Country diary:

Wendyl Nissen begrudgingly gets into the Christmas spirit – but don’t bother sending party invitations her way!

Wendyl reluctantly finds a little of the Christmas spirit

I’ve always been given an unreasonably hard time by my family for not being in possession of the Christmas spirit. The thing that makes people rush out and buy fairy lights by the thousands and throw them all over the place. The thing that demands you haul home a huge live tree and sit back to watch it slowly die over the period of a month, desperately emitting smells of pine in the hope that someone will notice and rescue it. The thing which demands decorations are bought by the boxful and hung all over the place, creating more clutter than we already have and general messiness.

And, worst of all, the thing that demands you take your unwilling baby and terrify her by planting her on the lap of some old man in a shopping mall to have her photo taken. I would accuse my husband of child abuse every Christmas as he took our youngest, Pearl, off for her photo with Santa only to return year after year with pictures of him holding her down on Santa’s knee as she wailed.

Which is why it is strange that Pearl turned out to be the biggest Christmas fairy of them all. Thanks to her, a tree is installed with her father’s help by early November at the latest, days are spent hanging garlands of decorations, and fairy lights are spread all over the garden. She has been the main creator of the Christmas spirit in our house since she was old enough to hang a bauble.

But not this year. It seems that finally, at the age of 19, she has seen her mother’s good sense and stopped all that nonsense. Instead of being dragged off to the mall to buy even more lights and decorations, I got a simple text at work: “This year I’m thinking just a small fake tree on the table between the armchairs.” That’s my girl.

I am also not much into the Christmas spirit when it comes to social occasions. Christmas drinks and parties are to be avoided in my world, simply because I am no longer much of a party girl. At 55, dressing up and tottering off in heels for a wild old time, ending with me staggering in the door at 1am wondering what happened to my shoes and why I’m covered in tinsel, are well gone.

Instead, I’m more of an “in bed at

9.30pm with a cup of tea and a good book” girl, which is why living in the country is so conducive to my lifestyle during the Christmas season. Any invites I may receive – and these days they are precious few – can be RSVP’d with a simple apology that I’ll be in the country (in my pyjamas with the aforementioned tea and book). And I’m not lying, because every year in that hellish week before Christmas

Day, when traffic is a nightmare, shops are full of desperate shoppers and supermarkets are heaving with over-priced strawberries and asparagus, I head north and hide. Only to slink back on Christmas

Eve laden with presents bought online and cakes baked in November.

I keep up-north a Christmas-spirit-free zone, because with a family as large as ours we have our celebrations in town – we can hardly ask 20-plus people to drive four hours north for dinner. But there is always cake, which I have made earlier (see last month’s column for the recipe), and this year a tribute to rural life in the form of a handmade Christmas wreath.

I’m not quite sure what came over me, but I found myself gathering Christmas nature stuff one afternoon. A bit of pine tree, a pine cone, some rosemary and sage for scent, and some driftwood from the beach, mainly because it was sort of round. I shaped an old wire coathanger into a circle then tied all the bits and pieces to it in a rather haphazard fashion. The result was a very odd but strangely inviting wreath, which I hung on our front door because, well, every house should have a touch of Christmas spirit.

I found myself gathering Christmas nature stuff one afternoon.