Christmas tree brings back memories, good and bad

We have a fairly fraught history with Christmas trees chez Penman. This stems (geddit?) from the year when Mr P attempted to trim the lower branches from a lovely fir and managed to trim his thumb instead. The Student (then The Toddler) has been scarred for life by the horror of her father’s copious bleeding taking the edge off the excitement as she waited to start hanging the baubles.

Luckily, we lived near a friend who worked at the hospital and who managed to get Mr P in and stitched up in record time. This was lucky on many levels, as it would have been almost impossible for Mr P to avoid telling the tinselitis cracker joke in A & E if he’d had to wait too long to be seen.

Every year now, The Student checks I’m not letting her father trim the tree – just in case.

As soon as the tree’s up, I get the boxes out of the garage which contain every single Christmas decoration we’ve ever had, even the broken ones. There are also quite a few paper plate Santas and baubles made by The Student when she was at nursery school.

I like to have a good old sentimental moment with the boxes before starting to hang things on the tree.

Every year I swear I’ll get rid of some of the unusable objects and every year I pack them away carefully at the end of the festive season.

When I was a child, me and my siblings would wake up on Christmas Eve to find the Christmas Fairy had been.

The tree would have been put up and decorated overnight and we knew that meant one more sleep until Santa came. Some of my friends of a similar vintage to me remember the same routine, so I don’t think it was just a particularly cruel trick by my parents, it was quite a widespread practice in the olden days.

We’d put out the mince pie and whisky for Santa and the carrot for Rudolph – a tradition Mr P’s been at pains to insist we continue at Penman Towers all these years.

Which might explain the thumb.

“We knew that meant one more sleep until Santa came