‘Dec’ the halls!
With sales of Christmas decorations already booming we look at how they’ve changed over the years and why this year’s have taken on a whole new importance
After such a difficult year, it seems many people are looking forward to Christmas as an opportunity for a little sprinkle of joy. But what better way to lift our spirits than to decorate our homes. And it seems we are doing just that. As early as September, John Lewis reported they’d already experienced a 230 per cent hike in Christmas tree sales and a 156 per cent rise in decoration sales compared to the same time last year, and this is only expected to rise as we inch closer to the big day.
Meanwhile, ever since the summer months there have been countless news stories of families putting up their festive decs early just to give everyone a lift from the pandemic.
All this news about decorations, though, got us thinking back to Christmases past and how we used to deck the halls in days gone by…
While the Christmas tree was first introduced to Britain by Prince Albert in 1840, it was the Twenties when home Christmas trees really became mainstream. In the early days, though, and right up until when we were children, Christmas trees were quite modest looking and a world away from the hulking great 6ft firs we’re used to seeing in houses today. After aluminium trees were introduced in 1958, many families invested in a fake tree they could reuse year after year to save both money and scrabbling on their knees to pick up pine needles. Many trees were small enough to place on the table and would be put up categorically no earlier than the first day of advent. Some families even left it as late as Christmas Eve.
As for the decorations, in the Fifties and
Sixties especially,
Christmas trees tended to be decorated quite sparingly, just a few bits of colour and sparkle hanging across the branches. There were the carefully selected and lovingly looked-after baubles, the old ones of which were typically made from real glass and had a nasty habit of shattering spontaneously. Tinsel, made from real silver at this time, also proved a health hazard after it was discovered that it actually contained poisonous lead! Nevertheless, by the end of the
Sixties, mass-produced plastic baubles from Hong Kong and fake tinsel garlands were widely available, making Christmas less of a risk to life and limb. In fact, by the time we hit the Seventies, the biggest danger of the Christmas decorating was getting a paper cut! For this was a decade that saw us adorning our homes in miles of paper chains and endless gold foil hanging decorations as we got an appetite for bigger, brighter and just generally more Christmas in our homes.
By the time we reached the Eighties our once minimally elegant Christmas trees weighed heavy with trends for lots of coloured baubles, velvet bows and golden beads that would then lead into novelty baubles in the shape of things like cocktail glasses, hedgehogs and rockets by the Nineties. Since then, the trend has emerged for Christmas ‘themes’ where all the decorations match, the most depressing example of which is a currently popular scheme for Christmas tree decorations in the palette of an iPhone.
The lights, a staple of Christmas tree decorating, have changed too. It’s now virtually impossible to get hold of the old-fashioned lights we remember from our childhood, which were usually in a fruit salad of bright colours and guaranteed to never-ever work, no matter how carefully you’d stored them away in the loft the year before!
Watching your dad or husband lose his patience as he tested every single bulb to see which one was the faulty culprit may not have seemed fun at the time, but since LED lights, introduced in the Nineties, resolved that problem we can’t help but slightly miss that old annual tradition.
Old-fashioned lights, in a fruit salad of colours, were guaranteed to never work!
Another aspect of Christmas decorations we’re sad has gone by the wayside in recent years is the homemade decoration. For many of us, the build-up to Christmas when we were children meant days figuratively glued to Blue Peter to see how to make our own baubles, advent calendars and nativity scenes, and literally glued to the kitchen table as we realised we created rather more mess with our craft projects than Valerie Singleton ever did (much to our parents’ irritation). Interestingly, as this year has seen a return to crafts and as families watch the pennies, it’s predicted homemade Christmas decorations could make a comeback. In fact, craft retailer Hobbycraft have already reported a 101 per cent surge in searches for Christmas craft products and projects on their website. Meanwhile, sustainability is another key trend of this Christmas’ decorations as Morrisons, John Lewis and Waitrose have all banned environmentally damaging glitter from their decorations, and other shops have vowed to return to simpler, more natural materials for decs. Perhaps what this all signals then is that while Christmas may be expected to be somewhat different this year, it may also be a festive season to get back to some of the simplest pleasures of decking the halls that we still treasure from Christmases gone by.