MATT BAKER
THE COUNTRYFILE PRESENTER GOES BEHIND THE SCENES ON HIS SHOWS AND FAMILY FARM
Christmas decorating starts early on the farm, with two trees and fresh wreaths.
Once Halloween and bonfire night are out of the way, we are a family that goes big on the build-up to Christmas; any excuse for a large family get-together. We get the decorations down from the loft a few weeks before and, thanks to my wife, we have a ridiculous amount of them. It’s almost as if they multiply up there every year.
We’re even a two-tree family at Christmas: one in the living room for Santa to arrange presents under and one next to the table where we’ll all sit down for Christmas dinner.
One of these trees is decorated with little birds, deer, hedgehogs and so on – just what you’d expect from a Countryfile presenter. The other is an eclectic free-for-all, crammed with all the Christmas decorations we’ve collected from our travels over the years. There’s usually a Mickey and Minnie Mouse dangling next to a Namibian bauble or a Russian doll, with a particularly spectacular frog we bought in Vietnam.
Among the perennial decorations from the loft there are always outdoor bits and bobs to add to the Christmassy feel, bringing the outside in. Every year, my wife makes a huge fresh wreath for the front door with greenery cut from our land, with rosemary, holly berries, dried oranges and lemons dotted throughout. The smell as I open the door after a hard day’s work is fantastic. These days, my daughter helps make the table centre and my son is a dab hand at gingerbread houses, and both love making new decorations. There’s nothing better than something that’s homemade, no matter how big or small it is. Our local pub is even getting in on the action this year, holding wreathmaking courses, which will certainly be a lot of fun.
MAKING THE MOST OF HOLLY
A holly harvest was always lucrative for me growing up on the farm. In fact, once I could drive, my parents would say whatever I could cut and sell was mine. The first winter my wife and I were together as teenagers we spent hours harvesting holly from our woodland on the farm. We bagged it up in sacks and drove it to a market florist almost an hour away for them to use in wreaths, decorations and just to sell in bunches. We had a great Christmas that year.
Every picture frame in our house is accompanied with a decoration, every sideboard is adorned with lights or cards. I love it, but there’s only a certain number of weeks I can cope with it. I begin to long for the feeling of surprise when I realise how much room we have, as all this stuff is packed away into mouseproof boxes and put into hibernation in the loft, so it can all begin again next year.
“We’re even a twotree family: one in the living room for Santa and one next to the table”