New contributor Spectator

FAIRYTALE children often get talismanic powers, like gifts of prophecy or the ability to change shape or be invisible, to remind us that gifts are never equally distributed. Harry and Anna, for instance, share a peculiar privilege of birth that allows them to leave doors open, whenever and wherever they like.

Stranger: ‘Shut that door! Born in a barn?’ Child 3 or 4: ‘That’s right.’ It’s unfair on the older boys, but they were never going to get that dispensation from the maternity unit at the Royal Hampshire. Nor is the name of a tiny downland hamlet set down in their passports under Place of Birth/lieu de Naissance.

Another small distinction of barn life was not having to put up a Victorian Christmas tree every year. The boys were too small to have absorbed any Germanic notions of what proper trees ought to look like so, come Christmastime, we’d take a saw, go down to the picket line of ash trees along the lane and lop one down—they were like weeds in Sussex.

We could drag it straight into the sitting room through the big double doors and set it up 15ft or 20ft tall because the whole room was so immensely high. We didn’t have a ceiling, just a pitched roof and a useful cross beam at wall-plate height to which we could lasso our ash tree.

Its spindly branches reached out all around the room in interesting ways and were perfect for hanging baubles from: they even came with their own tassels of keys. We wrapped the branches in trailing ivy and coloured paper or made stripes and scattered the twigs with lametta.

The branches were all quite far apart, so we could cover the whole tree in real candles— a tradition my German stepmother used to keep when we were children ourselves, until that memorable Christmas Eve when the whole tree went up with a crackling whoosh. The lead lametta melted and my father had to extinguish it with a pan of hot soup.

Our ash, however, was perfectly safe and gave room underneath for all manner of mysterious bulky objects with a shadowy resemblance to tricycles or bicycles or books as well as the crib. The black buds at the tips of twigs and branches spoke to us of winter, weather and concealed promise. No leaves, no needles, no green, only the outside miraculously brought inside. The children thought it perfectly natural to have a tree growing magically out of the floorboards and half-filling the room.

And did I say it was free? Free—and no burden on the environment. On Twelfth Night, it could go out the same way it came in and—because it was ash—we could saw it up right away for kindling.

These days, we live with ceilings and doorframes and the popular vote was for a Nordmann fir. It’s pretty and be-baubled and it cost a stiff £50 because someone grew it for the occasion and cut it then trucked it to be sold by the farm shop where we bought it. In a few days’ time, it will be need to be undressed, scattering its non-drop needles on rugs and under sofas.

I’ll wrestle it through the doors and chuck it onto the grass, where it will probably lie for weeks before I summon up the patience to dismember it, because chopping up a Christmas tree is like attacking a man in a fat suit with a spatula. The tree isn’t dense enough to burn whole and it’s springy in all the wrong places, as well as being spiky and sticky. The twigs burn like snap and the logs are pitiful.

‘Chopping up a Christmas tree is like attacking a man in a fat suit with a spatula