oh Christmas Tree

 

Oh dear

The Rockefeller Christmas Tree in New York has been erected under beautiful blue winter skies and for some strange reason its a balding and somewhat raggedy affair.

Perhaps it’s a metaphor for 2020

Who knows .

I remember as a child having such a tree.

Bought as an afterthought from the greengrocer on Meliden Road, it was bald and patchy and ever so sad looking, but to my sister and I who bought it, it was an underdog who had to be made the best of.

Bottom branches were literally sellotaped into place. 

The gaps were filled with fairy lights and thick snakes of tinsel and if you squinted long enough the whole finished article looked cheerful enough

Like I said as long as you squinted.

Christmas trees mean different things to different people and we all have our own connections to them.

For me it’s Shelley Winters and the cast of The Poseidon Adventure climbing up that impossibly blue 18 foot monstrosity in my 1970s  childhood but this memory has since been superseded by traditions of Sunday trips to Calver in Derbyshire to pick up the tree for the Sheffield front room.....and  after that various incarnations of the Nutcracker tree, at the ballet

You know the one that grows like a beast when the toys are sleeping.

I haven’t had a tree for a couple of  years. 

I did buy one of those tiny ones that the supermarket sells last year but it was too small to be viable and I planted out into my new back garden. 

It’s still there , bright green and cheerful and still with its battery lights on it

Another metaphor for 2019 perhaps.

On night shifts all week