As December approaches, sunny days are now few and far between. A grey skyline predominates. The fallen red and gold leaves of the chestnut trees have turned soggy and black as the earth reclaims it. The day becomes shorter. The shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice is on December 21st. The sun will rise is at 8:10am and set at 4:38pm.
The Christmas Trees appear bang on the start of December. They are always fresh trees, never plastic. They’ll be covered in fairy lights but no other Christmas decorations until closer to Christmas day itself. They are a welcome green in a city that is now cold and grey. When it’s dark by 5pm, the fairy lights on the tree are simply magical. I’ve embraced fairy lights and I will put them everywhere in the house and not just in winter.
ADVENT WREATHS
They’re called Advent wreaths because they are used to mark the advent or coming of Christmas. There are 4 candles on the wreath, to represent the 4 Sundays before Christmas and you light each one in turn.
My boys went to Langmatt Primary School. The school wrote that they needed volunteer parents to help the children make Advent wreaths to sell in their Christmas Market. I’ve never made one but I know how to get stuck in so I signed up. It was very well organized – long tables of cut evergreen branches, straw wreath base, coils of florist wire, decorations – Christmas balls but also dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks, glue gun and pillar candles. There was a woman there who clearly knew what she was doing. My job was to cut the evergreen branches which were over a meter long into smaller branches, no longer than 6 inches and ready for the children to bind on the straw bases. I must have arrived at 8am and left at noon to give the boys lunch. I felt I was there for only 20min. That’s how much I enjoyed myself.
But without the raw materials, I bought my first Advent wreath from Migros, one of our supermarket chains here. I happened to encounter one of the school dads on my way out. The wreath was right on top of my shopping trolley. He spied it and said “You know you can make that!”
I always buy two – one without candles to hang at the gate and one with candles for the dining table. The one on the dining table quickly dries out with the central heating, no matter how much I spritz it with water. But the one at the gate would stay so fresh that I’m always loathe to dispose of it come January 6th.
It took 10 years before I finally had the time to make my own! I always bought the ones without plastic Christmas décors – just a combination of leaves, some a paler green, some more blue than green and pine cones. This time, I used the seasonal holly – a classic Christmas combo – red and green. You can’t go wrong.
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