Trees, tinsel and scrotum sacks

I spent many an happy hour as a kid watching my mother bring the decorations down from the cubbyhole in her room.Each year I'd watch as she would wrap a small waste paper bin in Christmas paper before asking my Dad to fill it with sand. Then out she came!! The most fantastic white tinsel tree you have ever seen.All 6 foot of her. My Dad then wrestled for about 50 minutes trying to get it balanced in the sand. Trying not to knock the fairy off which he had placed on the top. Ever year the fairy looked like it had spongolitis in its neck as the ceiling was just an inch too low. Not the tree being too high my Dad said.

Then my Dad spent about 4 hours trying to get the lights to work. Some of the lights had like a spider's web effect thing round them and only about 4 of them were missing on our set. Then my Mam put the balls on. Loads of different ones we had, some were even like those balls you get in nightclubs only smaller. It always worked out that we had too many balls and not enough connectors to hang them from the tree. Usually we put these round the back and just forced them on the end of the branches. Looked like we had them all over then. She always put blue bunting round the tree and usually yellow tinsel. If I could manage to rob one of those small nativity ornaments from school we'd put that underneath.

Every year my Mum would buy those streamer like paper tissue style decorations. She would then go from each corner of the room and link one to the light in the middle. Then to make it look really posh she would stick a drawing pin in the centre of each one and pin it to the ceiling. This formed a sort of W effect. Then we'd spend an hour blowing balloons up and tying about 5 of them together with cotton and hanging them in each corner of the ceiling between the decorations. By the time the 1st January arrived you had about 5 balloons on the celing that looked like scrotum sacks.

Other lantern style things where then added to the ceiling. The crowning glory was 2 pieces of string over the fireplace. These were then filled with cards from neighbours and family. Ended up each year with about 3 layers of cards all over the fireplace. The mirror on one wall had tinsel around it that made it look like it had pig-tails.

Oh and another thing. There was only one other house on Norley besides ours that had one of those garland things on the front door.

Orrible Ives