Advent Calendar – The Christmas Tree
When I was a small child our Christmas trees were always real. The smell in the house was wonderfully warming.
In the 1970s when the artificial Christmas trees really became the rage we got one.
Whether the tree was real or artificial the ornaments were the same. We had some lovely ones that my parents had bought for their first tree in 1959. I have the few surviving ones for my own tree.
Putting up the tree each year was a ritual. It went up the second weekend of December and my father would put on the lights. Then it was our turn to put on the decorations. The final items on the tree were the candy canes and small hollow chocolates in the shape of Santa, pine cones, angels and Christmas trees. The presents were not put under the tree until Christmas Eve.
The tree was always taken down by the 6th of January.
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