Packing away ...

Funny, isn't it, how long it takes to decorate a Christmas tree, when it takes such a short time to demolish it? And even funnier, I suppose, is the fact that I always take the decorations off the tree in the same order. I always begin with these glass baubles, which I bought in Woolworth's for our very first Christmas tree which must have been 48 years ago. The fine glass in the indentations of two of the baubles is broken and long vanished, leaving only sparkling shards, but the long-tailed pink one is intact despite the fact that it never had a fitting on the top for the thread to go through and I had to improvise. In fact I had to put thread on all of these - they all arrived without, and have loops of black cotton tied all these years ago by my own fair hand ...

I love these because of their history, and also because they remind me of the ones my parents had - and now I think of it, I can't think where they ended up, as I never came across them. I have other dangly shiny things that also have their memories, not least the tiny mirror-balls I bought in Glasgow while on a lunch break from visiting my mother in the nursing home; she died less than a week later. The most recent are two little toy soldier figures from this year's crackers at Christmas dinner, and tiny glass balls from a contemporary in church who always attaches some kind of trinket to her Christmas card to us.

My extra photo is a messed-around-with photo I took today in the buffeting wind of catkins on a tree we passed. It was never much of a photo, but I rather like the crazily arty one I've produced.