UK Christmas Trees

This is a little before my time (my sister was around, but not me) and is a rather cool silvery artificial tree perched jauntily upon a table. And surveying a rather thrilling display of presents (not to mention the Christmas cake!).

This tree-on-a-table is a custom with some pedigree back through the twentieth century and across the world. In Alfred Shoemaker's classic 'Christmas In Pennsylvania', he gives examples of just such trees from the early years of the twentieth century.

It's the same tree - that's the best thing about artificial trees after all! In a different room with a fresh set of presents. Also, there's been a distinct step into the direction of tinsel. I reckon this picture was taken in Christmas 1975 or 1976. It seems unlikely my mum & dad were influenced by the swagger of glam rock, but the purple tinsel certainly takes a step in that direction.

At some point in the 1970s, our family switched to real trees. I've yet to track down another genuine photo from this decade, but I'll keep on looking!

The subtitle says it all. There's something a little riotous about a real tree, especially one like this which has its branches going off in all kinds of directions. There's plenty of tinsel (purple still going strong), a home made foil-and-cardboard star for the top and a very pleasingly well-filled red stocking just visible too.

This is a great tree, I think. It has a lovely jaunty shape and it's absolutely stuffed with great decorations. What looks like a metric tonne of tinsel - so much, a bit of red tinsel is dangling off to the side - and just about every part of the tree is decorated with baubles and so on. I'm pretty sure this is still 1980s - but towards the end, probably the high point, decoration wise, of the childhood Christmas trees I remember.

Great stuff.

Here's a tree from the new decade. It's probably a bit too fanciful to see it as a post-recession tree, with the decoration toned down and lower key (albeit huge!) grey stockings compared to the confident red socks of the 1980s.

No, it's more a reflection of children growing up and pretty much getting to the age when they're leaving home - or at least spending most of the year away and just coming back for Christmas. It's a bit more uniform, a bit less of a carnivalesque explosion - but still proclaims its essential jollity and its links with the past (you can't make out the returning baubles - but you can just make out the silvery star, back again for another year).

Here's the first of the trees that's really our own, rather than our parents'. It's a lovely tree, but it's decorated rather sparsely. A homage to the cardboard-silver star perches on the top, there's tinsel, festoons and some small baubles. It's really the first step along the road of having our own Christmas tree. One of the nice things about this custom is that you can get away with building up your decorations over the years - it's essential to do this, I'd say. The dark green of the tree is Christmassy enough in the early years and the decorations are more special as they appear, more of them each year.

What a difference a few years make! Not only a load more decorations, but the arrival of our children - and so our first family tree! A lovely big tree, decorated with tinsel, garlands, baubles and little individual decorations we'd picked up in the intervening years. It's important to add to what you've got, rather than just replacing your decs wholesale. So the small decorations of our first, mid-1990s tree are still there and contribute to the overall effect. The cardboard and foil star is also still there - although it's so worse for wear these days that it's in line for replacing...

A German friend of ours was very stern with us once about the need to have candles lighting the tree and not coloured lights. We didn't ask what she thought about no lights at all. I've always been slightly longing for candles on the tree, since reading Enid Blyton's 'Christmas Book' when I was little, its praise of candles and its slightly dismissive attitude towards new-fangled electric coloured lights.

Maybe one year.

Lights are great, though. I remember really well when we replaced the tree lights, back in the 1980s, with a very exciting set of coloured lanterns. Now, I rather regret my mum & dad didn't stick with the really ace 1970s geometric shaped lights I vaguely remember coming before them. Coming downstairs in the morning when it was still dark and switching on the tree lights is a very vivid childhood memory.