17th Night

Okay, I was a bit late. Twelfth Night was last Thursday. In fact, everyone in our street strictly adhered to the rule that lights and decorations need to come down on Twelfth Night. On Wednesday night there were lights galore, adorning nearly all the houses at our end of the street and then, as if someone had flicked a switch, Thursday night all was dark. Obviously we did the same.

It started with the removal of the lights, which I did on Friday and Saturday and then, today, the big job of stripping and removing the tree. The decorations were, as usual, quite fiddly.

There’s always the problem of missing one of two within the depths of the pine needles so a jolly thorough search is required. As it was I left poor Jason around the back! Though I did find him before the tree was carted off.

Having removed all (but one) of the decorations and scattered them safely about the dining table, I started on the lights. They are always a pain because the tree lights have to be carefully threaded onto a strange board. It requires quite a bit of forward planning otherwise it’s likely to go all wrong and have to be re-started. It can be very frustrating. The new cherry red lights and the icicles remain after orders from on high. They help with the Hyyge.

Eventually, the stripped tree was ready to become even more naked.

In order to properly dispose of the tree, it’s a lot easier if I strip all the branches off first. (When I say ‘dispose’ I mean it gets put in the wire stick groyne down the back of the garden. I don’t leave it on the kerb for some passing Labrador to pick up.) For this I parked up the barrow and got to lopping.

Eventually, all that was left was a big, naked stick in a dry holder. (The holder shouldn’t be dry but the puppies seemed to have developed a taste for what I’ve started calling ‘Tree Water.’)

This is easily transported away and the stand packed in the shed for another few years. All that remained was the non-drop pine needles…that had dropped.

Then came the long, laborious task of packing away the decorations. As I put each one away, I was under strict orders to photograph them so that we could create a Decoration Book, showing where each of them came from. This is going to be a very long job.