Write Space Literary news, views and reviews http://taurangawriters.org.nz

When We Were Small And Christmas Trees Were Tall

Christmas time brings a host of childhood memories which linger in drifts, pure and soft like cotton wool.

In the middle of the night on Christmas Eve my parents crept around, long after the age we all knew it wasn't Santa who consumed the cake and beer we left out.

In the dark they placed presents at the foot of our beds. The feel of those mysterious shapes and the crisp, crackles of paper brought excitement, difficult to contain.

For days before, we five children spent hours feverishly hacking branches out of the lawsoniana trees, to decorate and hide in obscure places.

The basement, coal heap and even under the bed were deemed places of concealment.

Imagination spilled over as we laboriously coloured, cut and pasted a host of hand-made decorations and gifts.

On Christmas morning we propped our beautiful trees in buckets and ceremoniously dragged them into the living room, their drooping branches draped in tatty tinsel.

Gallant paper lanterns and Santas clung to dying foliage.

These days I see glittering Christmas displays and think wistfully of my cotton wool snow and the limp fairy doll at the top of the tree.

Maybe it was the Christmas cards of my childhood, still imbued with our colonial links to England, or maybe my English-born grandparents' stories.

Perhaps Bing Crosby inspired it. I always longed to experience a white Christmas... which brings to mind quite a recent one.

2004 Scotland. Christmas Eve and it was extremely comfortable at the Lime Tree in Fort William but I was on a journey to Skye and scheduled to leave the stunning view of Ben Nevis and Loch Linnhe.

'You better hop on the morning coach,” my B&B host advised, 'Nothing surer, the afternoon coach won't get through.”

Forty five minutes out of town the snow began to fall as he had predicted. Silent, soft flakes gradually became thicker until the landscape was transformed. Trees, hillsides and valleys blanketed far down to the Loch edges where house lights twinkled. From our high road it seemed the bus had entered a world of fantasy, a mystical place with familiar shapes but pure, white and still.

Rusalka sang to the moon, and Yum Yum glorified the sun. I wondered if ever an aria had celebrated snow. Did anyone ever call upon its power to change their life?

We crossed the new bridge over the sea to Skye, not in a bonny boat but on a slow moving bus with limited vision and wipers working overtime to lift the heavy snowfall. We slowed to a snail's pace with the driver needing assistance from a passenger to mop up the blinding condensation on the inner windscreens. I was put down on the roadside just on nightfall in blizzard conditions. An ice-cold wind whipped snow in my face and my feet sank in mud and slush. Like Captain Oates I faced the elements and strode bravely forward, not quite sure I was headed in the right direction. The Guesthouse turned out to be a disastrous place. I was the only guest in an inhospitable and freezing house. A dose of 'flu and a frozen shoulder made for a miserable Christmas Day.

On reflection, that Christmas was unusually dismal, except for the snow. Most of my Christmas memories are clothed in joy and saturated with the sounds of precious people. Truly special, all the recollections, but the remembrance of cotton wool flakes and the smell of lawsoniana trees takes a lot of beating.