Deck the halls

I know, I know. It's way too early to start thinking about Christmas decorations. We're barely even into Advent. But if I do this post now and you get inspired by it, then it means you have time to get your supplies in. You don't want to be scrabbling round the supermarket on Christmas Eve. Nobody likes doing that. (And, honestly, I don't much like scrabbling around supermarkets at any time of year; these days I don't have to, because I can just order from Ocado and it comes to the door, but I was never keen on it. I especially hated it at Christmas. You'd be pretty much gridlocked in the aisles.)

Anyway, I learnt to do this as a child; and I was really lucky. I'm deeply grateful that I was allowed to put what I'd learnt into practice straight away, otherwise I'd probably have forgotten it within a few days. But there happened to be a piece of fuchsia pink tissue paper around the house, which had probably come in a shoe box or been wrapped round a wine bottle, and my parents must have been in an unusually relaxed mood, because they let me use it. (Normally, anything the adults decided was of no further use became "rubbish", and "we don't play with rubbish", so it ended up being all a little difficult.) And this is what I did.

That cylindrical plastic thing is actually part of a box of sticking plaster; it's on a reel, and I bought it because I couldn't get the usual stuff, and it taught me a new word, which is always fun. The allergy advice said it contained latex and colophony; and I thought, what on earth is colophony? So I looked it up; and it is literally just rosin. You know, that stuff you rub on your violin or viola bow to improve the traction. That's fine. I'm not allergic to either that or latex.

Anyway, I digress. (As usual.) You could use a pair of compasses, but it's a lot easier to find something about the right size and draw round it. I have the tissue paper folded in four here, which is about right. Too few thicknesses and it's very slow and inefficient; too many and you start losing accuracy because it will inevitably slide about a bit. You might get away with eight. I think as a child I used a yoghurt carton; there were always a few of those in the kitchen, as they were useful for storing things like spare egg yolks in the fridge.

Once you've cut out the circles, you then fold them in quarters like this:

Next, put them together in groups of eight. There's nothing particularly magic about the number eight, unless you happen to live on the Discworld (in which case you need to call it something like 7a for safety reasons), but it is a convenient number for making tissue paper pompoms because you get a nice well-formed shape, plus you're almost certainly going to end up with multiples of powers of 2 circles from the folding and cutting process, unless you particularly enjoy folding things in threes or something. I like to alternate them so that the open sides face alternately left and right, but there's no real need to do that. You can have them all facing the same way, or facing random directions, and you'll still get a good pompom.

All you now have to do is open out the circles, and you have a pompom as shown in the feature photo, conveniently attached to a thread from which you can hang it. One Christmas I made several in different colours and tied all the threads together to make a cluster, which I then hung in the window; but I don't normally do that. (That particular Christmas I was in the homeless hostel, and you couldn't use tape or even blu-tack on the walls, so I had to get a bit creative. That was also the Christmas that I made an angel for the top of the tree in the main entrance, because they hadn't got anything to top it with; I remembered that the other night and thought it might make a good blog entry, so I tried to get in touch with the hostel to see if they could send me a photo of it, but, alas, it's no longer a homeless hostel. It was sold off to developers and now it's private flats. I very much hope it was replaced, since there is still a lot of homelessness in this area.)

What I would normally do with these pompoms, and will be doing this year when it's time to hang up the decorations, is to hang them side by side at regular intervals, either on a ribbon or on a two-colour twist of tissue paper. I'd like to hang them on paper chains, but for some reason it's quite hard to get hold of them these days. It used to be the first sign of Christmas in my parents' house. We'd come home from school on the day we broke up for the holidays, and we'd be given packets of coloured strips of paper, gummed at one end, to make paper chains; that was a win-win, because we all really enjoyed doing that but it was too much hassle for the adults. Those would be the first decorations to go up. Then there would be the angel chimes, and the little Father Christmas perched on the back of a crane (the bird, not the construction plant), who hung from the light fitting in the middle of the lounge area of the living room, and if you gently tapped the underside of the crane it would flap its wings, which were hinged somewhere inside it. That decoration is older than I am, and it's still going; I don't know if my mother still puts it up herself, but my sister might do it for her. Finally, the tree would go up on Christmas Eve, accompanied by a selection of highly non-festive language of the kind strictly reserved for adults from my father, who did most of the tree decorating. He was all right until he got to the really tiny baubles, which he hated, since he actually wasn't that dexterous. And every year I'd tell him I didn't want to listen to him swearing and I'd be more than happy to do the tiny baubles, and every year I was told I'd be no good at it or I'd break something or some other grown-up excuse, until finally he lost the last remaining shreds of his patience over a particularly recalcitrant bauble and said, "fine, all right, you can try if you want."

I had all the tiny baubles on in the space of a few minutes, complete with broad grin; and after that, all was settled. That became my job every year till I left home. Funnily enough, I think that Christmas was also the time my parents finally stopped calling me clumsy.

I digress again... the point I was trying to make was I like paper chains, but they seem to have gone out of fashion. Well, never mind fashion. Let's see if I can think of a way to make them that doesn't take for ever!