#14 How to make a Christmas tree—an experiment in light and tenderness

For my last letter before the holidays, I wanted to give you a poem, a list, some tunes, three book recommendations and my recipe for an arbre de Noël. Back in January x

1. Source a big block of wood with a split or a crack or a gash or a hole in it. I have a rough hewn oblong of oak I found in a timber yard in South London. It’s about three and a half hands tall and square in section, with “39” written on one end in blocky Tipex letters. One corner is splitting slightly down its length.

2. Head out into the woods, or a local park with tall trees, preferably on the morning after a storm, and look for branches in the grass. There are always more than you think there are. Carry your bundle home. Enjoy the glances of passers-by hurrying with children on scooters and parcels to deliver. Make sure to make way for passing grannies and harried vans. Remember your sticks are likely taller than you are. If Winston, the kindest council worker who keeps the place clean, is downstairs when you get home, be sure not to drop twigs. When he says, “Oh don’t worry, leave those, I’ll get rid of them for you,” tell him it’s ok, you’re using them to make a Christmas tree and watch how something like joy—a bit of bounce—slips back into his tired voice. “Oh! Really?” He was not expecting that.

3. Put on some music (see World of echo below). Add songs that sound like home.

4. Make something mulled: put whole or sliced citrus, sticks of cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and all-spice in a pot with a bottle of apple juice, a litre of wine or some cider, then let it brew. The place will instantly smell exciting.

5. If you’ve any Lebkuchen, plate them up. Make mince pies:

To make 24 mince pies, rub 200g butter into 400g flour until it resembles breadcrumbs then mix in the zest of 1 large orange. Stir in enough orange juice to obtain a rough pastry that just sticks together, shape into a ball, cover with clingfilm and set aside to rest. For the filling, mix 200g cream cheese with 50g caster sugar until smooth. Knead the pastry lightly, then roll out but not too thin. Cut out 24 rounds to line fairycake moulds. Fill to half their depth with mincemeat, top with a teaspoonful of the cream cheese mixture. Cut out 24 smaller rounds to use as lids, and wet around the edges to place on the filled shells, pressing together slightly to seal. Bake for 15-20 mins at 200C until golden.

(Adapted from Cooking for Christmas—How to Plan, Survive and Enjoy Christmas by Josceline Dimbleby, Clearview Books, 2015)

6. Start assembling your tree. Use a saw to whittle or shape the ends of your branches, then wedge them in the crack in your block of wood. Make the whole as solid as you can. Consider maybe just stopping there, it’s so beautiful.

7. Then reconsider, and stand on a sturdy stool to get your boxes down off the shelf. Listen to how they tinkle as you handle them. They’re filled with bells.

8. Unwrap things. Find new ribbons for pieces missing. Let the wrapping drift around the room like snow, then gather it like hay.

9. One by one, hang things from all the tiny ends and knots you find on your branches. Catch the bigger branches as they sway and slip from their hold in the block and wedge them in deeper. Let them remember they are tree. Give them lights and varnished berries. Introduce them to your peacock, your white owl, your pair of gleaming hummingbirds. Show them the straw stars from Sweden. The beaded bell and ostrich from Gauteng, the tufted and tassled camel headdress Hiraki bought for Tsubamé in New York before she was born. The treasures you bought in Liberty’s for your Great Aunt Baba (a golden bauble with handtipped egrets), your mother (a swan) and your sister (a shining angel), which your mother then said, “But Dale, they’ll break in the post. Just put them on your tree instead.” The Japanese phone charm bells. The fake flowers from Simon’s ironmongers. The fishing tackle bells. Shaha’s kathak ankle bells. The whistling bird, the Thai elephant, the crocheted carrots, the knitted sheep, the knitting Santa, the glittered feather, the Manly ferry, the icicle, the duck, the zebra. The babushkas. The guerilla angel. The octopus plushie, the snowflake, the apple, the rose.

   

10. Put the wrapping in the boxes and the boxes on the shelves. Tidy the leads away behind the block of oak and light a tealight under the spinning candle holder. Mine is decorated with Moomins. Obvs.

11. Every morning until December 26, when you get up and it’s still dark out, put your slippers on then switch on the lights. Don’t worry if you drop something and your hair catches on a branch as you bend down to pick it up and things fall off. Just listen to the sound they make.

For several years, now, this is what I’ve done. I just couldn’t handle the post-Christmas attrition anymore, all those dying pines on the pavement. I started with an old ladder, but the ladderness bothered me. I tried bouquets of park branches in a tall enamelled jug—too flimsy. Then I looked at my piece of oak, and thought, “Bingo”.

I think it's about the line a branch draws, the way it animates a space. And also about wanting to be near a tree. Last Christmas Laura and I visited a juvenile giant redwood growing in a hidden Stoke Newington park. Being near it, I felt the same as I did when I met its altogether older and larger cousins in Oregon and California, or the old oaks in fields near Bath. When I’ve waited for the ginkos to turn yellow and watered Hackney street saplings.

My final piece on Notre-Dame’s rebirth—a longer interview with the wonderful Axelle Ponsonnet—was published this week. Of all the work that has been done to bring the cathedral back to life, I’ve loved most especially how the architects have rebuilt la forêt, “the forest”, as the charpente (the medieval wooden structure) is known. As one of the roof architects, Ponsonnet had to do a lot of site visits to oversee specialist interventions. While at the Géant sawmill, she drew these four giant oak trunks that were used to rebuild the flèche (spire).

Axelle Ponsonnet, The Géants Sawmill, December 2021, pencil on paper, 40x15 cm

This brings so many things to mind. First, the Passage des Chaises Tadashi Kawamata installed in the Saint-Louis chapel of the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, in 1997. The feeling of standing beneath it, when I was still a student—before I’d even lived in England—has never left me. Second, Jake Grewal’s exquisite figures in woodlands.

Then, a list (photographs below, numbered left to right, top to bottom):

1. Inversion by Roxy Paine, which stands 42 ft tall, its roots up in the air.

2. Yayoi Kusama’s Ascension of Polka Dots on Trees, 2013: most of these platanes that lined the Cours Mirabeau, in Aix-en-Provence, where I grew up have since been cut down because of Ceratocystis fimbriata, an arboreal fungal infection no one can cure.

3. The crown of a dead ash tree that Anya Gallaccio has installed in her current show, Anya Gallaccio: Preserve, at Turner Contemporary, Margate, on until 26 January.

4. Lisa Ross’s photographs of the Uyghur votive assemblages in the Taklamakan desert that the Chinese government keeps flattening.

5. The nazar boncuğu trees you find in Cappadocia (photograph by Meruyert Gonullu).

6. The Andean yunza carnival tradition (photograph by DSan), featuring a “very thin tree” decked with cheap things around which people dance before chopping it down.

7. Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay’s own yunza in a 2022 work entitled Chunka Tawayuq Pacha, featuring a cantuta flower and the antimalarial cinchona plant.

8. This extraordinary ghost apple Lemn Sissay recently posted about on IG.

9. The shinboku in Japanese Shino temples (here, at Futarasan-jinja, in Nikko (photograph by 長谷川 宏亮), with their shimenawa ropes and zigzagged shide papers.

See this beauty of a shinboku, 武雄の大楠, Takeo no Okusu, the Great Camphor Tree of Takeo, in Saga:

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See also the tanzaku wishing papers (left) for the tanabata festival, from which Yoko Ono derived her Wish Trees.

Three book recommendations

Axelle Ponsonnet’s Balade dans Notre-Dame, Carnet de Chantier

Lisa Ross’s Living Shrines of Uyghur China

Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital: Harvey is luminous

A poem

When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

World of echo

*

I’m sending this on Tuesday, because on Thursday, Tsubamé and I are getting on the Eurostar to Paris then the train to Montpellier and Valleraugue by coach and car. I’ll be back walking in my hills, hoping the chestnuts and the beeches will take dustings of snow before the year is out. See you on the other side.

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