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David Evans

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

Then a yelp from your father as he crept through the hall,

On his way to the toilet he'd stepped on a ball.

As a small boy, the festive season really got under way when our parents announced: 'It's time to get the tree.'

In the early years, erection of the Christmas tree was usually accompanied by a plethora of profanities. This was mainly for two reasons.

1) The tree was kept in the loft and the bulb up there always chose to blow the moment our father spotted the plastic perennial under eight bin bags of old clothes.

2) The tree would decide to unfold when it was precisely half-way through the loft hatch.

Three days later, after the fire brigade had left, a rather dishevelled-looking tree would be standing in the corner of the living room.

This was the cue for father to take a mass of wiring to the potting shed to see why the fairy lights had failed (yet again) to work and for mother to retrieve a sorry-looking bag of decorations from under the stairs.

It still escapes Lai See as to how these items managed to instil such a sense of overwhelming excitement in us children year after year.

Threadbare tinsel, plastic Santas, glass balls (mostly broken), assorted chocolates well past their sell-by date and a toilet-roll tube covered in tin foil and bits of cotton wool.

How is it that this latter item, a refugee from nursery school art lessons, always managed to outlast the shop bought decorations? And no amount of pouting and cajoling could ever convince your parents that it really was time to invest in some new trinkets.

In fact, who can forget taking their first serious partner home for Christmas only to find their mother has used the pre-school Daliesque desk-tidy as the dinner table's centrepiece.

As a child, our strategy for decorating the tree was to get as much on it as quickly as possible.

This usually resulted in the tree toppling over as all the decorations ended up on the lower boughs on the side facing away from the window.

Eventually everything would be ready for the lights.

After father had emerged from the potting shed and trimmed his singed eyebrows he would drape the repaired lights around the tree.

Mother would then point out that there was a patch with no light and he would have to reposition them.

This would continue until the lights finally ended up in a pile on the floor with father back in the potting shed and mother 'going next door for a bit'.

Later years saw our allegiance change to 'real' Christmas trees.

Initially, we would buy our trees from the gypsies who would appear with a flat-bed truck piled with firs. However, this stopped after we had a visit from the park-keeper.

Collecting the tree from the nursery was always a day of mixed emotions. The heady excitement of knowing the sweet smell of pine sap would soon be filling the house coupled with the journey home on the back-seat of a small family car accompanied by a six-foot tree pricklier than a bag full of porcupines.

And real trees, like plastic trees, have a mind of their own.

Profanities prevailed as the conifer presented a conundrum worthy of Hong Kong's new Logistics Development Council in trying to get it through the front-door.

Eventually, after the fire-brigade had left, a rather dishevelled-looking two-foot Christmas tree would be standing in the corner of the living room.

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!

From: Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas by Major Henry Livingston Jr. (1748-1828).



Eventually, after the fire brigade had left . . .