“A Twee Recollection of a Festive Season Past”

Christmas is the one day in the year that life in Fairy-land seems to be at least partly perceptible… even acceptable. To varying degrees, it even appears to be adopted, immersed in, and somewhat inhabited by what we assume to be a mundane public!

On the days preceding that much fretted-over event, one may wryly observe an untypically acute interest in the hosting of certain species of coniferous trees in celebrants' living rooms. It does seem touching whatsmore, if a little bizarre, that that tradition is also enthusiastically indulged in some regions of the world where such trees predominate, and year-round seem ubiquitous.

In such regions, one might wonder whether some pining (- pardon the pun -) for other types of woodland might have stimulated instead a trend towards proudly hosting in one's home a deciduous tree. Indeed, there could be considerable originality in being 'decidedly deciduous'!

A week or so into the New Year, in England, and I passed the front garden of someone's upmarket house, where grows a small deciduous tree. It had been pruned and was bereft of leaves, yet was bedecked with twee Christmas lights. On the ground nearby lay half of a used Christmas tree; presumably discarded for litter collection. One wondered whether the house' inhabitants demonstrable break with convention had been inspired by fairies, or whether it was the more likely scenario, whereby the inabitants had roused from their post-Christmas dinner (indigestion,) and tossed out the leftovers along with the hapless, just another 'Consumer Conifer'!

Meanwhile however, not quite being willing to let the festive spirit go, that spirit had perhaps been externalized to something in reach, and in view, ie the garden tree… An unconsciously reluctant 'adios' till next year. If it was the latter, then one might understandably gain the impression that the current substitute on proud display will, before many more days, lose its ‘halo’, and similarly diminish in its appeal.

I proffer this thought which seemed to conjure itself in my mind:

"The fairies may be thought to laugh and giggle, but humans can seemingly be very fickle!"

So then, let us be optimistic and consider that inspiration from Fairy-land had influenced the decision to bedeck a shrub-like tree, in the front garden of an English home.

Maybe after all that usually untypical openness to magicality, that seems perceptible at Christmas, is more innate then one might assume; within the human psyche... and more specifically, long inherited in the consciousness of the peoples of ‘Fairy-Angle-land.’

Yet by contrast, the not so 'fairy merry' axed-tree on the ground brought to mind something more like:

"We want Christmas and we want it to last, and we want to be done with it just as fast!!"

It was as though this reflected that our psyches may ‘officially’ be permitted a day off in the year to daydream; even if we must - 12 days, during which we can seek partridges in pear (- or alternatively spruce -) trees!

It does seem that what we term ‘mass consumerism’ has pervaded our thinking, and our ways of life. Have we however also permitted this phenomenon to tread underfoot the magicality which once quite naturally prevailed?

Fortunately then it also appears that the tide may be turning, as our human consciousness awakens more and more, and a longing which stirs for a dreamlike playfulness, from beyond the mundane world, may become suppressed less and less.