My earliest memories of Christmas go back to the fifties. There was a small artificial tree, which looked bigger to us bairns, maybe two dozen baubles (glass of course) and about five paper decorations: three strung across the room and two more stuck on doors. All of this was brought out and put up a few days before Christmas at most. We never questioned this but we complained bitterly every year when they had to come down again after just twelve days!
It was a different time. Go on somebody, say it: "You had a tree???" Most people didn't have a lot of spare money and hardly anybody had spare holiday. They got the bank holidays and that was it. I would guess that those years when decorations went up 'early' were the ones when Christmas day was on Monday; that's 1956, 1961 and 1967.
How things have changed. There is no way I could get all our decorations up in a few hours on Christmas Eve! I'm not complaining; I'll leave that to the grumpies. What is Advent all about if not the beginning of Christmas? That's when the first of our lights will be going up.
Christmas has got bigger and better and that's no bad thing. I will concede one point though; it has become so commercial that some of the original 'magic' (for want of a better word) has been lost. I have a solution for that. As I suggested in a different thread --
//www.diynot.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=104779
it's time to reclaim Yuletide. There should be two separate celebrations for two separate events. Christmas would be so much more peaceful. Dinner would consist if Yuletide leftovers so even the cook would get a day off. I might even be tempted to go out carol singing for some worthy cause - and I'm not even a Christian!
On the other hand our decorations, which, with the sole exception of the star on top of the tree, have nothing to do with Christmas, will still go up on the first day of Advent. Neither will they come down on the twelfth day of Yuletide! We might as well have the best of both worlds.
