London - At first, I thought a burglar had smashed through the lounge window and broken in, the noise was so startling.
A dramatic crashing sound, followed by a loud thud, at 3.30am on Sunday.
Mr Candy and I leapt out of bed and began to tiptoe gently down the stairs.
In front of us in the hallway, a lone, pink Christmas bauble lay in a thousand pieces. It was one of my favourites — the first Mabel and I bought together when she was just two.
I remember her concentrating hard as she carried it home, as if it were the precious Crown Jewels, but it’s now more a delicate memory than a bauble. We turned to see the tip of the 6ft Christmas tree poking out of the lounge door.
The damned thing had toppled over, like a drunken elderly relative on Christmas afternoon. There were shards of glass scattered everywhere, a host of family memories splintered across our wooden floor — a scene sadder than the drunk Santa we’d spotted on a park bench that afternoon.
“We jinxed it,” said Mr Candy, in the manner of Winnie The Pooh’s Eeyore. We stood there, solemnly staring at the giant festive mess, then decided to go back to bed and sort it out in the morning.
The thing is, decorating the tree is my favourite Christmas tradition. The rest I can take or leave, to be honest. Earlier that day, we had all been looking forward to this annual “family moment”. Each year, we take the children to see the Christmas lights and choose a new bauble.
As toddlers, they made all sorts of misshapen things to hang on our tree, and they still bring home DIY ones from school.
So when the decorations box is brought down from the loft on the first weekend of December, it’s a poignant glimpse into cherished memories of growing up, reminders of our expanding family and the happy ghosts of Christmas past.
This year, our celebratory moment went terribly wrong. Maybe the teen and pre-teen hormones of the older two, aged 11 and 13, were partly to blame. Maybe six closely-related people hurling glass objects at a 6ft Norwegian spruce in a small room isn’t the perfect recipe for festive joy. Whatever. Before I knew it, we were all arguing.
There were violent ownership disputes between the siblings, clumsy fumblings with beloved baubles and Mr Candy was taking an excessive amount of time checking the fairy lights, dubbed ‘festive faffing’ by my nine-year-old.
My patience ran out and, before I knew it, we’d all disappeared to another room in a huff, except for Mabel, the youngest of the four, who was contemplating eating a year-old chocolate Santa she’d unearthed. “Is it tomorrow?” she asked forlornly as we all stomped around. “No,” we all chorused.
Every year, 1 000 people are, apparently, injured by Christmas trees, and some 350 in the UK are hurt by faulty fairy lights — but there are no statistics for the number of broken-hearted moms who end up on their knees with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up the remnants of Christmas past on a Monday morning.
This was probably one of the saddest jobs I’ve had to do in my maternal career, up there with burying hamsters and putting much-loved but broken-beyond-repair toys in the recycling.
It feels like the nine-year gap between my oldest and youngest has fractured the family’s happy mojo: what pleases one annoys the other. It is a conundrum.
Even “Santa cam” — the pretend camera I claim to install on December 1 as a faux disciplinary tool — has lost its power for us. Our 11-year-old has mischievously explained to four-year-old Mabel that Santa cam doesn’t exist, so she doesn’t have to do what she is told in order to get her presents.
And now, we have to start all over again with the baubles. They won’t have any meaning — they’ll just be decorations I raced to buy in my lunch hour (Mr Candy muttered that if we wait until Boxing Day, we could get them all half-price).
But, as my least tactful friend pointed out, we now stand a chance of having a stylish tree, rather than one that looks like a team of short-sighted elves has indeed emptied the decoration sale bucket over it. “Everything will match,” she added, triumphantly.
But I don’t want everything to match - I just want to keep reliving those toddler years, to keep seeing their joyous faces when the lights are turned on.
I’m worried that I’ll forget that over time without those little bauble reminders.
Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle magazine.