I love the Christmas tradition and how our family comes together over Christmas time. As expatriates we never had the pleasure of celebrating Christmas in our home country with dear friends and family. Living in foreign countries we adopted all sorts of other countries traditions for Christmas and created our own unique and rather eclectic version of Christmas.

One rule I had was when friends and family visited they had to bring me a Christmas ornament to hang on our tree. The result is every year when we put our tree up we have a smorgasbord of Christmas decorations hanging from a large 3 metre high tree in our entrance hall.

We all decorate the tree together hanging each decoration remembering the absent friend or family member who now indirectly gets to share our Christmas with us. We reminisce about who gave us the ornament, their connection to us, and the country we were living in at the time.  Usually there is more discussion and argument as to where we were when the ornament was given to us than the tree actually being decorated.  It becomes a slow, and fun process with many tea breaks for the thirsty!

Have you ever wondered about the origins of the Christmas bauble….? Well, according to the Google oracle the history of the Christmas tree (an evergreen fir tree) and its adornment was used to celebrate winter festivals (pagan and Christian) for thousands of years. Pagans used branches of it to decorate their homes during the winter solstice, as it made them think of the spring to come.

The fierce Vikings of Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder. Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes where small evergreen trees were decorated with the likes of candles, apples, nuts, and berries as “Paradise trees” in church plays. … The tradition, which became a Christian ritual, began to spread across Europe. Glass baubles were first made in Lauscha Germany, by Hans Greiner (1550-1609) who produced garlands of glass beads and tin figures that could be hung on trees.

Christmas today is a Christian celebration associated with celebrating the birth of Christ. Many popular customs associated with Christmas developed independently of the commemoration of Jesus’ birth, with certain elements having origins in pre-Christian festivals that were celebrated around the winter solstice by pagan populations. As a family, we celebrate Christmas with many adopted customs from the different countries we have lived, and the people we have met along our travels, making for a rather unique Christmas celebration.

Christmas will always be a special time for me and I love making Christmas decorations as gifts. I don’t always find the time, but this year I got my act together early enough to actually make some decorations as gifts.