A Christmas Tree Should Tell Your Story

I love beautiful Christmas decorating. I use plenty of gold in our house because it works with our interior, and when everything is lit in the evening I absolutely want the room to feel warm, considered and special.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a beautiful Christmas tree needed every ornament to belong to the same perfectly coordinated collection.

I would rather look at our tree and recognise our life in it.

That’s why Prince gets a branch. That’s why food gets surprisingly significant representation. And that’s why decorations we’ve found while travelling are some of my favourites.

Our tree wouldn’t necessarily make sense if you copied every ornament into somebody else’s house. That’s exactly why it works in ours.

There is a difference.

You can walk into a shop, choose three boxes of perfectly matching ornaments and have a beautiful Christmas tree that afternoon. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But a collected Christmas tree takes years.

One ornament this Christmas. Another from a trip. Something ridiculous you spot in a shop and immediately know has to come home. Something connected to music you love. Food you love. A place you’ve visited. An in-joke nobody else would understand.

Eventually, opening the Christmas boxes becomes a little like opening an old photo album. Except you get to hang the photographs on a tree.

Travel ornaments are one of the easiest traditions to start.

If Bas and I are somewhere and I see a Christmas ornament I really love, I’ll bring it home. We have pieces from the Cotswolds, for example, alongside decorations we’ve collected elsewhere.

I love souvenirs that can become part of everyday life rather than sitting in a drawer, and Christmas ornaments have an unusual advantage: you rediscover them every year.

Most souvenirs gradually become invisible once you’ve owned them long enough. A Christmas ornament disappears for eleven months. Then you open the box again and there it is. Suddenly you’re remembering the trip, where you bought it and perhaps even the Christmas when you first put it on the tree.

That’s a rather lovely return on something small enough to fit in your hand luggage.

I own a lot of ornaments from Vondels. Which is partly how we’ve ended up with Dutch snacks hanging from our tree.

A frikandel speciaal is objectively an unusual thing to suspend from a branch in the name of Christmas. But it makes me smile. That’s enough.

I think we sometimes become strangely serious about decorating our homes once we’re adults. Everything has to coordinate. Everything needs an aesthetic. We edit until the room looks right in a photograph.

Christmas is one of the occasions when I think we can loosen that grip a little.

A beautiful glass ornament can hang beside a bag of crisps. Gold can sit next to Nijntje. Prince doesn’t need to explain himself.

Christmas is allowed to have a sense of humour.

Sentimental doesn’t have to mean solemn.

When people talk about meaningful Christmas ornaments, it’s easy to imagine baby’s first Christmas, weddings, family heirlooms and major life events. Those can be wonderful.

But meaning can also be much smaller.

You drink an absurd amount of coffee. Put coffee in the tree. You love a particular musician. Find the ornament. You have a favourite snack. Apparently someone somewhere has probably made it into a Christmas decoration.

Those tiny preferences are part of a life too. In fact, they’re often the things that make someone’s home immediately feel like theirs.

A personal Christmas tree doesn’t have to become visual chaos.

Our main tree still has an overall feeling. Gold is repeated throughout it and throughout our Christmas decorations because it suits the house. The lighting ties everything together. There are plenty of beautiful ornaments among the unusual ones.

Think of those elements as the backdrop. Then let the collected pieces give it personality.

If you’re worried that sentimental ornaments won’t work with your decor, you don’t necessarily need to choose between the two. Give the tree a visual foundation, then let your life interrupt it.

That’s usually where it becomes interesting.

This sounds obvious, but I think it’s worth saying.

You cannot really shop your way into a sentimental Christmas tree in one afternoon. That’s part of its appeal.

Start with what you already have. Then pay attention during the year. On holiday, look for an ornament instead of a generic souvenir. If something happens that you know you’ll want to remember, find a little representation of it. If you spot something that makes you laugh, buy it. If someone gives you an ornament that reminds you of them, keep it.

There doesn’t need to be a master plan. Ours certainly didn’t have one. The collection became meaningful precisely because it accumulated alongside our life rather than being designed in advance.

Our big tree is around 2.30 metres tall, so decorating it takes time. I make a day of it. Christmas music goes on and the ornament boxes come out.

And that’s when the collected tree really earns its place.

You’re not just decorating. You’re recognising things. Oh, I forgot we had this one. We bought this there. Look at this ridiculous thing.

That experience wouldn’t be the same if I replaced the whole collection every time Christmas decorating trends changed. Some ornaments will probably never be fashionable. Good.