Christmas Cake Off

To complete the fantasy of being a farmer’s wife, it’s necessary to be a seasonal baker.

- Michele Hewitson

According to the Mail Online’s “etiquette expert” – a concept so risible, given the Daily Mail’s obsession with pictures of celebrity derrières, that you suspect it must be a joke – putting up your Christmas decorations before mid-December is utterly vulgar. To put the tree up in November marks one as horribly middle class and not “proper”. Tinsel is tacky, unless you can source some of the 17th-century stuff, which was, apparently, made of real silver. If you must have a fake tree, it must be green; a pink tree, say, is beyond the pale.

We leave our tree up all year long, which would presumably render us de trop in Mail circles. It is a fake tree, obviously, and we leave it up because we love it. It is a Yule tree, made by The Artist, and was one of the loveliest things we have ever been given for Christmas. We put the presents under it.