It's our last Christmas'

They've celebrated their final Christmas at Greenfields. Now, it's all about anticipating the gifts a new home will bring, says Diana

- DIANA YATES

A wobbly stack of Christmas boxes sits partially open along the upstairs hallway, while I go through the task of downsizing nine boxes to an overly ambitious goal of four. Each ornament I unwrap holds a tiny echo of time spent here. There’s the 15-year-old fairy, her wings now broken in two parts from the time she took a rather dramatic tumble off a nine-foot tree a few years back. No amount of superglue will hold her together. I add her to the discard pile on the urging of my eldest daughter, who is far more ruthless at this downsizing malarkey than I am; the fairy now lying awkwardly atop a pile of broken baubles and a tangle of lights that have twinkled their last.

It feels right somehow that Christmas should be one of the last things to be packed away. The season has always been when this house feels most itself; the rooms fuller, the laughter louder, the windows glowing with fairy lights against the dark outside. It’s in moments like this as I rewrap finger-painted baubles, with a barely legible child’s name partially hidden under exuberant blobs of paint, that I feel gratitude for the memories I can tuck away.