The Holly and the Ivy

Crime is hereditary, you know. It propagates itself down through the generations and, before you know it, you're tangled in its creeping tendrils up to your ears. So, look before you leap and beware what you start. Spare a thought for your descendants when you stray from the straight and narrow. 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive' my mother used to say. How right she was!

She was a country girl, my mum: born and bred in a Somerset village and daughter of the village grocer. I have photos of her as a young girl, on horseback, riding jauntily through the heather with her sisters, high up in the Quantock Hills. It was a far cry from the London suburbs where my sister and I spent our childhood days. We were city dwellers and we never saw the country girl hidden deep in her heart until much later. In our teenage years we moved, with our parents, to a nicer part of London, close to the edge of the urban sprawl. We would make forays into the countryside at weekends and, there in the Kent countryside, it seemed, a part of Mum's old self was reborn. They would stop the car in a quaint Kentish village, full of tile-hung cottages and gardens full of old-fashioned flowers, and Mum would be off, strolling nonchalantly down muddy footpaths, bag in hand and a pair of secateurs hidden in her pocket, happy as a sandboy.

Secateurs? You should have seen her at Christmas! Dressed in 'slacks' and a moth-eaten old sheepskin jacket, with a headscarf knotted under her chin, she would drag our reluctant father down country lanes, armed with a walking stick and a pair of secateurs. Dad would be cajoled into doing battle with prickly holly bushes, yanking down tough branches with the walking stick whilst she snipped them off for her flower arrangements. No Christmas was complete in our house without jugs full of greenery and, behind the pictures, a sprinkling of holly and ivy that gradually shed leaves and berries all through the holiday. Country habits die hard.

Moving back to the country myself, after many years in the city, I am aware that aspects of my past are coming back to haunt me. Having spent summer and autumn days exploring river banks and country lanes in my new rural home, admiring the countless varieties of wild flowers in the hedgerows (and not picking them!) and helping myself to nature's handouts in the form of sweet, juicy blackberries and windfallen apples to fill the freezer, I am ready to enjoy nature's bounty at Christmastime too. All of a sudden, I am finding myself whistling merrily '..the holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown, of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown...' and a little urge comes upon me to supplement tree and tinsel, angels and baubles, with a little rustic charm of a traditional nature. Out come the secateurs, the bag, the jacket - no, not the headscarf! - and I am off down the country lanes to seek out Christmas past and follow in my family's footsteps.

It is a different kind of Christmas, rooted in the soil, in the country traditions, in folk carols and wassailing, figgy pudding and mulled mead and I am loving it! A Merry Christmas one and all!