MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 51

 

 

Christmas! It’s that special time of year. I think as you get older you treasure Christmas even more. It’s a time packed with memories, of loved ones no longer with us, of long ago happenings –opening stockings, making decorations from crepe paper, shaping milk bottle tops round a lemon squeezer to make bells for the tree and enjoying enormous family get-togethers when my Dad and Uncle John played festive songs on their harmonicas.

 

Small Roddy fairy lovingly passed down from the 1950s

 



1930s' celluloid fairy

This is the one time of year that I have an excuse to make my dolls the centre of attraction. At Christmas they can be incorporated into the general festive scheme quite legitimately. First and foremost of course is the Christmas fairy. I have a selection of these, mainly vintage, so they take it in turns to be the fairy on top of the tree. Have you noticed, incidentally, how difficult it is to buy a traditional fairy doll nowadays? Angels are easy to find – but Christmas fairies? They all seem to have fluttered off. I can remember as a child seeing shop counters massed with little plastic fairies. A special Christmas treat was to buy a fairy doll for the tree; after Twelfth Night she would be my ‘extra present’. Did you know that in the 1920s and 30s, fairy dolls were often made of celluloid, which is highly inflammable? As the trees often had lighted candles clipped to the branches, it must have been very hazardous.

 

This year my fairies are clustered together in a large festive bowl. They look delightful together, and they can gossip about the one who has been chosen to grace the tree. (You think I’m joking? Fairies might look sweet, but I’ve often come downstairs in the morning to find a fairy or two on the floor while the others, tinsel wreaths over one eye and wands akimbo, peer gleefully down at their victims.) Tableaux are fun to make – all you need is a roll of white packing fleece, some blue or black card for a background, maybe a mirror (if you want to make an ‘ice-rink’) and plenty of glitter, and your winter dolls will make a super display. You can have them skating, skiing, sledging or even building a snowman, depending on the props you include.

 

Two 'Vanity Fair' dolls from a local garden centre



A 1930s' styled Patsy toddler

Last week I visited one of our local garden centres and discovered a couple of porcelain dolls that had been marked right down in a sale, and were dressed in coats, scarves, boots and mitts – perfect for a winter display. They are now ensconced in the living room on a ‘snowy’ table, with a sledge laden with wreaths and a mini Christmas tree. They look very festive. A favourite doll of mine is dressed as a ‘Snow Baby’ in a fleecy white coat with matching hat and leggings, looking very 1930s, whilst another wears a brightly coloured jumper and hat with a pair of quilted trousers. She has skis and ski sticks, an excuse for making a cotton wool ski-slope.

I make a point of going to as many garden centres as I can in the run up to Christmas, because so often they have stunning Christmas displays with coloured lights and animated effects, just as good, if not better, as any department store. Van Hages this year has a life-size animated camel! Garden centres are also a good source for unusual or quirky gifts, often featuring handmade or craft items, while of course a pot of bulbs or a Christmas Hellebore make lovely presents. I’m not so keen, though, on the ‘themed’ Christmas trees – one centre I went to last year was proudly displaying white trees with black decorations, while many have trees all in purple, gold or even brown. Our tree always has a mishmash of decorations, some that I inherited from my parents, some my husband and I bought for our very first Christmas together, some that my children have made, and some that have been purchased on shopping sprees over the years. Of course, I always have to give pride of place to the paper snowflake made by my son when he was at nursery school thirty-something years ago, and the red cardboard Father Christmas that he made at infants’ school. This Santa is very unusual as he has no beard. Or arms…. (My son once told me he had no arms because his hands were in his pockets.)

 



A large camel at Van Hages Garde Centre, Amwell



 Just like everyone else, we have our own family traditions – a sparkler in the Christmas pudding is a ‘must’,as is blowing the ceiling decorations to see who can make them spin the most. We always put up a paper owl (it is very tatty now, but we’ve had it almost forty years, so can’t complain) and however it is hung, it still insists on facing the wall so all we see is its back. And a local tradition is – or was – children in our area being told that Father Christmas keeps his reindeer in the woods near the Hastingwood roundabout! (Okay, they might be fallow deer, but to a small child they are magical.)

 

Happy Christmas everyone, and please don’t forget to put out some seed, nuts and a dish of water for our feathered friends, especially if it’s really cold. I’ll see you in the new year– I’m just off to decorate the bower with fairy lights!

To get you into the festive mood, you might like to venture to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-wOkBnx71Q

where some of my bears and toys are acting out their version of 'Twas The Night Before Christmas!

Two 1920s German bisque fairies in a decorated sleigh

 

 

MUSINGS FROM THE BOWER 50

 

 

 

Well, the desk is now looking respectable, and though it isn’t as green and pretty as the bower, there are shelves and notice boards for useful and favourite things.  I mentioned recently that I had rediscovered my Furby; I have now found Furby’s friend, Shelby. Shelby is noisier than Furby, sings and tells ‘Knock Knock’ jokes, so I will have to make sure his shell is clamped down or else I will never get any work done! By my feet, curled up on his red tartan rug, is my cat Tigger. Unfortunately, due to the fact that our garden is too small with a main road at the end, I can’t have a real cat – and anyway, our garden is a bird haven, so I can’t risk disrupting that. Therefore Tigger is the next best thing, a sleeping toy cat, perpetually curled on his red tartan blanket.

We do, however, have a lionhead rabbit, called Moppet, who is seven and a half years old. Lionheads seem to be particularly laid-back rabbits, very gentle and placid. Ours tends to relax by lying in weird un-rabbit-like positions, such as almost on his back with his legs in the air – which was quite worrying at first! His soft fluffy coat needs a lot of brushing, and tends to attract wisps of hay which he trails through the house. He is quite vocal, too – he grunts happily as he runs along the hall, or when sitting under the kitchen table.

 

I’ve had so many pets over the years – cats, tortoises, hamsters, mice, guineapigs, gerbils, terrapins, budgies, canaries, zebra finches, fish, lizards, stick insects, axolotls, clawed frogs and giant snails. Many of them I have bred. I have only ever had one dog, way back in the 1950s and 60s. His name was Rex, and he was a cross between a spaniel and some kind of terrier, but his fur grew so long he resembled a small Old English Sheepdog. Rex was very friendly, a great companion for a child, and he adored running through the woods near our home plunging his nose down rabbit holes or seeking out sticks. Rex thought big. He never brought home a small stick – oh no, he dragged home fallen branches! He almost did himself an injury once when he misjudged the size of the enormous branch he had in his mouth. It was wider than the width of the door and he ran towards it only to be brought jarringly to a halt as the branch caught in the ornamental trellis of the porch. It was a wonder that his teeth didn’t fall out.

 

Fire Bellied Toad

Asian Painted Frogs

 

White's Tree Frog

 I’ve always been drawn to small exotic creatures, especially amphibians, and managed to breed several species in the 1980s and 90s, writing my experiences in various fish and reptile-keeping magazines. Creatures such as fire-bellied toads with their beautiful orange tummies, and the even more beautiful Oriental fire- bellied toads with bright scarlet undersides, as well as the no-less colourful yellow-bellied toads – all these provided hundreds of tadpoles, and, in time, tiny froglets. Then there were fire-bellied salamanders who were meant to give birth to live young (rather than lay eggs) by immersing themselves in shallow water, although in the case of my female, shunning the shallow water and giving birth in damp moss so I had to quickly save the young before they dried up. I bred various types of newts, too, but my favourite frogs, so-called ‘Asian painted frogs’, never bred for me though they called for hours. And I never attempted breeding with my enormous green, grinning White’s tree frogs. These enjoyed being out of their tank, liking best of all, for some reason, to sit on top of a clock in the dining room! My favourite amphibian ‘pet’ was a big black axolotl (like a large newt larvae, with feathery gills) which I called Fred. I bought Fred when I was about ten or eleven, and he lived for around fifteen years.

 

MacLeays Spectre Stick Insect

Then there were Indian stick insects, which sprayed their thousands of eggs all over the floor of the tank and which soon hatched into minute replicas of their mothers (the females were so liberated they didn’t need a male to breed) and delicate pink winged stick insects which tended to hang from our ceiling. I also kept Macleays Spectre stick insects, which were enormous, about 6 inches long, and very spiny, resembling something from a science fiction film. They laid attractive marbled brown eggs, like small beads, which hatched into scuttling little nymphs and it wasn’t till they had moulted several times that they suddenly made the dramatic transition into a spiny monster.  Giant land snails were interesting; they are hermaphrodites (they have both male and female parts). They had a weird love play which entailed them simultaneously firing a ‘love dart’ at each other, and they would stay entwined, mating, for several hours before gliding off to bury their clutches of pearly eggs in the damp soil.

Alpine Newt

 Perhaps by now you’ll have guessed that during my desk clear out, I came across plenty of photos of my ‘exotic pets’, and so I was inspired to write about them in my blog. As I do so, Moppet the rabbit sits on my feet grunting softly, to remind me that he’s there and that he would like his ears stroked. And that is one of the drawbacks of toads, frogs, snails and newts – fascinating though they are, you can’t really pet them!

 

Moppet enjoying the snow