One year when I was very little, my mum hand-sewed a beaded cream dress with a taffeta skirt for a plastic doll I owned, to turn her from my toy into the Christmas-tree fairy. The doll was a younger, sweeter version of a Barbie, with round blue eyes and painted pink lips. I never played with her and I suspect it was Mum’s way of recycling, finding a purpose for it.
The doll was much too heavy really to adorn the top point on a Christmas tree, weighing it down and often ending up facing the ground instead of looking over us the way a fairy should. But we all loved her, and my brother and I would take it in turns each year to climb up a parent and place the fairy on top of the tree. She began life with long straw-like hair that I brushed sometimes, but around the time she made her first fairy appearance, I gave her a haircut, trimming those long tresses into something sharp and brutal. Instead of framing her face, the polyester strands bounced up, making a sort of messy bonnet. It didn’t matter. The unorthodox hair just made her more special. More like the fairy with the attitude we’d always imagined she had.
When my brother and I left home, the fairy was retired while Mum played around with more elegant Christmas decorations. Then I had kids and the fairy came to live with us.
It has been years since we’ve had a real tree. And because of family losses and house moves, it’s been years since we felt like decorating one. So, this year when my kids beg me to buy a real tree to rescue some lost nostalgic moment of Christmas, I head straight to a flower shop nearby with my eldest. Laughing, she picks one that reminds her of our family, slightly crooked and small, with a gap between branches towards the top. It’s also the cheapest, which is a relief, and we wedge it hard into the car, shaving some of the pine leaves into the boot as we do. At home we can’t find a bucket to rest it in, so we use an empty pot plant and slide a pasta bowl under it to stop the water running across the floor. It is makeshift like most things in our house, but it still smells like Christmas and it still does the job.
For days the tree remains naked because nobody has time to find the decorations that I shoved away in a cupboard somewhere in the apartment when we moved in. Then I test positive for Covid and spend days locked in my room, and the tree sags a little because nobody waters it. When I am finally free to find the decorations, I am surprised the bag storing them is nearly empty. There are a couple of coloured balls, some tatty lengths of tinsel and a few hand-me-down Santas I rescued from my parents’ house years ago. It takes us all of three minutes to dress the tree, and I pretend that minimalist is my style this year.
Then my son pulls the fairy out from the bottom of the bag. By the look of her, she’s been waiting for years for some attention. Her hair is upright like a punk, and her dress is dirtier than I remember, less cream and more muddy brown. But the beaded top still holds firm with Mum’s finely stitched sewing. Then we realise she is pant-less under her dress, and the skirt sticks up so much from all the years of being stored away that there is no saving the sight of the nude plastic bum from certain angles. We decide it doesn’t matter. This fairy needs to fly.
My son has never been tall enough to place a fairy on the Christmas tree, but this year he is. He is gentle with her, worried perhaps her ancient limbs will fall off if he isn’t. Somehow, he manages to secure her so that she looks out and not down. And because the tree is on the small side, she is perched at about our eye height. The branch doesn’t sag and the fairy doesn’t droop and she is oddly perfect from the right angle.
We step back to admire our work. The tree wouldn’t win a decoration award or even deserve photographing for posterity, but as I stare at it I see the fairy smiling at me with her blue eyes and wild hair and I remember all the trees of my childhood. The smell of the pine, the hours of watching the Christmas lights flash on and flash off, the chocolate baubles hanging from high branches where Mum optimistically tied them thinking my brother and I couldn’t reach to steal them before the big day. And the homemade fairy who is nearly as old as me and our link to Christmases past.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning children’s author. Her adult memoir, Love, Death and Other Scenes, is out in April 2024 from UQP
