A Christmas tree can be a time machine. Antique or even modern baubles, summoning a land of lost content . . . or so it seems in wishful memory – where happy moments are magnified, all pain and trivia tinselled away. But the Christmas tree is a paradox: cheerful hope and wistful melancholy combined. The distorted reflections in its decorations are either heartening or defeated. Deep purple is the most extreme perhaps . . . or green or blue, who can say – the mood changes as swiftly as the rules of covid. To look up through the wire and plastic branches of a fake tree, bedecked in glitter and lights, induces a simple childlike delight, a heathen joy, or a queasy question mark. Holding a twisted mirror to sincere religious belief, this spangled trophy can also appear a profound embodiment of the debased human situation. And the ghastlier a decorated Christmas tree is, the more dislocating its presence might become. To get completely carried away, a contemplation of this presence and its history can be like a journey to the end of the world, as well as “to a hypothetical paradise of dreams”[i]. I know I’m taking it too seriously, but haunted by rich moments of numinous glamour[ii], of man-made lights against the winter darkness, even if I’m forcing meanings upon it, the confluence of myths surrounding Christmas are second to none, and conceivably the decorated tree has become its apex? From Paganism to Consumerism, it symbolises the lot.