Christmas traditions and nostalgia present in our bauble collection
Take a tour of our Christmas tree for some familiar faces from our favourite franchises.
I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about Christmas in the past ten years or so. Tradition, like nostalgia is a powerful drug, it can cause us to act irrationally. There are both healthy and problematic sides to this.
On one hand it’s important to be able crawl out from underneath the avalanche of situations in life that oppress our joy. On the other there’s a scenario where your interpretation of joy becomes passive aggressive to those around you. “I will enjoy Christmas” vs “you will enjoy Christmas”.
Like many toy collectors only interested in vintage, never modern, I think the Christmas most of us seek is a first pressing. A repress will do, but it’ll never reach the same value.
The acceptance that it’s impossible to recreate the past or a first time experience is freeing. The realisation that you can create new experiences is empowering. When we let go of old traditions, we make space and time for new ones.
This isn’t binning your nostalgia for [ enter your year or decade of choice here ], it’s considering what your love for a time, place or thing looks like today. Perhaps an example of when re-inventing the wheel might make some sense.
I see a lot of surprise on the faces of people who ask about my Christmas plans when they learn how relatively scaled back ours have become. My hot take for you is that it shouldn’t be an expectation that adults receive presents, the focus should be passing on the experience we had, or in some cases sadly didn’t have, as children. You’d save a lot of time, drama and money if you adopted this (apparently) radical view.
I’m not advocating for an austere December for grown ups. This year I found myself defending those who decide to put their Christmas decorations up well ahead of schedule. If you want to take a made up concept and make it up weeks earlier, crack on! You won’t hear criticism from a 36 year old who lines his lounge wall with Pez dispensers the whole year round. You do you, hun.
Have some baubles
Preach over, let’s show you what you clicked for.
A small tradition that emerged in the early years of my relationship with Sam was an annual visit to a couple of local garden centres around the last weekend of November, shopping, or just window shopping, for baubles.
My Dad voiced a limited range of opinions on festivities when I was young, but one that stood out was his push back against the move towards a colour co-ordinated Christmas. I think even then I knew he was right, the reduced palette was erasing the fun from view.
Trends continue to ebb and flow but a walk around said garden centres will show you that all tastes are catered for these days. The rigid and refined to the weird and wonderful. Our house, as I’m sure you’d expect, falls firmly into the latter.
Creating a patchwork takes time, to go out and buy an eclectic selection in one hit feels at odds with the concept. Instead our collection has been curated over time, some from the garden centres each year, many now from other sources. Almost all pieces have a memory attached, or a connection to the year it was added.
As we run out of space for our collections it’s convenient to have one that we only put on display for one month of the year, but also a novelty to become reacquainted each time.
Last year we accepted we’d outgrown the tree. Not wanting to part with it, we didn’t replace with a larger model, instead we bought an overflow spruce. The apprentice model is home to our more Christmas themed pieces. The original houses the unique.
It’s those that we’ve been sharing on Instagram in an advent calendar format the past month and collated here for you. I love that there are multiple nods to my childhood included. Browsing through you’ll be able to find Wally (or ‘Waldo’ for our international friends) four times.
You can also see Sam’s impressive sub collection of robot ornaments here @myrobotcollection.
Merry Christmas to all our readers, thank you for your support and interest in the Collect Us All! project this year. We’ll be back in 2025 for more fun.