Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 Most years, I decorate a huge Christmas tree with hundreds of ornaments and sparkles, but this year our tree is so different .... it is a small jade tree in a pot, decorated in soft colours .  The  little tree is  from a second generation cutting from my grandmother's jade tree, brought from Hong Kong, or so the family story claims. The baubles are frosted glass with our grandchildren's names on them, made by my daughter-in-law.  I added a few little dolls also in pastels and  I hung some felted balls .  These little balls were made in Nepal, a couple of  years ago at  Seven Women , a centre  which empowers marginalised Nepalese women through education and employment.  There is a single wooden star resting on the top branch  of the tree.  Somehow all this seemed appropriate with the unsettled and disturbing situation  of the fast spreading  Omicron variant of Covid -19  here in Newcastle ( NSW)  - thes...

Baubles:  The first “Christmas” trees were decorated with apples, strings of popcorn and pastry treats in the shapes of stars, hearts and flowers. They were illuminated later by candles.  The first glass baubles were said to be made in Lauscha, Germany by Hans Greiner –  at first, garlands of glass balls and then glass figurines.  In 1840’s, illustrations of Queen Victoria and family around a Christmas tree festooned with lights, and  ornamental glass baubles appeared in a London newspaper and also in  the American Godey’s Lady Book in 1860’s . These illustrations encouraged  a more widespread practice of decorating trees with ornaments and baubles in both Britain and America. Until the 1880's when the mass production of glass and moulded  tree baubles began in earnest,  tree decorations were created at home usually from paper, and lovingly used year after year.