The bockety reindeer that looks like a demented donkey your three-year-old made in creche; the weary-looking but still beautiful fairy handed down for three generations; those clip-on toadstools; that hand-painted wooden rocking horse; the cheap-as-chips and slightly faded glitter ball that’s as much a part of Christmas as the pudding. Now that you’ve hoiked them all down from the attic and out from under the stairs, we want to hear about your best-loved Christmas baubles and the stories behind them.
Send your photos and the story of your bauble in no more than 150 words to mybestbauble@irishtimes.com by Wednesday, December 17th, to be in with a chance of being crowned King or Queen of the Baubles and landing our star prize of a break with dinner for two sharing in Gregans Castle, Co Clare, courtesy of Ireland's Blue Book.
You can also enter on Twitter or Instagram using #mybestbauble. A selection of the best Christmas baubles will be published in The Irish Times and on irishtimes.com on Monday, December 22nd, when the winner will be announced.
Peter Murtagh:My favourite Christmas tree bauble is my little fat Puffin with a sprig of holly in his bill. Puffin has a little smile on his face and on the back of the bauble, it says:
Gleðileg Jól, which is Icelandic for Merry Christmas. Puffin has been on our Christmas tree every year since 2004 which is when I got him in Iceland where I went on a camping and glacier hiking holiday with my children Patrick and Natasha, then aged 14 and 12. Puffins taste good, especially when roasted and served with cranberry sauce. The children were less enthusiastic about that bit of the holiday. . .
Arminta Wallace:
I have a new favourite every year: this time around it’s a cute and tiny pink creation which I bought in Sydney recently for my two-month-old grand-daughter, Zara. It’s her first Christmas as well.
Liam Stebbing: Not many decorations conjure up a sweltering summer, but this one's special. It's our favourite souvenir of the July week 18 of us - nine adults, nine children - spent at a lakeside cottage (and a row of overflow tents) in Muskoka, Ontario. Days of swimming and five-a-side soccer, nights of barbecues and bonfires. The kids toasted s'mores over the embers; we adults toasted our good fortune as we sipped the beer we'd paddled across the lake to stock up on. That part of Canada is buried in snow at this time of year. For us the sun's always splitting its stones.
Joyce Hickey:I don’t know how old she is, nor where she came from. She was lost for years, and resurfaced a couple of years ago from an Afternoon Tea tin in my parents’ attic.
Until I looked at her closely this morning, I had not registered that her fine eyebrows, smudged eyelashes and pin-dot nostrils are scarlet, nor that her mouth is a miniature heart. Her pale blond hair is patchy and thin, and her head tilts irreversibly over her right shoulder. Her gold-paper wings are bashed, and her wand is a tiny torpedo. Her arms are grubby, furry pipe-cleaners and her ball gown evokes ‘The King and I’.
Until I brought her down from our attic to write about her, I remembered only that my mother always lifted me up to put our golden angel-fairy on the top of the tree, and every Christmas was distilled through that shining moment.
Claire Looby's Christmas Angel: My best Christmas bauble is a Newbridge Silver angel. It was given to me by my best friend – we met twenty years ago this Christmas – and the thought of it sums up Christmas for me. It means things like there’s always a place for something pretty in your life, even when times are tough; it means that a present that costs your last €20 in the world can have far more impact and mean more than something you have to take out a loan to buy; it means that the Christmas tree will
never
be bare; and it means that, while twenty years is a long time, it can also seem like the blink of an eye. With a bit of care, and the odd bit of polish, hopefully the angel will last as long and be just as strong as the most precious friendship I could wish for.
Naoise Bierney, Newbridge, Co Kildare: Our Christmas Angel was made by our daughter Meadbh when she was 8. It has pride of place on our "Santa Christmas Tree"; we have a "posh" tree too and Santa delivers presents there every year because it’s much more colourful and sparkly and needs to serve a purpose after all the effort that goes into decorating it tastefully. Santa's tree would not be complete without all the decorations made with love every year by our kids. Our cat Louie also prefers this tree and attacks it regularly and with great accuracy.