‘Tis the Season: Christmas Decorations

It’s no secret that I love Christmas. I don’t go too overboard but I do like to decorate the tree and the living room with ornaments I’ve bought on my travels. I often do a round up on Instagram of the newest ones but I thought this year I’d do a post here now that I’ve started travelling a little again. They’re usually a cheap(ish) souvenir and small enough not to take up a lot of room in your bag. The first one is this wonderful (and actually quite expensive) Welsh dragon I bought recently at Conwy Castle in Wales. [Starting next year will be a whole series of posts about what I got up to in a week’s exploration of North Wales – spoiler, it was a lot!]. Although I live in England I’ve been learning Welsh via Duolingo since the first UK Covid lockdown as I thought it would be nice to learn one of the Home Nation’s languages, Wales being the country I’ve visited the most. Amusingly one of the first words you learn is draig, the Welsh for dragon.

The next is this Faberge egg tree decoration which proved ridiculously difficult to photograph on the tree so I had to resort to propping it up in a cardboard box! I purchased this at the V&A Museum earlier in the year when I went to the Faberge exhibition. There were a few different options to choose from but this colour was the one I decided would look best against our tree. It does open up, though there’s nothing inside.

This next lovely wooden decoration I purchased in Bath from Zoe Rose Art (link goes to her Etsy shop). All her own artwork, there were so many ones I liked it was hard to pick a favourite, but this one just edged out the others.

This next decoration I didn’t actually buy on my travels but from my local Oxfam charity shop. However I bought it because it reminded me of Amsterdam and the decorative bike I photographed on the bridge near Amsterdam Centraal.

And finally this badger, just because I like badgers. I purchased this at Gloucester Services, which I visited because the friend I went to Bath with wanted to show me how nice it is while we were heading back to her place. And she was right, it is definitely one of the better services I’ve ever been to and was selling some very nice decorations in its farm shop.

This is my last post of 2022, so I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year!