Morse at Christmas

The code has directly collided with my Christmas Tree..

The purple decoration at the right bears repeated instances of the word "deluxe", knitted into its periphery. It was a gift from one of my daughters, who knows of my madness (though she knows nothing of Morse). I heard her explaining to her mother this morning ("each dit is a knit and each dah is three knits").

The knitting madness started just before All Souls, when mother and daughters purchased a book by these Norwegian boys, who promised to "bring fun-filled holiday crafting to knitters everywhere with their ornamental balls" (please understand that is a verbatim quote from the book's promotional material, rather than a cheap attempt at low humour).

The knitting started with some Orange and Black knitted ornaments after the style of carved Halloween pumpkins, as a warm-up to the many knitted balls which now dangle all over the place...

Having raised three daughters, I have been besieged for over twenty years by an almost overpowering weight of glitter, tinsel, fairies, angels (and sundry other figures), glass balls and bells, chains of beads, lights and all manner of other nonsense which the girls and their mother have dumped on our tree. In my vain attempt to mount a last-ditch, one-man defensive action, I instigated the idea of putting a few, select decorations on the tree. They were all purple. They became - first jokingly and then mockingly - known as 'deluxe baubles'.

Here are two generations of my 'deluxe' baubles as seen on this year's tree...

At top left is something from the time (about ten years ago) when everybody was taking it seriously. Daddy had his deluxe purple baubles, all the girls laughed quietly behind his back and everybody was happy. At bottom right is something from the time (about five years ago) when even Daddy was mocking himself, buying an absurdly large, swollen deluxe bauble from the local garden centre in a subverted act of laying out a large towel on the side of the Christmas Tree's swimming pool to make sure nobody else could lay claim to these territories.

So it was that yesterday, my dear daughter gave me a new, unique deluxe bauble. Only the initiated will ever be able to read that it is deluxe. Only the initiated will ever know what it means. Perhaps some of those initiates will meet me in the winter sports over the  next few days.

Happy Christmas,
...-.- de m0xpd