The Christmas shop is a room at the back that opens in September, and in July it is a store room with the trees in boxes and the lights on a circuit that is off at the board. Every night in July the circuit comes on for one tree. Not a boxed one. A tree that is standing, in the back corner, out of its box, and by morning it has ornaments on it, glass ones, old ones, hand painted, with names on them, a family's, and dates, and the last date is the year the Christmas shop was built on the site of a house.
I am the seasonal manager at a garden centre, which means the Christmas shop is mine from September, and in July it is not mine at all.
The shop.
A big room at the back, built on a bit of the site that used to be something else, opened in September with the trees and the lights and the grotto, and shut in January, and in the summer it is a store room, the trees in boxes on racking, the lights on a circuit that is off at the board because there is no reason for it to be on.
Every night in July, the circuit comes on.
The tree.
One string of lights, in the back corner, on a tree. Not a boxed tree. A tree that is out of its box and standing, on its stand, in the corner, in July, and the lights on it are on, and in the morning the lights are off and the tree is decorated.
Glass ornaments. Old, thin glass, the kind that came in a box with a lid and was got down once a year. Hand painted. And on each one, in gold paint, a name, a first name, the way families did, one for each child, and a date, the year the child was born, and the names go from the fifties to the seventies, six of them, and the last has a date that is the year before the room was built.
Nobody sells those. I have looked. They are somebody's.
What has been checked.
The circuit, off at the board, and the breaker taped. It comes on.
The room, at night, in July, by me, on a box, in the corner opposite the tree. The lights came on. In the dark, in the heat, a Christmas tree, lit, in the corner, and then the sound of a box coming down from a shelf, a cardboard box with a lid, and the lid coming off, and tissue, and the small chime of glass ornaments being lifted out one at a time and hung, with the pause before each one that is somebody deciding where it goes, and a child's voice, once, saying, mine goes at the front, and a woman's saying, they all go at the front, and laughter, and the ornaments went on, one at a time, in the right order, oldest child first.
At the end the lights went off and the room was a store room and the tree was decorated.
Who.
The room is built on a house. The centre's own plans show it: a cottage, on the corner of the site, bought when the centre expanded, and knocked down, and the Christmas shop put on the footprint, and the corner where the tree stands is where the front room was, and the front room, the old staff say, had a bay window, and a Christmas tree in it every year that the whole road could see, and the family in the house had six children, and the last one was born the year before the centre bought it.
They had been, the old staff say, sorry to go. The father had asked whether the centre would keep the tree in the bay, and the centre had said there would not be a bay, and he had said, no, he supposed not.
They are decorating it. Every year, in July, which is when they moved out, in the corner where the bay was, with their own ornaments, in the right order, and the youngest goes at the front.
What is done about it.
The circuit is on every night in July and the electricity is on the bill and the area manager has asked why the Christmas shop uses power in the summer, and I have said it is a fault in the board, and the electrician has been, and has found the breaker taped off and the circuit live, and has said he is not going to write that down, and has not.
What I do.
I run the seasonal side.
The tree in the bay was for the road. That was the point of it. A tree in a front window is not for the family, they have the inside of it, it is for everybody walking past on a dark evening, and the room is built on the bay and the wall where the window was is a wall, and the road cannot see it.
So I have put a window in. That is more than it sounds. A window, in the back wall of the Christmas shop, in the corner, at the height a bay window was, looking out onto the road, which is still there, and the centre's builders asked why and I said light, and it does give light, in the day.
In July, at night, the tree is in it. Lit. Decorated by morning, and by eleven at night it is decorated already, and the lights are on, and from the road you can see it, a Christmas tree in a window in July, and people stop. I have watched them. They stop on the pavement and look, the way you do at a tree in a window, and some of them smile, and the ornaments on the tree, when I look in the morning, are all at the front, facing the glass, where the road can see the names.