Gothic Christmas

I decorated my study with Gothic-aesthetic Christmas decorations. As has been explained in this blog already, I don't celebrate Christmas as a religious thing, more an honouring of family traditions. It's very much a secular Christmas in our household, with the big religious celebration being Midwinter's Day on the 21st of December instead. The decorations in my study centre around the 'Gothmas' Tree - something that's part in-joke, part household 'tradition'. The 'Gothmas' Tree started when Raven and I first moved in together, nearly 10 years ago. His family are quite traditional about Christmas, and so Raven wanted to continue that. At that point, I wasn't really into Christmas very much as I came from a home where it wasn't really celebrated because it held too many painful memories and too much anxiety, it was a very simple occasion with no turkey, a very briefly apparent Christmas tree, and usually a lot of sorrow. I went to Christian schools, so Christmas was a big thing there, and I sang with church choirs when I was younger, so I'd performed in many carol concerts, and so it wasn't a completely bleak and sombre affair (and even the worst Christmas of my life ended up with me falling asleep in glittering lights of the basilica in Rennes) but it just wasn't something I felt a deep connection to, at least not a positive one. 

The 'Gothmas' tree & my tinsel on my desk. The snowflake is too big, so leans

I wanted to go for a Gothic 'Christmas' that was just a second Hallowe'en (my favourite holiday, of course) so I could still be celebrating something when surrounded by the huge cultural pressure to do Christmas, but my partner is very much into a traditional Christmas. The compromise was that we'd do both; I could have my own Gothic tree, and we would have a big traditional tree in the living room, and I could watch 'Nightmare Before Christmas' and he could play old-time Christmas songs from the '40s and '50s, and we'd get together for roast dinner with the fancy black-handled ornate cutlery reserved for special occasions I brought back from Ireland. It was said in jest that my Gothic tree was so I wouldn't 'ruin' the Yule tree with skulls and bats when Raven wasn't looking because I kept trying to 'sneak' black baubles onto the Yule tree, especially when I found baubles that were very pretty but too big for my little black tree, and they are now permanent fixtures on the Yule tree (which has a lot of more unusual decorations).

Spiky iridescent bauble, I think from B&M or Tesco, on the 'Gothmas' tree

I couldn't afford a second full-size tree on that first Christmas because I'd recently been made redundant when the shop I was assistant manageress of shut down for good a couple of months previous, so I bought a small tree, to bring a spark of spooky joy into what I feared would be a very bleak Christmas in a new country where I knew virtually nobody except my partner, hundreds of miles from my family, jobless, broke, and celebrating that festival that I usually hated. Christmas that year actually wasn't too bad, and I think I managed to even continue the pattern from our first Christmas where I bought Raven a hamper of unusual ingredients and favourite foods! Ever since then, there has been the Gothmas tree - in our old apartment it used to be in the bedroom, and now it is in my study, where being purple and black it matches everything else in there as the whole room is purple and black. 

Skull tinsel - cracked skull tinsel, to be precise, from Poundland

Apart from being very short, my little black tree is quite weedy, so I fill it with tinsel - purple, black, silver, and one that's purple and black with black cats, and another that's black and white with skulls. It looks a lot bushier once I've wound it around with all that tinsel - full length tinsel meant for full size trees, too! It's about all I can do to make it a passable Christmas tree and not a sad Christmas branch instead.

'Festive Fears' tombstone decoration from SpookyBoxCo

Some of the decorations like the glittery stars and black baubles are just ordinary Christmas decorations - it's quite common to find purple and black decorations these days, and silver is a traditional festive decoration for anything snowy. I quite like the spiky glittery stars, and there iridescent star shown at the top. I've also got decorations from SpookyBoxCo from when I used to be subscribed. Some are black tomb-stones with spooky mottos, and some are white skulls (pictured bellow).  There's also glittery purple skulls tucked into the boughs, but all the photographs that I tried to take turned out blurry, unfortunately. 

Cute skull decoration from SpookyBoxCo

As you can see in the background of the photograph above, the lights on the tree are bats. They glow a blue-ish violet, but all the photographs I've taken of them look purely blue. I promise they aren't entirely blue. They're Hallowe'en lights, I think probably from Poundland, but I can't be certain of that. I don't have many Hallowe'en specific string-lights in my house any more - I used to have several in my study when it had the more kitschy aesthetic, but I've now rehomed them to people who have more of that sort of aesthetic. I still have two strings of skull lights, one with small clear resin skulls, and one with blown mercury glass large skulls, but they are in our bedroom. I bought some purple bat miniature LED lights, which are on the edge of my shelves. 

A purple bat that looks blue. 

The rest of the string-lights in the picture below are all permanent fixtures in my study, except for the ones on the tree. The festive period is probably the only time of the year when I have all of the string-lights turned on, although I do sometimes put a few one for things like ambience while gaming at my PC or mood-lighting for D&D. I also like to put a few on when I'm meditating, and don't want the bright over-head light or stand light. I think my study possibly has far too many lighting options, and I'm saving up to get an electrician in to give me even more lighting options, hopefully in summer, so maybe I'm just overly finnicky about lighting adjustability... The lantern string lights were originally clear plastic with brown frames and I used glass-paint to make them purple and green and nail-polish to re-paint the brown plastic frames black. The skull, lanterns and purple orb lights were all from Poundland. They run off batteries. 

Lanterns, a skull, tiny bats, & glowing orbs are the tip of the lighting iceberg

In both the first photograph and the one above you can see there's tinsel on my shelf. I think they're both from B&M, although one might be from The Range, I can't remember. I've got two more photographs of tinsel and I'm not writing two more paragraphs on the topic of tinsel; one is iridescent green and purple/pink, and the other is petrol grey, and they're thick with long fronds - that is all there is to say about tinsel. I think the iridescent one looks quite magical. 

Iridescent tinsel

I think next year I will get two more strands of tinsel, so each shelf has one, as just two shelves looks a bit awkward. I'd like to get some really chunky black tinsel, and maybe some purple or some silver tinsel. 

Grey tinsel

Another element of Christmas decorations in my study are foil garlands, spider garlands, and a foil star. They are the sort that come flat, and you fold them out to expand them. I know a lot of people think these decorations are quite tacky, but I like them, and they remind me of Christmas at my grandmother's house back in the early '90s, maybe even the late '80s. I liked Christmas at my English grandmother's house, but she passed away when I was a child. I tried really hard to photograph the garlands, but I could not get a good angle. I did get a good couple of photographs of the star that hangs from my ceiling however. 

A foil star with silver, purple and blue

There's a spider garland that has a pretty similar concept - it's purple (six legged???) spiders made of tissue-paper strung along a cord - but I didn't get a photograph of that either. 

My glass-less Gothic arch former-mirror for scale and position.

That was my Christmas decorations for 2019. If by next Christmas, I have my cornice up and sort out my ceiling (maybe with two new lights...) then you might get a half-decent photo of the garlands, too.