“Lights first,” I tell Simon firmly.

“Alright, if you say so...”

“Trust me. When have I ever led you wrong?”

“Well last week, you took us down a wrong turning on the way to the shopping centre, and then the week before that we had takeaway and you told me to try chicken chow mien because you said I’d like it, and it gave me food poisoning...”

“Alright, alright!” I bite my lip sheepishly, realising I maybe could have worded that better. But even if it is true, Simon’s only teasing me. “At least trust me when it comes to Christmas. I’m like, the anti-Scrooge.”

“Why do you think I asked you to come help me?” he says with a grin, and rummages around in the giant cardboard box of Christmas decorations, finally fishing out a tangle of white fairy lights. When I raise my eyebrows at the state of the knots in the wire, he shrugs sheepishly.

“Let me take a wild guess: it’s your responsibility to take the tree down every year?”

Once we finally manage to untangle the clump of fairy lights, it doesn’t take long to wind them around the tree. Simon has to do the top few branches; it’s a six foot monster of a tree and I can’t quite reach all the way around. When he sees me struggling to pass the wire around the top of the tree, he laughs and takes it off me, kissing me on the forehead and smiling.

Then, he shakes out a plastic Marks and Spencer bag, the colours on it faded from years of use, and a mound of tinsel falls to the floor. There’s silver, gold, turquoise, red, bronze, white, and even pink.

“My mum likes to change the tree a little every year,” Simon tells me by way of explanation, grinning at me. “Take your pick.”

I choose a long piece of silver tinsel with stars on, and start to wind it around the base of the tree. I hear the rustle of the tinsel as Simon takes some, too, and he starts to work from the top down. We both carry on, until the tree is covered with tinsel, and step back to admire our work.

Simon sputters with laughter, and I sigh, glancing at the clock: this is taking way longer than anticipated. The bottom half of the tree is in silver and turquoise; the top in gold and red. They both look good individually, but as a whole, the tree’s a total mess.

I start to pull it all off.

“We could have planned that one better, I think,” he laughs next to me, carefully unwinding a string of gold tinsel so as not to disturb the lights we’ve placed so carefully amongst the foliage.

“You saw me start using silver,” I argue.

He shrugs. “To be fair, you didn’t look to see what colours I was using and stop me.”

I just shake my head, trying to bite back a smile and failing completely. Once the tree is stripped back to just the fairy lights, glowing soft and gold from the branches, Simon runs a hand back and forth through his mousy curls and says, “So which colours are we going to use?”

We use the gold and turquoise, alternating the colours as we go. The end result is much better than our first attempt. The music is still playing on the radio – now a Michael Bublé cover of ‘White  Christmas’, and I bounce on the balls of my feet to it, bobbing my head in time.

Now the baubles?”

I laugh, and go on my tiptoes to give Simon a quick kiss on the end of his button nose. “Yes, now the baubles.”

Like with the tinsel, I find that Simon’s family have a huge and varied collection of baubles with which to decorate the tree. I pick up a silver one, made of glass, just like a mirror. My reflection is a bit distorted: my face more round than usual, my curly blonde hair seeming to be even more huge, my blue eyes too close together.

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