Deck The Halls

I look away from the bauble and up to Simon, who’s poised ready to drape a red teardrop-shaped bauble from the tree. “Um, I think we should decide which ones to use first, so we don’t make the same mistake as we did with the tinsel.”

He pauses, and then takes the bauble away from the tree, nodding in agreement. We divide out the blue and black and gold baubles, and put the others back in the bag.

As we hang them on the tree, stepping back every so often to see how it looks and see where needs more baubles, I start singing along to the radio again. I haven’t got a great voice, but I’m better than Simon; and anyway, who doesn’t like to sing Christmas songs?

“May your days be merry and bright... And may all your Christmases be white...”

“You’re not actually that bad a singer.”

I cut a glance his way. “Gee, thanks.”

Simon rolls his eyes, sighing. “That’s not how I meant it. I just don’t hear you sing much unless it’s Christmas. Or unless you’re singing ‘Happy Birthday’, but that doesn’t count.”

“Everyone likes to sing Christmas songs.”

“Maybe not everyone should,” he quips with a cheeky smile.

“Tell me about it. You make my ears bleed every time you try and hit that high note in ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’.”

Simon gapes at me, aghast at how I could insult him so, and shoves at my arm playfully. I can’t help but laugh, and bat him away. When I raise my arms to fend him off, though, he takes advantage and jumps at me, tickling my neck and sides.

I shriek, squirming away from him and running across the room, but he stays in hot pursuit, until I try to vault over the arm of a sofa and trip, tumbling onto the cushions. Simon falls down on top of me, sitting on my legs and his fingers burrowing into my neck and waist.

Gasping for breath from laughing so much, I give up trying to fight him off and hold out my hands, palms facing him. “Okay, okay, I surrender!”

Laughing almost as much as me, Simon stands up and gives me a hand to my feet. I scowl, and straighten my woolly blue and white jumper with the reindeer on. “That was mean.”

“That was funny.”

“I’ll get you back for that.”

“I’m not ticklish. You know that.”

I pout, and twist my mouth into a tight line. “I’ll find something.”

Simon just smiles at me, and kisses me on the top of the head again as he moves past to pick up another bauble to hang from the tree.

“Okay, I think that’s enough baubles,” I say, trying not to sound too horrified by the amount of decorations Simon’s hung on the tree. He clearly takes his role as bauble-hanger very seriously: there’s hardly a branch that’s not got either a fairy light or a bauble on it. But it’s Simon’s tree, so I resist every urge to start taking off at least twenty baubles to make it a little less of an eyesore.

“See, it looks great,” he says, stepping back to admire his work. “I told you, I always do the baubles.”

“You told me,” I agree. He takes one look at my expression though – the worried line of my mouth, the pucker in my forehead between my eyebrows, and the repressed objection he can just tell is on the tip of my tongue, and he smiles.

“Too much?”

“A little.”

So we take off a few baubles, until the tree looks much nicer – less something that will blind you if the light hits it just right.