Making a Christmas wreath turns me into a mad secateur lady

Competitive Christmas wreathing. It’s a thing and, yes, that is an actual bona fide verb. These days, as any self-respecting hostess knows, you can’t fake it – you have to make it. And it better be a showstopper.

From Edinburgh Zoo to St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff, The Bressingham Gardens in Norfolk to Castle Howard in York, venues have been coining it in with workshops revealing the secrets of the perfect door wreath.

In London, ritzy florists McQueens has been charging £250 a pop at its Mayfair HQ. All three of the £95 Make a Wreath day courses are sold out at Hugh Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage, in Devon.

One of my friends stumped up £50 in Essex to learn about arranging ornamental grasses with feathers, berries and velvet ribbons (yes, yuck). Another planned ahead and had the foresight to make a willow base while visiting an ancient woodland activity centre in the summer holidays – three years ago.

The pride she takes in dusting it down every year and threading it through with fresh eucalyptus and blue pine verges on the unseemly. Or it would do, had not I too fallen victim to the one-upmanship at the heart of what ought to be lovely, fun Christmas crafting. I mean, it is lovely and fun, but now everybody’s at it, the stakes have been ramped higher than the Bake Off final showstopper. Hers next door has dried fruit! Cones! Damn, I forgot to squirrel away seed heads!

Being too much of a skinflint to invest in professional tuition, I have instead embraced the inverted snobbery of gathering my own foliage and being far more, you know, authentic.

In other words: I’m now a mad old biddy who carries little hessian bags and a hefty pair of secateurs around in my tote wherever I go, snipping anything I come across.

I’ve checked the legal situation in case someone calls the rozzers when I’m halfway up a holly tree and I’m in the clear as long as I’m simply foraging for personal use and not collecting for commercial reasons – although if Charles Saatchi happened to be passing and offered me a sweet deal for my faux-naïf Gesamtkunstwerk, I’d definitely consider it. Until then, I’m permanently scouting for rosehips and hawthorn, spindle and ivy. When neighbours ask us round for mulled wine of an evening, I’m out through the kitchen and into their back garden before they’ve ladled out the first glass, scanning the herbaceous border and nosing around the pots looking for any spare rosemary or sage, while judiciously clipping off a sprig or two of bay.

My justification is that, as it will be hanging on my front door, they, like everyone else in the road, will get to enjoy it. That usually placates them and, in truth, whatever the result, it always looks pretty, or at least rustic.

My husband isn’t always convinced. Last year I overheard him telling our visitors that one of the children made it – only for them to shriek in horror and deny all knowledge. But once in place, the wreath stays put; I think of it as our traditional Christmas compromise. I’ve no idea what he calls it, but if he ever took it down he might find himself in need of a very different sort of wreath.

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