Growing Christmas trees healed my December birth trauma
And gave me fertile ground and community to grow in.
I want to tell you a story about Christmas and how something that was mine was stolen from me in December and how the shock and brutal pain of this experience changed all of my Decembers forever. It prompted a kind of renaissance as well as a nativity. Well, eventually.
But before I do, hold that thought a moment.
We know that pagans held celebrations in December for the winter solstice and that the Romans marked the solstice with Saturnalia, their 5-day festival in celebration of the sun. And that once, in mediaeval times, this mostly amounted to simple activities. Gathering evergreens like holly and ivy, symbolising eternal life and the promise of spring. Bringing the outside in to festoon a household with nature’s seasonal gifts. And to the storing up of food for mid-winter feasting and lots of revelry.
And of course, there’s the oh Tannenbaum a.k.a. fir and spruce trees which Martin Luther in Germany is credited with nurturing our special fondness of. He was transfixed by stars twinkling through the forest branches and this prompted trees to be brought indoors and lit with actual candles. I know! Terrifying idea that, isn’t it.
I love all these age-old traditions; they’re comforting and uplifting. It all seems much simpler and more wholesome back then, Christmas past. And, well, achievable. Our Christmas nowadays is a great, big polarising bear of a beast.
A time of year which falls in the harsh, dead cold of winter in the northern hemisphere and which has, over the centuries, been overlaid with tradition upon tradition, ritual upon ceremony.
It now looms so heavy and full of expectation at the end of the calendar year. And its weight is not always a welcome one; many people struggle particularly with this time of year.
Whilst long associated with consumption and displays of benevolence and wealth, hyper capitalism has really hijacked much of the raw joy from the occasion.
Fundamental messages of goodwill, finding community and gathering to find cause to celebrate can seem wholly obscured, hidden and muffled deep under layers of consumer anxiety and the pressure to provide material gifts.
This is a season that tends to divide; people seem to be either all-in ELF about the festive period or lean right away from it and towards a bah humbug, Grinch of a disposition.
I’ve been a part of ‘Team Tree’ in the farmyard at Wylds Farm Christmas Trees for ten years now, mixing with the (mostly) merry massive as they gather to commune in the yard. It’s where I rediscovered myself and learnt to trust my pen, to see there’s value in what my eyes see ( a photography business grew from this ) and found my Tannenbaum tribe.
Over these ten winters I’ve had conversations with lots of farm visitors who’ve shared with me their own personal and sometimes painful Christmas stories. This has helped to make it easier for me to share my own. Lots of people have a difficult relationship with Christmas.
I’ve mostly been someone who could fully enjoy the lead up to December 25th. Surrounded by small children through my twenties and thirties, I met them squarely with their wide-eyed joy and wonder at the fables and yarns spun to them, the flying antlered ruminants with bells jangling along their bridles and the jocular old, ridiculously benevolent, bearded codge whom I now slightly regret allowing to take all the glory for gifts I sourced and carefully wrapped myself and often lonnnnng into the night. Sounding familiar?
I’m not suggesting that surviving the sensory gluttony of Yuletide with three young children was eternally easeful and without stress. It absolutely wasn’t. There were sack loads of seasonal snotty gifts, coughing sickness bugs and term-end burnouts, meltdowns and plenty of domestic isolation (for me). Beyond all this, however, was an overarching desire to welcome in the wintering stuff with open arms.
Building small family rituals around the occasion like writing & illustrating their poems onto white hankies for the grandmas. Scavenging the 12 books of Christmas from charity shops ( look away authors, I’m sorry ). Learning the Night Before Christmas by rote. Covering whole doorways with wrapping paper for them to karate kick through on Christmas morning ( hard recommend, this one ). Jointly constructing big gingerbread houses during kitchen bake-offs which, come the 26th, would be enthusiastically demolished in a rambunctious wrecking ball frenzy of bashing with toy hammers. Spicy structures reduced to rusty, orange, crumby rubble. And promptly gobbled up.
Christmas was by and large a joyous, glittering time of each year.
This all came to a sudden halt one dark December night in 2005 when my world was shaken to pieces by a baby boy born with a dangerously broken little heart. He arrived so quietly and stole my own actual birthday from underneath me. Literally. The labour began whilst picking the tree too.
We would eventually nickname him ‘the birthday thief’ for his nativity robbery and properly called him Jake. His arrival heralded enormous, unanticipated and at times terrifying change.
His birth smashed me open like a flimsy, paper Piñata, scattering all the parts of me far and wide. Not the gynaecological parts. Mercifully, his earthside transition was a marvellous and manageable affair on that level. I’m talking about my mind. I had to hold on very, very, extremely tightly to not lose myself.
Holding everything together, or so I thought at least, was what was required. Little did I know.
For a long time I had sharp edges and had to work hard to retrieve the shape of me that I knew myself as and by this I don’t mean size or body. I know now that the experiences which immediately followed his birth were felt as traumatising.
My fourth born arrived with unanticipated disabilities and complications that had not been diagnosed in pregnancy and we didn’t make it out of the hospital, he and I, for a whole two weeks. By the skin of our teeth - well mine as he didn’t have any nashers visible at birth - we made it home on the 24th to put out the carrot and mince pies.
The hospital staff didn’t much notice the tears that poured down my cheeks for the fortnight I spent in the PICU ward. Perhaps they assumed I didn’t want my new baby with the chromosomal mutation and the faulty heart.
Hot tears concealing cold fears, and also anger, confusion, guilt and rage. An emotional selection box and I chomped through them all. Pissed off at being in hospital without warning and losing all agency, that was the number 1 frustration pushing salt rivers down my face. The rest would come much, much, much later.
I was in deep shock and intensely angry that I’d been separated from my other three children and from enjoying pre-Christmas joys with them. The being snuggled up fireside with endless slabs of Stollen watching family films together and laughing at corny Snowman jokes. Not that any of this was visible; I swallowed the anger down with the cake and turned it all inwards on to myself, to ferment like a good brandy.
What I now know about trauma is that we, as animals, have a need to move our bodies to fully process and transmute shock and pain. In the animal kingdom, when a predator has given chase and unsuccessfully, the hunted impala - let’s say - will vigorously shake its body following an exhaustive pursuit. This literally shakes the shock right out of it.
Although we rarely die, humans suffer when we are unable to discharge the energy that is locked in by the freezing response. The traumatized have been confronted by overwhelming situations. If they are unable to orient and choose between fight or flight, they will freeze or collapse. Those who are able to discharge that energy will be restored. Rather than moving through the freezing response, as animals do routinely, humans often begin a downward spiral characterised by an increasingly debilitating constellation of symptoms.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
I didn’t shake. The shaking was contained. Trapped in hospital with a baby whose constant need for the breast was the only need I could connect to and answer, I wasn’t free to flee in flight. Wasn’t able to go anywhere at all in fact.
Not even to speak with a counsellor. There wasn’t one of those which now strikes me as incredible. It was 2005 and conversations around trauma and pain didn’t exist in the public domain. Things have shifted a whole lot since although actual service provision has in no way caught up with demand.
There are four responses to fear, trauma and stress. These all begin with the letter ‘F’ and since ‘flight’ wasn’t an option, my body picked a combination of the other three to cope with the excess of cortisol and adrenaline racing through me; these being fight, freeze and fawn.
I had three giant December shocks to absorb in three giant December days. Each one following the other and quickly.
The first shock being my baby’s Down Syndrome. Believe it or not, this felt the lesser of the three challenges at the time. That’s not virtue-signalling on my part. I’d spent a fair amount of time professionally alongside children with disabilities. True, I’d wanted to teach SEN children not parent one. Still, this shock just paled against the other two more pressing shocks that I was about to receive.
Secondly, his heart. It was missing some rather structurally important, meaty chunks by which I mean an entire wall - medical name septum - and a significant valve. He had an AVSD which stands for atrio-ventricular septal defect and surgeons had only recently begun performing a corrective surgical repair for the condition with any reasonable success. He would need to have his little rib cage cranked wide open and his walnut-sized heart stopped for six, long, terrifying hours so that cow tissue - grown in a lab, not on a heifer - could be stitched in to create a wall where there was none.
Ultimately, this surgical procedure would be performed six months later and successfully. In the meantime, I fell in love and despair and absolute terror with a baby I became convinced was going to die.
He didn’t. He’s ox-strong now which feels funny to say being as he’s actually a little bit ‘cow’. I never did Google that life-affirming surgery to see what it entailed.
The third shock was felt as the largest of all. Perhaps because I experienced it alone, just me, my baby and a woefully ill-prepared healthcare assistant in a green tabard. The newborn hearing test is called the automated otoacoustic emission (AOAE) test. It takes just a few minutes. A small soft-tipped earpiece is placed in the baby's ear and gentle clicking sounds are played.
She positioned the probes. When instead of a jagged, spiky display this prompted two long, green flatlines on her laptop screen, she confirmed my baby was deaf. Then reversed out of the room apologetically and left me on my own with this bombshell.
I remember this as the nadir moment of our navidad. It was simply too much pain to hold and the most acute despair I’ve ever felt. How would I possibly cope with a baby I didn’t know how to communicate with? Where would I find time to learn BSL with a house full of needy children?
For three long, difficult days I held this frightening diagnosis of deafness, the belief that my baby son would never hear a single sound. As it turned out, it was the healthcare assistant’s laptop battery that was dead and not my baby’s hearing. It took me a long time to be able to laugh about this massive minor glitch which shredded the tatters of my hope at the time.
Holding all these big emotions of love and profound grief at once was exhausting.
The first few winters with him proved to be long and fraught with many medical crises, blue light speeds down the A3 and countless interventions. Just staying out of hospital and away from antibiotics was the overarching baseline ambition for each day. That and a solitary run in the woodland which for a long while seemed the go-to strategy to right any dys-regulation.
Life continued along this rhythm for his early years and I carried on ‘performing Christmas’ appearing to love our December joint birthday even. Then it all came to a head and a collision of circumstances revealed some giant truths.
I’d shrunk myself to fit. To fit the available resources. Squashing my needs very small and my body with it.
I was turning forty and realised I’d not even properly celebrated ‘my’ birthday, as an individual, as a woman, outside of the house or with friends for six whole years. The occasion had become collateral damage and all but disappeared along with quite a lot of other disowned parts of me along the way. Subsumed by the caring and the raising.
Jumping back into the Cadbury’s Christmas selection box again, in terms of our family’s needs, I’d unwittingly made myself the finger of fudge. Hyper vigilant and rightly, tightly wound, I hadn’t discharged some of the trauma from his birth which was locked within my body. A version of PTSD.
What I know now but didn’t realise then, was that I was experiencing a breakthrough. Not a breakdown, it didn’t feel like a slump in energy but instead, my vitality was increasing and by a LOT.
I became energised and capable in completely new and expansive ways. Desires and needs revealed themselves to me and some big shifts began to occur in my life. Becoming suddenly able to stretch and think differently enabled me to embrace my creativity and in some deeply rewarding ways.
‘… If you’re lucky, you have a crisis. At some point in your life, something terrible happens to get you to question the rules ….’
Dr Alan Watkins, TEDxOxford a hugely informative and enjoyable 20 minute watch
Nick has the gnarliest, working man’s hands and can make a lot with them.
He is mechanically minded, physical, has always worked outdoors and the slightly enlarged joints of his fingers show this. He is a Luddite really, preferring to hammer at plyboard over keyboard and twist things with chicken wire over devices that rely an entanglement of high speed fibre optics.
I was in crisis when we were introduced. Nick takes chances on people who are down on their luck. He goes out of his way to see past obvious difficulties and barriers to employment and give a person a go, gauges their work ethic and makes his decisions from there.
We began working together at a time when his Christmas Tree business was very small. The footfall to Wylds Farm was quite tiny and the number of trees sold each season a fraction of what they’d grow to become. Hundreds rather than thousands at this time.
There was a rough and ready Wylds Farm Shop with a leaky roof selling glass baubles, stationery and tree stands. Refreshments were available but basic. Bacon baps and the odd slice of cake. The whole outfit was very primitive. But there was huge scope for growth.
Gradually, over the years, Nick has built many things with his talented hands to shelter all the visitors who have grown to love the place and flock now in high numbers. A fabulously inviting Lincoln log cabin, open-sided barns and netting sheds topped in living grass roofs. Repurposing along the way an eclectic mix of disused railway sleepers, reclaimed timber frame sliding doors, random leaded windows and mix-century creaky doors.
Mine is quite a marketing brain and I saw how I could grow an online audience locally and share the joy of the Christmas Experience at Wylds Farm through words and pictures over the (then emerging) social platforms, bringing other local groups on board to link up with in a big paper chain of human connection. Choirs, youth groups and musicians.
Self conscious and anxious initially, over time I learned to trust my gut instinct, discovered I was actually pretty sharp in the role and grew bolder and brighter.
I learned how to use a camera and became the online voice of Wylds, using witty ( I thought anyway ) captions and telling the story of the farm, the trees growing in the plantation, the fun, showcasing the other Team Tree members and all the sparkly (and grunty, muddy) corners of the place.
It was all about the green and the growing - apart from the chopping down bit obviously - and I got the green light from the man in the green felt hat. To grow myself alongside the tree sales.
Wylds makes for a wonderfully mismatched, hotch potch of welcoming Heath Robinson rustic. Especially once fairy lights are festooned and stretch in twinkling rows between the timber gables. And once the braziers are lit and glow their warmth over beanie-hatted tree pickers. And the log burner sizzles and warms big and small hands holding hot chocolate. And the vats of mulled wine waft their spicy, fragrant steam across the farmyard from the ‘Après Tree Bar’.
And there’s the Christmas Pigs! Not forgetting the three wise Kune Kune who oink their snorty festive songs to one and all …
I’ve watched so many people arrive for the first time, leave smitten and make their visit to Wylds an annual festive tradition, returning year after year down the bumpy track. My kids have all worked a Christmas here, including ‘the Birthday Thief’ himself who celebrated his 18th by shunting logs in a barrow all day last December.
Becoming part of ‘Team Tree’ at this crisis time in my life was an entirely life-affirming experience and healing. There is genuinely nowhere I’d rather spend the month of December.
Wylds Farm Christmas Trees is located just off the A3 1hr45 from central London and 30 min from the South Coast. The What3Words reference is hoops.fidget.frogs The Après Tree Retro Ski Party is on Dec 21st this year and a lot of fun. 🚠
Beautiful and thought provoking. X
This is so beautiful… 🧡