Are Your Bells A-Jingling!

Giving you a sneak peek of my Christmas Sketchbook page here ….. and the inspiration for it ''Carol of the Bells!''.

 

A quirk of my character is to do exactly the opposite of what everyone expects (not deliberately!), on social media a couple of comments were about loving my colourful festive sketchbook pages ….. and what a surprise this year it’s monochrome. 

Where do you find bells? Well, in belfries, so I've decided to go for some churches and belfries in my sketch. All of this gorgeous architecture gets me all nostalgic and reminds me of one of my family Christmas memories, I've probably told it every Christmas in my blog but here we go again, and some twinkling lights to set the mood!

My Dad had really wanted to become an architect and so he decided to put his architectural skills into building a Christmas panorama, a spectacularly festive centrepiece to set the scene for our family Christmas. He decided to build the interior of a gothic cathedral with buttresses soaring upwards and a magnificent rose window. He carved polystyrene tiles night after night and then very carefully cut out the rose window. With coloured, transparent paper he created a fabulous stained glass window, on Christmas Eve it was time to unveil his masterpiece. 

There it was, arch after arch of delicately carved polystyrene leading the eye into the stunning edifice and taadaaa … the rose window! As a special treat he'd decided to back light the window, wow, we were gobsmacked! 

Unfortunately, he had chosen to light this creation with a 100w lightbulb and that was his downfall. As we watched agog, the polystyrene started to melt and with the transparent paper the whole thing went up in flames. The stench was horrendous.

Some people would have seen in him Nostradamus predicting the fire in Notre Dame but my mother only saw and smelled the acrid smoke and the melted black mess that had been our Christmas centrepiece which was thrown unceremoniously out into the garden. 

Sweet Christmas memories indeed, that said the smell of melted polystyrene wasn’t much worse than the smell of 13 kilograms of onions that my Dad peeled and chopped for the turkey stuffing, no wonder nobody wanted to sit beside him at church.