In 1978 Chris and I planted a tree in the front garden of our new house. Bought from a local garden centre our tree travelled to its new home on the roof-rack of my small white Mini. That Christmas we decorated it with six lights. Living in a village with no street lighting and situated at the bottom of the Pepper Street hill, our tree shone out bravely, if diminutively, that year.

Trees have a habit of growing and as it grew, each year we purchased more lights. We soon needed to stand on a stepladder to reach the top. A few years later Chris designed an ingenious pole to hook the lights on the top branches. This pole was extended year by year until, even standing on the top step of the ladder with the pole fully extended, we could no longer reach the top. Help came first from a local contractor who had a cherry picker and since 2005 we’ve been indebted to Paul Davis of S.E. Davis & Son who, together with a couple of friends, has come with a high-rise platform to put up the lights and take them down each new year.

In 1984 two friends helped us dig a trench from the front door across the lawn to the tree to enable us to embed a pipe so that we could install a permanent electric supply. Putting lights on the tree was now getting serious ! Chris would start checking the sets in October and, having taken them down, it would take well into the new year before they were all tested, repaired and stowed in our loft.

Now over 50ft high, we need 1100 lights to decorate it. The old-fashioned incandescent bulbs we use are getting increasingly hard to source. We are grateful to be able to purchase sets from the Severn Valley Railway as the heritage railway changes to LEDs for lighting their Father Christmas grotto. We don’t think LEDs would work on our tree as they are very bright and would change the nature of the almost magical effect of the present bulbs. We underrun the lights, both to give a slightly traditional effect and to ensure the bulbs last longer.

The tree attracts a lot of attention in the village and for many years we have raised money for various charities. We first had a lighting up ceremony in 2009, when Kay Alexander of Midlands Today kindly came to switch them on. Since then our tree has raised money for many different charities, including the Alzheimer’s Society, Help for Heroes, First Responders, Cancer Research UK, The Stroke Association, St. Richard’s Hospice, the Acorn Children’s Hospice, The Lighthouse Charity, Midlands Air Ambulance, the Worcester Food Bank and the Cardiac Care Unit of Royal Hospital (who saved Chris’s life when he had a heart attack).