The atmoshere before Christmas

It gets closer and closer, like every year, fascinating and mysterious… at home, the lights become suffused, the colours get warmer and softer: a coziness in contrast with the outside temperatures. There is no space left for sadness: joy becomes the main character, and the elegant decorations, the golden flocks and the sparkling garlands give an extra tone of magic to the whole picture.

The Christmas spirit is something nobody can really explain. The atmosphere that characterizes the time before Christmas is simply unique.

Valtpino’s Garlands

Green or coloured, hanging on the front door, on the door’s jambs or windows, over the fireplace, draped on the walls of the rooms or on the tree: garlands immediately give to the ambient chosen for them a sweet feeling that anticipates the arrival of a celebration.

Valtpino’s decorative garlands can take many different shapes and can be realized with an infinite quantity of different materials.

The history of Christmas’s garlands

It is indeed when we start seeing garlands hanging on the front doors that we finally realize, the time of celebration has come.

However, before the advent of Christianity, German populations had already been using garlands as a symbol for good omen and to mitigate the fears that the imminent return of the long nights and the deep darkness of the winter were carrying. Families used to meet around a garland laid at the center of a room and in which four candles were glowing. This was meant to symbolically enlighten the life till spring’s return.

With the time, Christianity spread out its customs and these had to come together with the already existing pagan’s religious habits. By these means, garlands became the symbol of light’s excellence, of hope and of the truths that Jesus brought on Earth, and, therefore, they grew into a decorative element that cannot be missed in any of our homes.

A peculiar german legend

Christmas garlands are not only those typical circular ones that we hang on the front door or on the walls of our houses, in fact, there are also the long and stretched out garlands, the ones we use to decorate our Christmas Trees and that are usually golden and silvery in the colours.

Not everybody knows about the old tradition involving theses stretched out garlands, a tradition that refers to a curious German legend and whose main character is a mother:

“During Christmas Eve, for the love of her family, a mother spent all of her day cleaning up, organizing and preparing home for the big celebration that was about to come the next day. During the night and thanks to its darkness, however, all the little spiders that had managed to elude the broom and the rag to find shelter in the garret, went back to the main room and started, once again, weaving their webs, very diligently and exactly on top of the beautiful Christmas Tree that was standing in the middle of the room! When Santa Claus arrived in the house, his bag full of all the presents that he was supposed to leave under the Christmas Tree, he noticed the mess that the spiders had caused and, for the love of all the family, he decided to turn each one of the webs into magnificent garlands, made of golden and silver strings, giving life to a wonderful and incredible decoration for the Christmas Tree.”

Since then, the families of all the World choose to adorn their Christmas Trees with colourful garlands, to celebrate Christmas and to remember how good Santa Claus had been!