The Calm Christmas Podcast with Beth Kempton

S2 Ep5: NEST (simplify + decorate)

• Beth Kempton • Season 2 • Episode 5

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This episode is all about nesting – getting your home and heart ready for the winter, with natural Christmas decorations, and ideas for mindful crafting. With inspiration from Laurie Lee, Ariella Chezar (@ariellachezardesign), Lucy Hunter @lucytheflowerhunter, Truman Capote, Lizzie Kamenetzky, Cleo Wade @cleowade, The Royal Horticultural Society (@the_rhs), and my mum!

Featured in this episode:

Download my free guide to creating a wreath HERE  and ideas for other natural decorations HERE. 

To be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of The Flower Hunter by Lucy Hunter and a signed copy of my book Calm Christmas, head over to Instagram @bethkempton. The deadline for entries is 4pm UK time on Friday December 3, 2021. 

Ingredients list for featured recipes:

Salt dough

-       1 cup of plain flour

-       Half a cup of table salt

-       Half a cup of water

 

French onion soup

Serves 4

-       25g unsalted butter

-       3 tablespoons olive oil

-       1kg large onions, very thinly sliced

-       250ml dry white wine

-       1 litre rich beef stock - or you could replace with vegetable stock for a vegetarian version

-       Freshly grated nutmeg

-       A small handful of fresh thyme sprigs

-       2 fresh bay leaves

-       75ml good quality Madeira

-       1 day old baguette or other crusty bread, cut into slices

-       1 garlic clove

-       150g Comte cheese, grated (or you could use a vegetarian cheese)

-       Sea salt and ground black pepper

"Among the black and bare trees we shook the snow from the undergrowth with frost-reddened fingers, seeking the sharp-spiked holly, bunches of laurel and ivy, cold clusters of moon-pale mistletoe. With these, our sisters transformed the familiar kitchen into a grotto of shining leaves, an enchanted bower woven from twigs and branches sprinkled with scarlet berries." Welcome to the Calm Christmas podcast with me, Beth Kempton. That snippet was from Laurie Lee's wonderful book, A Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year. And this is

Episode Five:

Nest. It's all about simplifying and decorating our homes for Christmas. I'm sending this out to you from the kitchen table of my home, an old stone cottage here in world Devon in South West England. The kettle's on, the range is warm, and I am bubbling with anticipation thinking of decorating the house this year. We could call this episode 'the less bought more handmade' episode because we are going to be talking about decorations, especially natural ones that we might want to make ourselves. But we could also call it the'less stuff more headspace' episode, because really, it's about that too. But let's talk about the decorations first. Growing up, there were only two occasions when my dad would stand on a ladder to get the Christmas decorations down from a high shelf above the stairwell, and to put them back a few weeks later. One by one the battered cardboard boxes would be passed down to my mum standing at the bottom of the ladder, and then along a chain of us children until the baubles were finally delivered to their rightful place at the foot of the tree. The most exotic Christmas decoration we ever had- I'll never forget it - was a silver and blue expandable foil star. Lying flat it was really no more than a series of squares on top of one another. But when you picked it up by the hook at the centre of the top layer, it stretched into this captivating lantern that caught the light as it twirled. That decoration was my dad's pride and joy. He'd picked it up on a trip to Spain at what he thought was a bargain price. Until he realised he had put the decimal point in the wrong place when doing the exchange rate calculation and it made it the most expensive decoration that we'd ever seen. The most expensive in all of Europe, probably. So we treated it with due reverence as if it had the power to guide us all the way to Bethlehem and itenjoyed pride of place above the dining room table every Christmas from when I was eight, until my parents moved house some three decades later. Decorating the home can become a lovely annual ritual and give us memories like these. Whether we do it alone or we do it with others, it can represent a really special moment in the year, the point where for many of us Christmas truly begins. In fact, scientists have found that hanging Christmas decorations generates positive emotions and powerful memories of childhood that are good for us. For centuries, people have brought light and life into the darkest days of winter by decorating their homes with candles, lamps, and evergreens. Holly and ivy are said to provide a sanctuary for fairies over the cold winter months, and mistletoe - that universal invitation to kiss - is both highly poisonous and medicinally beneficial when expertly prepared. Did you know it was traditionally harvested with a golden sickle? And then it was carried high and hung over doors to bring good luck. Of course herbs have long been used symbolically in festive displays, including rosemary for remembrance and bay for valour. Evergreens and berries are subtle signs of life when much of the garden is dying back. They represent hope, regeneration and a spirit of life itself. And I love particularly natural decorations because they're not showy or loud. Yes, there might be some bright red berries, but generally, they are subtle and beautiful, and offer a warm welcome and a hint of potent winter magic. Why not try making some of your own decorations this year if that's not something you've done before? If evergreens are in short supply where you live, you can usually forage them from local woods or hedgerows. Of course, if you need to request permission from the farmer you want to do that. Or you could pay a visit to a local market, a farm shop or a florist and there's no need to wait until late December to make a wreath. I often adorn our front door with natural delights from the end of November onwards and then I take the Christmas wreath and refresh it after Christmas for some seasonal cheer through January. I really love this because it encourages you to get outside, use your hands and take time to make something really special. According to Ariella Chezar in her lovely book, Seasonal Flower Arranging, "Winter is a season of soft colours, all grey and white, like an etching that reveals the beauty of bare limbs in twilight, but it is also a season of celebration, of New Years and new beginnings. She says, I find myself drawn to flowers in shared of white and green, to blooming witch hazel, eucalyptus, and all manner of berried evergreens. Winter flowers, foliage and fruit that might be in season at this time of year depending on where you live include bulbs like amaryllis, perennials like ferns, hellebore, orchids, sea holly and succulents and then shrubs and trees like fruit trees bearing lovely fruit, eucalyptus, evergreens - cedar fir, juniper, pine - and of course things like winter berry, witchhazel, and willow. For some utterly gorgeous decoration ideas take a look at Lucy Hunter's new book, The Flower Hunter, which offers flow styling ideas for every season of the year. In the winter section she shares some brilliant ideas for making flower nooks even when there aren't many flowers available. If you know Lucy's work from Instagram - she is@lucytheflowerhunter on Instagram - she shares just gorgeous corners and styled areas of flowers but in a carefully chosen vase and often with some props around them and it's so inspiring. Her colour palette is just incredible, and I'm so happy that she has bought a book out. It's as gorgeous as her Instagram feed. She says, "There can be slim pickings in the garden during the long months of winter. But you dont need a huge bunch of different flowers to put together a joyous, mood-lifting little vase. A tiny vase will force you to choose your flowers with care, and every stem has to earn her moment in the limelight. Lucy loves vintage treasures and says Apart from hand-dyed silks, my other obsession is vintage floral fabrics and wallpaper. Finding large pieces and rolls is difficult and can be expensive, but short lengths, just the perfect size for covering a journal, are more easily sourced fro online shops and auctions. Colour and pattern add variation to a stack of notebooks waiting to be filled and which are destined to become cherished objects in their own right. Old glass jars offer storage for silver threads and dyed silks wound around old bobbins and cotton reels. I'm sure you're beginning to get the picture of how lovely Lucy's arrangements are. And in her book The Flower Hunter Lucy shares how she makes him fills her own journals. With stories of the passing seasons. She fills them with snippets of silk and linen from the dye pot and flowers cut from the garden and pressed between cartridge paper and heavy piles of old magazines. She makes notes of exactly what went into the dye pot and she sticks those notes into her notebook as they did in old herbariums, and she carefully fixes the flower pressings in place with archival tape. What a wonderful way of capturing the season. I love to imagine poetry and seasonal words sprinkled around those pages too. Lucy uses deckle-edge journals that have been hand bound to make the journals that she covers in fabric, but you could make your own paper and bind that if you want to. It's always a lovely thing to do make your own paper, make your own notebooks. She then gathers a large piece of paper for a template, fabric to cover the journal (around 30 centimetres x 30 centimetres), a sharp pair of fabric scissors, fabric glue, and naturally dyed silk or velvet ribbon. And then what she does is she lays the journal on a large piece of paper and draws around it to make a template for the cover. And then she leaves a good 10 centimetres allowance around the edge and then she pins that paper template to the fabric and cuts around it just like a dressmaking pattern. She applies a small amount of fabric glue to the front cover and firmly presses down the fabric easing out any folds and creases, then applies more glue to cover the spine and then turns it over and repeats on the bag. Lucy advises not to apply too much glue or it's going to seep through the fabric fibres and spoil the surface of the cloth. If you're making this then you want to let that dry and once it's dry, turn the 10 centimetre fabric allowance over the edges and carefully glue it down and then allow that to dry. As someone who loves her journals to look slightly raw and unfinished, Lucy simply trims any excess fabric around the edges of the journal and then chooses a length of naturally dyed silk or velvet ribbon to wrap around the journal and then she ties it in a bow to keep everything together because that journal is going to grow over time with all those natural goodies that she puts in it. This is such a wonderful idea as a gift for somebody or as your own way of tracking the winter. The pictures of Lucy's journals in her book are so beautiful. If you fancy winning a copy of the book, The Flower Hunter, be sure to pop over to my Instagram@BethKempton this week, where I'm giving away a copy alongside a signed copy of my own book, Calm Christmas. I've also put together a special guide to making a wreath and a whole host of ideas for natural decorations, which you're very welcome to download for free from my website at Bethkempton.com/podcast, and I'd love to see a picture of any natural decorations that you create this year. Do tag me on Instagram @BethKempton. But of course, we haven't talked about the tree. What about the tree? We have to talk about the tree. For me, it's such a huge symbol of Christmas. I know not everyone has a tree but here's one of my own Christmas memories, which might give you a hint of why I love Christmas trees so much. This is taken from my book Calm Christmas."My older brother and I are shovelling ourselves urgently into our heavy navy duffle coats, small hands searching for the mittens dangling by elastic from the sleeves. We tumble into the back of the old brown Volvo estate with our Labrador, Meg, and as soon as Mum has tucked our baby brother into the basket on her knee, were off. At first we are loud and fidgety, telling jokes and poking each other in our excitement. Can we get the tallest one? we beg in unison, squeezing our faces between the front seats. Well see, they say, noncommittal but smiling. After a while, the voices fall away as the hum of the engine lulls us into our respective dreams of Christmas. I trace the shapes of pine trees in the condensation on the window, clearing the glass one finger-swipe at a time to see the town rushing past, roadside buildings eventually petering out to make way for villages, then woodland. As we get closer to Ashurst, were on the lookout for the hand-painted sign: Christmas Trees This Way above a giant arrow pointing to the woods. There it is. There it is. The trees come in all shapes and sizes. I like the fat ones with lots of room for decorations. Dad suggests getting one a couple of feet taller than our ceiling, so when we cut off the single spindly branch at the top well be left with a fine, plump specimen. Once the tree has been secured on top of the car, we head back. In the past we have stopped off at a forest pub for a bowl of soup and some chips by the fire, but today we are hurrying home, eager to get the tree indoors so Christmas can begin." Moments like this make Christmas precious. The American novelist Truman Capote wrote about this too, in an essay called A Christmas Memory, which can be found in The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories edited by Jessica Harrison."Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weathered moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter wood. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile

more:

of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine

tunnels. Another creek to cross:

a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My

friend shivers, too:

not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petals as she lifts her head and inhales the pine-heavy air.'We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?' she says, as though we were approaching an And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday ocean. trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red berries, shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree. 'It should be,' muses my friend, 'twice as tall as a boy. So a boy can't steal the star.' The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that survives thirty hatchet strokes before it kills with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long trek out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down and pant. But we have the strength of triumphant huntsman; that in the tree's virile, icy perfume revive us, goad us on. Many compliments accompany our sunset return along with red clay road to town; but my friend is sly and non-committal when passes-by praise the treasure perched on

our buggy:

what a fine tree and where did it come from?'Yonderways,' she murmurs vaguely.' So many wonderful moments of Christmas in that book, The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories. This idea of Christmas memories being special is not just some warm and fuzzy notion. It's actually scientific fact. A study in the British Medical Journal identified a particular network in the brain that is activated by images associated with Christmas. According to the team from the University of Copenhagen, who conducted the research, the network showed a series of cerebral regions that are more active in people who celebrate Christmas with positive associations, compared with people with no Christmas traditions, or neutral associations, which kind of means we're hardwired to enjoy Christmas. That doesn't mean we always do, but it means that our brains are trying to help us enjoy it. Just like making the decoration of the tree a special event, creating a simple ritual to mark the threshold between work and the holiday season can be lovely too. In our house we love to end the school term with a blustery walk by the sea before sharing our excitement about Christmas over hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows, all of us dressed in Christmas jumpers of course. That evening, we will usually light a candle and welcome the start of our family Christmas. Good lighting somehow makes everything more magical, don't you think? Fairy lights and candles, they don't cost much but they make such a difference. You don't need to invest in fancy new candlesticks, you know you can use wine bottles, old lanterns even a block of wood with a few holes cut in it for tea lights can work wonderfully. And in my opinion, fairy lights look good on everything. A tree, a branch, a gate, a disused grate, wrapped around the trinkets on your mantelpiece, in a Kilner jar as a portable lantern. I love the warm white fairy lights, much more than the coloured ones for me, but it's all a personal choice, isn't it? And there's firelight of course, which offers warmth. So this winter, turn off your overhead lights and use these gentler methods instead, and see your rooms transformed. And don't forget the outside of your home too. You know lamps by the front door send out a generous welcome. Solar powered lights alongside paths and fairy lights in the trees can be a real gift to passers-by out on a wild and wet winter's night. And so to this week's journaling prompt, I've got two questions or prompts for you this week. The first one is to tell the story of Christmas through an object that you associate with it. Can you tell me the story of Christmas through an object that you associate with it. And then the second one, tell the story of yourself or your life right now through an object in your vicinity. I would love to hear what you do with this. Feel free to come and share your thoughts with me over on Instagram @BethKempton. And now it's time for this week's Christmas recipe. I actually have two recipes for you this week. One is for eating and one is definitely not for eating. It's for decorating and let's go with that one first. So this is my mum's salt dough recipe for making tree decorations. My mum has had a long career as a primary school teacher and she's absolutely brilliant at making stuff with her hands and inspiring children to do the same and she gave me this recipe when my children were really little. All you need is a cup of plain flour, half a cup of table salt, and half a cup of water. And then depending on how much you want to make you just expand those amounts in that ratio of one to half to half - one flour to half salt to half water. So preheat the oven to its lowest setting. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl and then add the water and stir, and when it comes together in a ball, you want to put it on a floured surface and use cutters to cut out the shapes you want. Obviously you going to flatten down that ball to probably half a centimetre or centimetre depending how fast you want your decorations to be. And then you want to use cutters like Christmas trees or stars or bells, whatever it is you want to do. And then if you want to be able to hang those decorations on the tree, use a knitting needle or a skewer to poke a hole through before you bake them. And you want to make that hole pretty big about double the size that you want it to be in the end because the hole will shrink as the salt dough cooks. And then lay out the shapes on a lined baking sheet and bake them for three hours at that super low temperature until they're hard. Once they are cool you can paint them and you can poke thin ribbon through to hang them on the tree. These make really lovely advent calendars too if you do a whole set and paint one to 24 on them. And so to our food recipe. There's something about this time of year that makes me want to eat French onion soup. Oh my goodness, I love French onion soup. And I've been looking for a really good recipe for this for a while and I found a wonderful one in Winter Cabin Cooking, which is just as glorious as it sounds as a cookbook by Lizzie Kamenetzky. She says, "The key to a perfect French onion soup is to cook your onions for seriously long time until they're reduced to an anxious sticky golden mass." So this serves four or it serves one of you wanting four servings! You will need 25 grams of unsalted butter, three tablespoons of olive oil, one kilo of large onions that you want to be slicing up very thinly, 250 ml of dry white wine, a litre of rich beef stock- her recipe is not vegetarian, but you could try it with a vegetable stock if you want a vegetarian version - freshly grated nutmeg, a small handful of fresh thyme sprigs, two fresh bay leaves, 75 ml of good quality Madeira, a day old baguette or other crusty bread cut into slices - no waste around here - one garlic clove and then 150 grams of cheese. She recommends Comte cheese which you want a grate, you could use cheddar, you could use a vegetarian cheese - up to you for whatever kind of cheese you like. And then you need sea salt and ground black pepper to taste. So to make it you simply melt the butter in a heavy based pan or flameproof casserole and add the oil. Add the onions and season with salt, then cook over a low heat stirring occasionally for at least 45 minutes until they've reduced right down to a golden sticky mass. Add the wine and bubble, stirring, for a minute and then add the stock, a good grating of nutmeg, and the herbs. You want to simmer that for 20 minutes, then add the Madeira and bubble for five more minutes. Check the seasoning and spoon into for small ovenproof bowls or dishes. And then you want to preheat your grill to high, toast the slices of crusty bread, and rub one side all over with garlic. Then put the toast on top of the bowl so they cover the surface of the soup, sprinkle with lots and lots of cheese and put on a baking sheet under the grill until the soup is bubbling and the toasts are lovingly melted and golden serve straightaway. I know what I'm having for dinner. And now it's time for our wellbeing corner. So this week, I want to encourage you to think of something that you could do daily in December to support your wellbeing. It could be that you download a meditation app with a daily prompt to take some time out and listen to a lovely meditation. It could be that you set an alarm on your phone to remind you to go for daily walk, or perhaps have a daily dance around your kitchen. It could be spending a little bit of time in the garden, in a park or in the woods, it might be to pop over to my Instagram @BethKempton and read my daily alternative advent calendar I'm going to be posting there throughout December, whatever works for you. But just try and think of something that you could do daily to support your wellbeing. I also want to offer you these words from Cleo Wade from her wonderful book, Heart Talk. Oftentimes when the world feels chaotic, we begin to feel as if it is somehow inappropriate to have joy. Have your joy. Joy is a form of radical self-care. Joy energises us to take on even the most difficult circumstances. When we have joy, especially in the midst of challenging times, we are saying to the world I will define the current state of the world around me instead of allowing it to define me. Today, regardless of what is happening, empower yourself by embracing your joy. Love that. And now for our nature section. In the garden here in the Northern Hemisphere, as the natural world withdraws through the winter, it may look like there isn't much going on. But there are still subtle changes to notice, and things that we can be doing to help the garden through the winter. The Royal Horticultural Society advises that we use this time to repair lawns, sheds and fences when weather conditions allow to shake snow off trees, shrubs and hedges if you're lucky enough to have snow. Obviously I say'lucky enough' because I'm in a country where we don't have much snow, to earth up tall Brussels sprout stems to support them, to insulate garden taps and exposed pipes to stop them freezing, and to bring in Christmas bulbs for flowering. For those of you in the southern hemisphere, I really recommend following Byron Smith and Tess Robinson, who are authors of the lovely book Slow Down and Grow Something. They're@Urbangrowers on Instagram and they tend to track the seasons in the southern hemisphere really beautifully with their posts about gardening. And so for this week's get ahead tips because preparation can make all the difference. I want to encourage you to make a list of people that you'd like to reach out to this year. It's a really good time to do this, you've still got plenty of time to write cards or notes. Reach out to those people if you haven't done so far. If writing lots of cards feels like a lot of work, why not pick just five people that you aren't going to see over Christmas, but you really care about and write them a lovely long Christmas letter or a Christmas card that goes into some detail about your life, about their life, something that it will be really lovely for them to receive. Now's a really good time to make natural decorations as we've been talking about. You can go on a nature walk to find pine cones, shapely twigs and branches, all those kinds of things. If your decorations haven't gone up yet, I know there is a big debate about when the decorations should go up, now's a good time to plan when you're going to get your tree and maybe make arrangements for an afternoon or evening of decorating together. When I was growing up, it was always an evening of mince pies and sherry, that we had to accompany the tree decorations. I wonder what it's like in your house? Also, if you want to invest in a creative career, write a book create a new income stream with an online course next year, this is your last chance to get a huge discount in our annual sale which is on now but it ends soon at doyouloveforlife.com. These are all courses that I teach. They have all been described as life-changing by many participants over the years, and they are all on sale at up to 50% off including the Book Proposal Masterclass which I will be running live again next year, and it's everything you need to know to get a book deal for your non-fiction book idea. All of that is over at dowhatyouloveforlife.com now, but it ends very soon, so don't miss it. And also don't forget that December 10th is Christmas Jumper Day, so you might want to dig yours out of the closet. And that's it for me this week. I hope you have a lovely time nesting, simplifying and beautifying your home for December. I'll be back next week with a special episode all about calm. Don't miss it. You've been listening to The Calm Christmas Podcast with me Beth Kempton. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss any upcoming episodes and tell your friends if you think they'd enjoy it too. For more inspiration and access to a very special free Christmas Care Package, cosy up with a copy of my book, Calm Christmas and Happy New Year: A Little Book of Festive Joy, available now from all good bookshops. For a peek into my perfectly imperfect Christmas preparations, come and find me on Instagram@BethKempton, I would love to hear from you. Until then, wishing you a wonderful week as you dream of your calm Christmas and Happy New Year.