There’s nothing like the joy of returning to – and growing – your collection year after year.

The tree is in place, suitably fluffed and coiffed. The Christmas music is playing. The box of ornaments lies waiting. Gently unfurling tissue paper to greet baubles and trinkets that have been collected over decades brings that warm, fuzzy sense of nostalgia. The hand-painted set from an artisan market, the homemade oddities your children brought home from school (that you can all laugh at now), the glass heirlooms passed down from your grandmother – each decoration retrieved is like turning a page of an old scrapbook filled with memories. Remember when we got this one? Wasn’t it the year that…? Even the new pieces you choose this year will someday be heirlooms themselves. When they’re painstakingly untangled from their boxes, strands of fairy lights illuminate not just the ornaments you’ve carefully looped onto tree branches, but the moments by the crackling fire, loved ones gathered around the tree on Christmas morning, dancing in the living room on New Year’s Eve. The moments that will flood to mind when, next year, you get to repeat the same ritual all over again.