The shops are full of decorations, gift ideas and jolly music. Love it or hate it, you can't get away from the run-up to Christmas - it's right there in your face and seems to start earlier every year.

If you hanker for a quieter, more natural Christmas, you only have to look around you in the countryside, where you'll find many of the things we have come to associate with the Yuletide season - Nature's Christmas - with far less fuss, very little noise and just as much sparkle and style. Reg's Meadow holds many of Nature's Christmas decorations and all except four of the photos in this page were taken in the meadow. Photos of birch tree bark, red leaves, robin's nest and robin on a seat were taken elsewhere in the Hawk Conservancy grounds.

Nature begins to prepare for Christmas early, making hanging garlands of White Bryony leaves in September and October, decorated with green, orange and red berries. The leaves die away to leave the deep red berries on the stems, as bright as any garlands you will hang up in your house this Christmas.

Jingle Bells

There are many shapes and designs which have become accepted as part and parcel of the modern Christmas and these can be seen in almost every home and on countless greetings cards over the festive season. The shapely seed heads and pods from the meadow flowers are used as Nature’s dried decorations, such as bells, stars and lanterns, and as the weather grows colder in December, fallen leaves from the hedgerows are frosted white and their edges painted with silver glitter for that extra bit of Christmas sparkle.

Now that the colder days of December have arrived, things get even more wintry and seasonal in the meadow. Preparations for Christmas are speeding up. First comes the Christmas tree, fresh and sparkling with frost. There are some genuine coniferous trees in the copses, such as Larch and Scots Pine, and other similar trees elsewhere in the Hawk Conservancy, but you can find tiny imitation Christmas trees out there in the meadow too. This is a Yarrow leaf, looking for all the world like a miniature tree ready to be hung with colourful decorations such as clear crystal icicles or bright red, pink and orange baubles.

Christmas Tree Decorations

The decorations are all out there too, even if they are a bit too large for our little imitation tree! Although our hedgerows look bare and empty for winter, the colours of Spindle berry cases and the fat, juicy Rose hips remain on the branches long into the winter, providing welcome food as well as a bit of Christmas colour and cheer for over-wintering birds and small mammals.

Gift Wrap		Curling Ribbon

Final preparations for the season are now under way. Christmas presents have all been bought and just need wrapping, labelling and decorating.

It’s Christmas Eve - the cake is iced and ready, table napkins are folded into decorative shapes and the house is bright with poinsettias.

Cake Frill	Napkin Folding	Poinsettia

All that's needed now is snow, Santa and his reindeer to make it a truly perfect Christmas!

Snowflakes	Snowballs

There hasn’t been very much snow seen at the Hawk Conservancy in recent years, but the meadow can provide passable imitations in some of its plants. The delicate white fronds of Traveller’s Joy seed heads have the fragility and dainty shape of snowflakes, while ivy flower clusters seen against the dark green of their leaves make tiny snowballs. The meadow has its white Christmas.

Reindeer	Santa's Beard

As for Santa and those reindeer - as you can see, the reindeer are out there, hiding among the moss in one of the copses, in the shape of a little Stag's Horn Fungus, waiting to be called on when it's time to pull the sleigh.....and Santa? Well, maybe he's out there in the meadow too - after all, another name for Traveller's Joy is "Old Man's Beard".....!

You can’t have Christmas without seeing robins. They are one of the most popular symbols of our modern Christmas festivities and are found everywhere, on Christmas trees, cards and wrapping paper. They have long been one of our favourite birds, not only at Christmas but all year round. Robins have round, dumpy bodies and long legs and their slender bills show that they are insect feeders, though they also eat fruit and seeds in winter. They are most easily recognised by their orangey-red face and breast, a colour which has been likened to that of Heinz tomato soup! Male and female birds are similar in size and have the same colouring, so they cannot easily be told apart by their appearance.

The robin is a member of the Thrush family and is found throughout Europe. British robins usually stay here all year round, but those from northern and north-eastern parts of Europe, where winters are very cold, often migrate through Britain as far south as north Africa - some of these migrating birds over-winter in Britain. There are around 5.9 million robins in Britain.

Alternative names include redbreast, ruddock, robin ruck and ploughman’s bird. The name “ruddock” means “little red bird” and the scientific name is also derived from its colour. Erithacus comes from the Greek, meaning “red-rumped”, while rubecula comes from Latin and means “little red one”.

Robins are known to gardeners as friendly little companions who follow them around, perching on garden implements and waiting for worms and insects in the newly-disturbed soil. They build neat little nests in shrubs and bushes, but also in unusual places around the garden, such as old kettles, buckets, flowerpots and boots. A robin nested in one of the Hawk Conservancy tool sheds, simply using an old box on one of the shelves for its home. One egg did not hatch and can still be seen in the nest after the robins had left. The eggs are tiny, only measuring 20mm x 15mm. The average size of a clutch of eggs is 4-5 and these are incubated by the female for 14-15 days. The young fledge and leave the nest after 13-16 days and become independent soon after that. There are often two broods a year and occasionally three. Adult robins weigh around 18 grams and despite their small size are feisty and very territorial. Both male and female birds hold individual territories outside the breeding season and defend them fiercely. The pretty-sounding song of the robin is actually a statement of defence of territorial boundaries and they will fight anything resembling another robin which crosses those boundaries! Robins can often be heard singing at night and their song is sometimes mistaken for that of a nightingale. They are believed to sing after dark mostly in noisy urban environments, where the daytime noise masks their important territorial sound signals. Urban areas are also quite light at night, encouraging the birds to remain active and keep singing.

Robins appear frequently in folklore and are often associated with bad luck rather than good. A robin pecking at your window was thought to foretell a death in the house and harming one would bring bad luck - if you killed a bird your hands wouldn’t stop shaking and if you broke its eggs, something valuable of your own would get broken. When seeing your first robin of the new year you should make a wish before it flew away, or bad luck would follow you all year.

One story says that the robin got its red breast when one came to Jesus during his crucifixion and tried to pull the thorns from the crown on his head. The red colour was believed to be the blood of Jesus on the bird’s feathers or the robin’s own blood when it was pierced by one of the thorns. Another legend says that the robin brought fire to Man and the red shows where its breast feathers caught fire while carrying it.

It was said that you could forecast the weather by watching where a robin sat to sing. If it sat at the top of a bush, warm weather would follow, while the middle of a bush foretold rain.

One suggested explanation for the bird’s association with Christmas is that the first postmen wore red waistcoats and were popularly known as “Robins”, leading to the popularity of robins on cards. Early Christmas cards often showed robins holding letters in their beaks.

Whatever the reasons and the stories, these fat, jolly, friendly-looking little birds are here to stay, both in the gardens of Britain, where they are thriving and as a much-loved symbol of the Christmas season.