My first thrill of ‘Christmas feeling’ usually comes around late October. It is always inspired by someone far better prepared than me, someone who has already got round to buying their Christmas presents, someone who has decided to give someone an olive tree adoption, someone who has asked for ‘Happy Christmas’ to be lovingly inscribed in the message card. The heady childish thrill of Christmas thoughts and the smell of imaginary mince pies and fires and decorating trees and aching anticipation is usually coupled with a very grown up non-thrill of ‘oh my god how come some people are so organised?’ Personally I can barely think about Christmas shopping until the shop assistants are looking hopefully at their watches towards the tail end of 24th December.
Those message cards nowadays teleport me to Nudo’s very first Christmas. The company had only been going for a few months and we had just, rather ineffectively, done our first olive harvest. I think the total number of trees we’d adopted stood at around 14 and we knew the names, and birthdays, of all the foster parents. Friends and family are the saviours of early hopes in a new business. Anyway we were approaching Christmas and somehow hoped that ‘real’ customers might somehow, magically start emerging in force. But how would anyone find us? How would anyone in the ‘real world’ even know we existed? Is this something Father Christmas asks himself?
The answer, at least as we saw it, was Christmas gift guides- you know those lists in newspapers (so old school!) that give you great ideas for last minute presents? We were prepared to do anything, including as it turned out, selling our children, to get in one. I exaggerate of course. But I do remember in our desperation, sending a photograph of one year old Rosie with a sorry expression and the words ‘What kind of Christmas?’ with the press release that we sent to friends to scatter to anyone they knew who’d ever even had a paper round.
Emotional blackmail is a very effective tool (a fact soon to be confirmed, were confirmation needed, by spending Christmas in the company of Italian mammas). By the miracle of modern communication, that press release made it into the hands of someone who knew someone who knew someone who was compiling no less an opus than the Independent’s guide to ‘Great Christmas presents for men’ in the Independent. Those Christmas gift guides really do make a difference. People knew we existed. People adopted our olive trees. And Rosie had a lovely first Nudo Christmas.
