Light Up Leith is great but you can stick your Christmas window decals - Susan Morrison

Christmas window decal

Here in Leith a young woman called Hannah put out the cry for Leithers to decorate their windows.

Volunteers were given a number, like an advent calendar. Folk walked about the Republic to spot the decorated numbered windows. This is the last year and we are number 17.

No idea why I volunteer for these things. I’m not the artistic type. At school I made a sort of chunky little pottery bowl thing out of brown clay and left it on the kitchen table for my mother to admire.

She saw it, screamed and fetched rubber gloves, back copies of the Glasgow Herald and a gallon of Domestos. She thought the dog had poo-ed on the table. We didn’t even have a dog.

So, given my lack of artistic ability, I thought I’d get one of those window decals. They look well swish. The one that caught my fancy was a swirly abstract Christmas tree.

On the screen, it looked just the job. ‘Easy to apply’, it said. Whack that in the window and we have ourselves a Number 17 to delight Leith’s Lightspotters.

Excellent. Press ‘Buy Now’. Arrived most swiftly. And that’s when the trouble started.

It’s a plastic thing. Willing to bet it won’t recycle. Waiting for an angry call from Greta Thunberg now.

It reeks to high heaven. The fumes made my eyes water, which made it all the more difficult to read the tiny instructions, which had clearly been translated into English by a bad-tempered AI machine, and made little sense.

Instructions were required because it came in bits, something that wasn’t made entirely clear on the internet. Well, it might have been, but I didn’t notice.

Essentially, it’s three huge sheets of thick clingfilm. The backing must be peeled away.

By ‘‘peeled’ they meant ‘clawed’. The sharp corners stabbed under my fingernails. Screaming started fairly quickly, followed by festive swearing.

Once that battle was won and the design liberated, the sheets made like budget-hotel cheapo shower curtains and wrapped around me like that drunk at the Office Christmas party.

Naturally bits of it stuck to other bits. The abstract swirly pattern I so admired made it difficult to work out which bit went where.

Worse was to come. Each of the three sections must precisely match. Remember when they fitted that last section into the new Forth Bridge, and we all wondered what would happen if they found out one side was a couple of inches out?

Yes, well, that’s how I felt, balancing on my new kitchen worktops attempting to make the stars on the tree literally align.

And I had to make it face the right way round. The top sections mutinously rolled over my head, choking fumes and all.

Easy to apply, my big bahookie.

My abstract Christmas Window decal is, of course, made in China, like virtually all our fiddly, exasperating ‘easy to assemble’ decorations.

I sense a sinister plan here. Should they ever invade, it will be at Christmas, when we’re all fighting the fumes, wrestling the plastic and reading the instructions. We’ll barely notice.

But I must admit, the window does look nice.