My boyfriend and I haven’t been living together very long yet, we only found this apartment about 2 months ago. It’s a small apartment, but it’s just the two of us there. Believe me, that’s a very welcome change after living in a house with 7 housemates (me) or 5 housemates and an overactive labrador (my boyfriend).

We’d agreed that we wouldn’t have a Christmas tree this year, with the apartment being small and us not having a budget to buy decoration after moving in together. We’d just get some stockings to hang over the (fake) fireplace and that would be our Christmas decoration.

Coming home from work on Wednessday I saw some lights in the window. At first I thought they were candles, but they were too high for that. When I opened the door, my boyfriend was welcoming me with a big grin. He’d taken half a day off to surprise me and had gone out to buy lots of Christmas stuff. And not only that, he’d also started putting things up, like lights in the window and even fake snow on the fake mantlepiece. The biggest surprise of all was that he had actually bought a Christmas tree as well!

I was so touched and so excited at the same time by his gesture. He’d already done most of the decoration, but he’d saved the tree, so we could do it together. I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I look at our tree. I have to admit, objectively speaking, it’s not the most beautiful tree in the world. But it’s our tree, our very first tree together, and that makes it more beautiful to me than any decoration could ever do.