She Got Sick of Snowmen in 38 Degrees. So She Spent 18 Years Bending the Opposite Out of Gold Wire. Now Her Last Batch is Going on Sale at a Disount.
Close to two thousand of them, all out of one rented shed outside Bendigo, and Lyn Carmody had no plans to stop. The building sold in August and her lease runs out at the end of February. She is keeping the bench — what ends with the building is the business.
Lyn Carmody has a theory about Australian Christmas that she has been testing on strangers across a trestle table for twenty-nine years, and it goes like this: the tree is in the wrong room.
"It's inside, in the cool, in the corner, with the blinds half down," she says. "And where is everybody? Out the back. At the table. For about six hours." She holds up one of her trees by the base. "So what's on that table? Salad bowls, a fan, and a net over the ham. Nothing that says Christmas. The decorations are all in the room nobody's in."
A branch in a jug, on the verandah
The idea isn't hers. It's her grandmother's, and it came from not having much.
"She never had a tree. Wouldn't have one in the house, too hot, too much carry-on. What she had was a bare branch in a jug, out on the verandah, with bits of cut glass hung off it." Lyn's hands go up, miming the shape. "And about seven o'clock the light goes flat and comes in sideways under the roof, and that thing would just go off. Absolutely go off. Meanwhile there's a proper tree in somebody else's lounge room that nobody's looked at since lunch."
Lyn started out doing wire jewellery — earrings, brooches, the usual market table. She has sold at Bendigo and Castlemaine for twenty-nine years, the same two stalls, every weekend she could manage; for the last several years she's posted them out as well, to people who turned up at the stall once and then wanted another one for a daughter in Perth. Eighteen Christmases ago she tried bending her grandmother's branch out of wire, so the drops would hang the way they hang off a real one. Close to two thousand of them since, all out of one rented shed on the edge of town — the back bay of an old engineering building, a roller door that sticks, no insulation, and a yard full of dry grass and one gum tree.
What she was actually trying to get rid of
The branch was the memory. What made her build one was the shopping.
"I went in for a box of hooks one year and there it all was. Snowmen. Frosted pine. Spray-on frost, in a can, in Bendigo, in December." She reports this the way other people report a traffic accident. "Somebody had shipped that halfway round the world so we could put a cold Christmas in a hot house. And we all buy it, year in, year out. Same four things, same red and green, and every one of them is about weather we haven't got."
So she set out to make the opposite, and the rule she wrote for herself was subtraction. No green. No snow, no frost, nothing pretending at cold. No red. Nothing printed, nothing moulded, nothing that would look dated in four years. What was left was a shape, some light and eighteen faceted drops — and the shape was already waiting on her grandmother's verandah.
"Gold, because that's what the light actually does here at seven o'clock. Clear drops, because they haven't got a colour of their own — they just take whatever's in the room. And open, so you can see straight through it. A proper tree is a wall. This is a shape with air in it." She shrugs. "It's less. That's the whole point of it. Everything about Christmas here is already too much by two in the afternoon."
Then, in August, the building sold
The new owners are putting up storage units. Lyn says that's fair enough and means it; the roof is tin and in February the shed is genuinely unbearable by eleven in the morning. Her lease runs to the end of February. After that the key goes back.
Everyone has told her to find another shed.
"I know. There's bays going at the old saleyards, there's a bloke at Epsom who'd rent me half his. My daughter's offered me her carport." She counts them off, then stops. "I'm sixty-seven. I could spend a year looking at sheds and carting that bench across town, and then be sixty-eight and still doing December. Or I can take the hint."
She took the hint. This is the last batch she's making to sell.
She would like that handled without any fuss. "My hands are sixty-seven and there's nothing wrong with them. They'll be bending wire for years yet. Nobody's pushed me out and nothing's gone wrong with me — a building changed hands, which buildings do, and I had a look at what was on the other side of it." She laughs. "And I'm not loading that van at four in the morning again, and I'm not standing in a car park in the middle of December in thirty-five degrees. I've done it. It was good. I'm done."
The bench is coming home to the back room. The forms are coming with it. She'll go on making them for her daughters, for the grandkids, for the woman who's had the stall next to hers since 2004 — at whatever pace she feels like, in a year with no December deadline in it. "I'll still be at it in July with the door open," she says. "I just won't be counting them into boxes."
260 trees left — everything on the shelves of a shed she hands back at the end of February. There is no next batch.
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What she actually does to one
Lyn is blunt about this and would rather say it herself than have it dressed up.
She buys the wire, the acrylic drops, the micro-LED strand and the base. Everything after that is the bench: the gold-coloured wire is bent by hand into its spiral, turn by turn, on the same forms she's used since the first batch. The light strand is wound along the inside of that spiral, so the bulbs sit behind the drops rather than in front of them — thirty years of market tables have taught her that this is the difference between something that glitters and something that just glows. Then eighteen faceted acrylic drops go on one at a time, hung so no two sit at the same height on the same turn. The star goes on last.
The drops are acrylic, not glass, and Lyn will tell you she prefers it that way. "Nan's were glass and they were lethal. One went on the tiles every single year." She shrugs. "A grandkid belts this one off the table and you pick it up. That's the right choice for a thing that lives outside on a table with twelve people around it."
It runs on three AA batteries in the base, and that isn't a shortcut either — it's the entire reason it works where it works.
"There's no power point on the verandah where you want it. There's never a power point where you want it. And I'm not having a cord across a step with everyone's thongs going past." So it goes where the people are: out to the table before lunch, back to the kitchen windowsill after, inside if the wind gets up in the evening. You pick it up and you carry it.
Christmas here doesn't look like the catalogue
Ask Lyn why she thinks these sell the way they do and she comes straight back to the light.
"What we've got here is light. Hours and hours of it, and then that good flat gold hour at the end of the day, when everyone's still out the back and nobody wants to go in." She turns the tree so the drops swing. "Eighteen bits of cut acrylic in that hour will do more than a whole shop full of tinsel. You just have to put the thing where the people are, and that is not the lounge room."
And she will tell you where to put them, unprompted and in order: the long table first, then the kitchen sill, then the front room, then one in the post to a sister interstate.
From people who already have one
Bought mine off Lyn at Castlemaine three years ago and it has sat in the middle of the table every Christmas lunch since. My brother-in-law, who notices nothing, asked where it came from. That's the review.
Robyn K., Castlemaine, VIC
We're in a unit now with a balcony and not much room for a big tree, which I thought I'd mind. This goes out on the balcony table and about eight o'clock the drops throw little bits of light around. Looks far more expensive than it was.
Margaret H., Geelong, VIC
Posted one to my sister in Perth and had to get a second because she wouldn't give it back when she visited. The switch underneath has been flicked by two grandchildren roughly four hundred times and it's still going.
Dawn P., Echuca, VIC
The thing I didn't expect is the weight of it when you pick it up. It doesn't feel like the stuff that comes three to a box from the big shops. You can tell someone sat and bent it.
Ian M., Ballarat, VIC
The details
- Height: 31.5cm
- Width: 14.5cm at the widest turn; the base is narrower
- Drops: 18 faceted acrylic drops, hung individually, plus the star on top
- Light: warm white micro-LEDs, wound inside the spiral
- Power: 3 x AA batteries in the base, push switch — no cord, no power point
- Made: wire bent, light wound, drops and star hung by hand in Bendigo, Victoria
If it turns up and it isn't what you pictured, send it back within 30 days for a full refund. This is on top of your rights under the Australian Consumer Law, which nothing here takes away. Marlow Market Co. handles every order, return and question — Lyn handles the bench.
260 left, and then the shed is empty
This is everything that's in there: the last batch she built, plus what was still on the shelves from the years before it. There's no reorder, because there's no next December in that shed and, after the end of February, no shed. Whatever doesn't sell goes in the back of the car along with the bench.
After that the trees go to her daughters, her grandkids and whoever else she decides on, at whatever pace suits her.
The tree inside can stay where it is. This one goes where everybody's sitting.
This page is a paid advertisement presented by Marlow Market Co. and is not independent editorial content. Customer comments reflect individual experiences. Stock figures are accurate at the time of publication and change as orders are placed. Drops are faceted acrylic, not glass. Batteries are not included. Our returns policy is in addition to your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.