A Rougham Estate Christmas Tale
Find out how the Christmas Festival at Rougham Estate started
Once upon a time…
many years ago, a young Danish woman called Bus found herself celebrating her first Christmas in England. The year was 1948. Earlier that year she had married the future owner of the Rougham Estate who was called Keith.
Bus wondered what to do to make her new home in England as Christmassy as she remembered from all her years in the countryside in Denmark, with the snow falling outside and roaring fires and candlelight within. In Danish the word for this feeling is hygge.
In England at that time, candles were for powercuts and quite hard to find in the numbers used in Denmark, so she had to start planning early to create a Danish Christmas in rural Suffolk. Candles had to brought over from Denmark by friends on visits, but other things could be found closer to home.
What was the main thing that she needed? It was a Christmas tree of course and one that was as tall as the room. Finding a Christmas tree in Rougham at the time was going to be tricky, but they were lucky that they had woods full of trees to choose from.
Bus and Keith would go out into the woods armed with a walking stick and a saw. The stick helped with measuring the tree whilst it was still standing in the wood. Before going out you would test the ceiling height with the stick, so no expensive mistakes were made when in the wood. Trees always look much smaller outside than they actually are when you are looking at them outdoors.
Bus would spot a lovely tree that she felt was just right but Keith, who was a forester, would see it as the key tree to keep in that part of the wood and he would try to direct Bus elsewhere. In the end all would be sorted and a compromise would be reached. The tree was cut down and carried back to the car.
The next problem was that Danish style tree stands did not really exist in England. Most people used a bucket with some bricks to wedge the tree, or they dug the tree up complete with roots and replanted it in the bucket. This was fine for small trees but no good for a tree which was maybe 8 feet high, so a tree stand or ‘foot’ as it is called in Danish, had to be made up from a wooden cross and a hole in the middle.
This ritual would go on year after year as Keith gradually adjusted to the Danish Christmas ways, and Bus adjusted to the English ways too. Slowly it occurred to Bus that other people in England might like a lovely fresh Christmas tree too and so the Rougham Estate started to grow Norway Spruce Christmas trees in their plantations, especially for the Christmas market. In a way, at this moment, the Christmas Festival on the Rougham Estate was launched.
A spot was found to sell the trees down by the Estate Office, perched by the side of the A45 main road, now the A14, and we were in business. For twenty years things carried on much the same until finally Bus and Keith’s son George got involved and could see the potential of those Christmas trees being relocated to a place with more atmosphere; somewhere like the Blackthorpe Barn, which had just been rethatched at that time and was awaiting a new role on the Estate.
Suddenly, after decades of little change, things developed rapidly. A small craft fair was set up and a tiny café to offer visitors something warm and sweet, to keep them going on their Christmas shopping trip. Soon there was no stopping it. Christmas just got bigger every year on the Rougham Estate and it still does, but all the time we should think back to Bus and her Christmas vision from her own Danish childhood and her desire to bring a bit of that over to rural Suffolk.
Christmas Quick Links
