Family Fortunes: ‘Beautiful but useless’ – the unlit Christmas candle that reminds me of my mother’

“Such a beautiful but useless little thing,” my mother said, as she unwrapped the round poinsettia candle. About the size of tennis ball, symmetrically designed with 20 poinsettias painted on its circumference and a wick that protruded stamen-like, from the top. A gold, self-adhesive label on the bottom read: “Handmade in Los Gatos, 1996”.

Too heavy for a tree ornament, she placed it on the mantelpiece between sprigs of berried holly and holy Christmas cards. She never lit it, said it would be a shame to waste it, that she couldn’t bear to see the lovely red and green flowers melt into wax. I was slightly peeved at its redundancy but acquiesced and allowed her enjoy it as a Christmas souvenir of my time in California.

Wrapped in tissue and put away with the crib, it sat on her parlour mantelpiece for the next 12 Christmases, until she died in 2008.

In 1996, I remember buying a variety of handmade candles at an art fair in Los Gatos; the artisan chandlers made their products on site, the artists dipped tiny brushes into pots of red, green and gold liquid and I wrote a piece for a local paper. I compared my Christmas memories of growing up in north Galway to my first Christmas in California.

I reminisced about red candles, the width of the handle of a shovel, about a yard long and how my mother cut them into manageable lengths to decorate the three windows at the front of the house. With her tongue out to the side, her brow and jaw filled with motherly determination, she sliced through the red wax to the wick, cut it with a scissors and continued around the other side.

The previously decorated jam jars would be half-filled with moist sand and pebbles, curled up ivy was twirled around the spout and trailed down the sides. The truncated candles were placed firmly in the sand base, a sprig of holly placed in front of each one, as if it grew there. Various glittering ribbons of tinsel gave the window decorations the finishing touches.

Today, I unpacked our Christmas decorations and the 20-year-old poinsettia candle came out of its tissue again, pristine, like the day I bought it. Still beautiful, never lit, but no longer useless – I put it on my mantelpiece, think of my mother, and write.