One grandmother in the United Kingdom is taking her Christmas spirit to new heights.
Each year, Sylvia Pope of Swansea, South Wales, elaborately decorates her home for the holidays. This season she's using a whopping 2,530 ornaments to completely cover the ceiling in her living room. That’s 766 more ornaments than the last time we caught up with her just three years ago.
And the festive granny shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
“I am off to Prague next week only for a couple days to go to a Christmas market to see if they have any nice ones. Hopefully I will bring home lots of new ones,” Pope, 73, told ABC News. “The time I went to New York on holiday I had to buy another bag just to bring them home. Oh my gosh, it was so fabulous.”
Every ornament, or bauble, as Pope refers to them, has a story. They're handpicked by either herself or her loved ones during their worldly travels.
“The most recent ones friends have brought me are from Dubai and Las Vegas,” she said. “If they think, ‘Oh, Sylvia likes that,’ they’ll bring them back. It’s just nice when people come and say, ‘Look what I’ve got for you,’ and it’s lovely. I always find a place for them.”
Pope begins decorating in mid-September and leaves all of her precious baubles up until March because after all that hard work, “It’s silly to only leave them up for a short while.”
“I do it all myself. I put them up and take them down myself,” she explained. “I don’t have any help at all because I like to wipe them down and wrap them to put them in their boxes. I try to be so careful. But it’s always a special one that I break, and it’s a shame. You can’t always get another one.”
There was one year when Pope left her precious baubles hanging on the ceiling all year round because she was recovering from foot surgery. “But I don’t like to do that because they get really dusty," she said.
Finding each ornament’s perfect placement is no easy task, either.
“I do take my time, I don’t rush it,” she said. “I put some up and sit down to look at them to make sure I like how they’re placed. I don’t like one bauble hiding another bauble.”
Pope’s home has become a bit of a local attraction as word has spread of her beautifully adorned ceiling.
“A lot of people do come, the delivery men and everyone, they do come and ask if they can have a look,” she said. “Because it’s been in the paper, a bar in Manchester asked if I could assist them as well to do their ceiling. I was helping this guy Stuart put them up.”
And it takes no less than 42 boxes to pack up the thousands of ornaments.
Pope does admit that she feels her quirky tradition is “getting a bit old hat now” after doing it since 1999, but that’s why this year “it was time for something different.”
That’s when she decided to create her beloved “bauble tree.”
"When I went to Malta for Christmas last year, my son lives there and I stayed with him," she said. "Out in the street in Valletta there was a bauble tree and I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so big and I thought, ‘That’s fantastic.’ So what I’ve done is I bought a cone-shaped thing with lights inside and I stuffed a load of colored glass balls into it, but they are see-through so the light shines through. I love it. I think it’s brilliant.”
