The Sherlockian Christmas Tree

In last month's column, you may recall that I wondered en passant why Sherlockians didn't name their children from the Canon. Well, guess what? Sherlockians do name their children from the Canon.  Peter Blau informed me that there  is  a William Sherlock,  a Conan  (well,  that is  from the title page), a Mycroft, and probably others. I really should have expected it, because Sherlockians do tend to manifest their devotion in an amazing number of ways.

And since it is the holiday season, I'm very sure a lot of  Sherlockians  are  decorating  their  Christmas  trees accordingly. I know many long-time Hansoms have their stuffed felt Sherlocks that Sue Kirkwood was good enough to bestow upon us at a banquet years ago.

For the ultimate Sherlockian Christmas tree, however, a person really has to go to that place where it is always 1895, via the country of the mind. So this year, I went out with a few friends and found a fir in that valley on the road to Baskerville Hall. We cut it down and took it back to the Dangling Prussian, the notorious inn on Montague Street.

For  those  of  you  who  haven't  heard,  or  may  have forgotten, the Prussian is a bar in London where the year is always  1895,  and  my  friends  of  the  Dangling  Prussian Sherlockian Amateur Press Association are to be found every
other month. "Real" people mingle with "fictional" people, and the Sherlockian Canon is never really over. It seemed the perfect place to put up a tree.

I sent some of the regulars out scouting up things to decorate it with, using a list my computer had generated for me. In order to be the ultimate Sherlockian Christmas tree, it had to be decorated using only objects  found in the chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. And since Watson never makes mention of  such common modern tree  decor as tinsel  and garland, it proved to be something of a challenge.

The first step in decorating any tree is to put on the string of lights, and this tree was no different. A series of small buildings was to provide the lights for this tree, the twinkling lights of the great city of Agra. This being a proper Victorian tree,  the  lights  shining  out  of  those
buildings couldn't come from electric bulbs, either.

We had to use candles. We got candles from mantelpieces all over England:  Briarbrae,  Abbey Grange,  a cottage  in Norbury. We got a whole bunch of candles from Baskerville Hall. Inspector Lestrade even provided a couple. The Canon is a great place to pick up candles. You don't even have to resort to getting them from single candle references.

Next came the decorations and ornaments.

For decorations the tree was covered with medals  and ribbons: the decorations of Sir James Walter. As a famous government expert who had grown old and gray in the service of the Crown, Walter provided an ample supply of decorations, which helped make up for the fact that we only found three ornaments for the tree.

The first ornament was a square-pierced Chinese coin from Jabez Wilson's watch chain. The second was a plaster cast of Sherlock Holmes's skull. You don't really want to know how we got that one, and you really don't want to know how we got the third ornament for our tree:  John Ranee's  head.  The constable wasn't using it for anything else anyway, but some people  are  squeamish  about  decapitation,  especially  at Christmas.

As there were only three ornaments in the Canon,  the fellow we sent to retrieve Jabez Wilson's Chinese coin also came back with the three gilt balls from over Wilson's pawn shop, a nice addition to any tree.

The crowning glory of any tree is, of course, the star or angel on top. As the Canon contained far too many angels to choose from (thanks to Watson's great love of women), we settled for a star. A few people commented that our star looked an awful lot like a ship, and there was good reason for that ... it was the barque Lone Star.

There aren't any presents under the tree yet, because my computer couldn't distinguish between "presents" the noun and "presents" the verb. The Canon contains a whole lot of verb "presents."  We'll  just  have  to  leave  that  for  Santa Claus.(And if you don't think he's Canonical,  look up my column in issue 88 of P & D to refresh your memory.)