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DETAILS
SIZE
A6 (folded)
INSIDE
Blank for your message
PAPER
Fine Italian paper, 300gsm, softly hammered texture
Matching off-white envelope with lined interior
ENVELOPE
MADE IN
The UK
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FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING ON ALL ORDERS
Orders are usually shipped within 2–3 working days, and international shipping is available.
Please note that customers may be subject to customs duties in their respective countries, which are their responsibility.
You can also pay directly via TWINT.
You’re also welcome to pick up your order directly from the studio in Meilen. Important: Please call or text ahead to arrange a pickup time. This ensures I’m at the studio and have your order prepared.
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Handle with clean, dry hands to keep the print looking its best. Store flat in a drawer. Keep away from direct sunlight to preserve the colours over time.
Read more here
PAY WITH TWINT
It has begun to snow again, softly, the small flakes settling on a shoulder without wetting it. The stalls have lit their lamps against the four o'clock dark. Somewhere behind us a new pot of mulled wine is going on, red and clove-dark, and the lane smells of orange peel, cinnamon and Zimtsterne.
It is into this scene that we invite you to step with our Christmas Market paper.
Our journey begins with the fruit of the season: the orange. Raw, the peel is oily and sharp, releasing a fine spray when pressed. Dried slowly above a stove, the flesh turns amber and translucent, thin enough that the lamp behind it shows straight through the segments. That is why they are hung in windows. The fruit stops being a thing you eat and becomes a thing you look through.
The next stall keeps its spices all in one basket: cinnamon, star anise, cardamom. The cinnamon we drew as the quill, rolled tight, because that shape remembers the tree, the bark cut from young shoots and left to curl as it dries. Beside it the star anise, split open, still holding its seed and the cardamom pods, pale and papery, still rattling.
Everyone's favourite stall stands at the turn of the lane, past the knitted hats and the ice rink. It sells only Zimtsterne, from a recipe handed down four generations and never written out. The daughter learned it at her grandmother's elbow, by hand and by weight, and she will not say what is in it. The stars come out warm, the icing set in a soft white cap that stops short of the points, so the dark spiced edge shows underneath. No two are quite the same. Some lean, some have a short arm. There are hazelnut ones and almond ones, and a third with orange zest grated into the dough.
Christmas Market is made for the gift you hand over in a warm room. Hold it, and you can almost feel the cold coming off your coat, and catch, just faintly, the scent of orange and a new batch of Zimtsterne on the air.
PAIRS WELL WITH
PAY WITH TWINT
Come out early, before the light does much. Snow changes what a garden sounds like. Footsteps go dull, the birds thin to a robin somewhere in the hedge, and a branch cracks as it lets go of its load. Everything else has stopped. Underfoot the path is set hard, ice white in the wheel ruts where the air was trapped, giving with a sound like thin glass.
The borders were left standing on purpose, and the frost has found every one of them. Seedheads on the phlomis, whorled up their stems like small clenched fists, each one furred white. Miscanthus arching over the path, holding its shape all winter, gone the colour of straw. Echinacea keeping its cones above the snow, brown and bristling, the last petals faded through to grey. Box clipped into globes, packed hard enough that the snow sits on top and does not sink in. Low in the bed the hellebore has come up, nodding, cream and green, the only thing here in flower.
At the turn of the path stands the eucalyptus, leaves round as coins and silvered along the edge. We take a short branch. Press one between finger and thumb and the oil comes up sharp and camphorous, the only strong scent in the whole garden.
Beyond it the apple tree, and in its crown the mistletoe, growing in a ball, leaves in pairs like small green paddles, forking and forking again on stems that never turn woody. Its berries come in at midwinter, the colour of milk. We cut a sprig from the branch, never the ground, the way the old healers did at the turning of the year.
Against the south wall, out of the wind, a magnolia holds one flower open in defiance of the month. Waxen, faintly of lemon, shut again by three. That comes with us as well.
Then the sun clears the hedge and the whole garden lights at once. Every stem and rimed leaf throws it back, and for a quarter of an hour the beds glitter as if scattered with grain. We gathered that too, in the gold sparkle running through the paper.
By then the cold has got through your gloves. Indoors the mint and lemon balm you left to draw before going out are finally ready. The flowers go into a vase on the sill, and the tea is poured, and outside the garden goes on glittering until the sun moves off it.
PAY WITH TWINT
Long before he had a sleigh, he had a pocket full of oranges.
The old stories say Nicholas, a bishop in Myra, once dropped three bags of gold through a poor man’s window by night, so his daughters could marry. Over the centuries the gold became oranges, tucked into the toes of stockings, and the bishop grew a white beard, a red coat, and a laugh you could hear three rooftops away.
But oranges alone no longer fill his sack. So for weeks before Christmas, he makes sweets in his own kitchen. He boils sugar in copper pans until it turns amber, pulls it on a hook until it shines like silk, and twists in a stripe of cherry red. Each one he bends into a cane, shaped like the bishop’s staff he once carried. Beside them, meringues dry by the stove in rose and pistachio, blood orange slices are dipped in dark chocolate, and pink gumballs rattle into glass jars.
On Christmas Eve he sets out with all of it. No lane is too narrow, no village too far. Down chimneys, past sleeping cats, around the painted nutcracker standing guard on the sideboard. He fills stockings to the brim, leaves an orange in every toe, and is gone before the embers settle… almost. Listen closely and you might catch it, drifting back over the roofs.
Ho ho ho.
Write a few lines and send this card ahead of him, a small herald in the winter post. Somewhere above the rooftops, he is already on his way.