We return to Christmas trees this week, but not the ones you can decorate, but ones that decorate you.
There’s a big trend in the UK of wearing tasteless knitted sweaters and jumpers with terrible or over-the-top seasonal designs a lot of them including Christmas trees. Even Tom Daley has been known to design and wear his own awful Christmas jumpers. But what if you want to wear something that is a bit more subtle?
How about brooches. There’s a lot on sale, but let’s keep with the Christmas tree motif.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records the person who holds the record for owning the most Christmas tree brooches is an openly gay man called Adam Wide (b.1953).
Adam is no stranger to Guinness World Records. From 2009 to 2012 he was its Creative Director, responsible for expanding the organisation’s live record breaking attempts, including using social media. On top of that, after he left Guinness, Adam co-founded a gay rugby club called the Berlin Bruisers who, in 2020, broke the Guinness World Record for the most passes thrown per minute (237 in 3 minutes). However, this record has since been broken by other teams.
Little did I know before researching this that I had actually seen Adam Wide before. In the late 1980s he formed as half of a comedy double act with Babs Sutton called Clarence and Joy Pickles. They performed regularly on a popular Saturday night show I watched called “The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow”.
Adam has been collecting Christmas tree brooches since 1984. In another Christmas-related fact, he bought his first brooch in Copenhagen when he was playing as the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Robin Hood-based pantomime called “Big Sis In Watching You” with the London Toast Theatre, am English language theatre company who perform all over Europe. Not only does this give him a connection to my city of residence (and, more personally, to a former real Sheriff of Nottingham) but his father was born in Nottingham. It’s all worthy of forming part of a future “80 Gays Around the World” series.
Just after the Berlin Bruisers were founded Adam commissioned Mark Mercy, the original designer at Stanley Hagler NYC jewellers to design a Christmas tree brooch in purple and white, the team colours of the Bruisers.
Adam first set the world record with his brooch collection in 2008, when he had 542. Since then the record has been broken several times, even by Adam himself five times. When he was last recorded as the Guinness World Record holder in 2021 his collection contained 7,921 brooches.
Such a massive collection needs to be displayed, and that is exactly what happened in 2023 when Chatsworth House, the famous stately home of the Duke of Devonshire, turned them into a “Christmas Forest”. By then, Adam’s collection had increased to 8,250, breaking his own record again.
You can see Chatsworth’s Christmas Forest in this video in which Adam takes us on a tour of the glittering display.
Next week we’ll look at other glittering decorations that are directly associated with Christmas trees, and their surprising origin legend in a popular Hallowe’en item.
