Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things begins from the premise that our relationship to things is not opposed to relationship with people but rather that “the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationship are with people.” Visiting the Clarke family at Christian (as summed up by the TLS reviewer), Miller estimates that they have “800 separate decorations for the tree, some handed down, some given, some newly bought, but all with a memory attached. In personal terms, Miller reckoned, these objects represented ‘a century of devotion.’”