A few years back, we discovered our youngest son is red/green colour blind . From then on, things made sense, how he’d struggled to learn colours when we tried to teach him. Why he’d always draw in black or dark blue. and why he’d tell me his favourite colour was black.
It came as no big surprise to my wife,, after all my wife’s brother is colour blind, as was my wife’s granddad was colour blind, it runs in her side of the family. Though hearing those words made me a bit sad. Had he ever felt frustrated, confused, even stupid because he couldn’t see colours the same as us and we didn’t know. That thought and one other upset me and my wife greatly at the time.
From then on we started to look at the world a little different, putting more thought into the colours we picked when buying him clothes, the flowers colours we picked for he garden The other thought was Christmas!
There we were every year, decorating a green tree in red and gold baubles, acting like it was the prettiest thing in the world. He must have thought the world had gone mad.
Look at the below image, the left is how the tree looked to us, a green tree with red and gold decorations, and red curtains to make things worse! The right is how it would have looked for our red/green colour blind son.
There’s no traditional red, green and gold. A colour blind Christmas is muddy brown. At best, you could say it’s a chocolate brown (or at worst it looks like sh*t).
In spring after we discovered my son was red green colour blind, we set about injecting some colour into our garden to make the great outdoors look more, well, great. Later that year we decided it’s time to do the same to Christmas.
So, the red baubles are heading for the charity shop, they have been replaced with glittery silver (seriously, there’s so much glitter I think we’ll still be finding it at Easter). Our complete lack of tinsel has been addressed, we now have lots of blue tinsel. We’ve kept some of the gold decorations since there’s some glittery ones that sparkle nicely in our new lights. Yes, new lights as well. Our tree is pre-lit because I’d always get in a tangle (and a grump!) wrestling with a string of lights. But the lights on it don’t flash or twinkle or do anything. Boring! So much deep breathing (and tongue biting) later and we have 240 multifunction lights on it.
One of the below the left image shows how the tree looks to someone with normal vision, the right side is how it looks to our red green colour blind sine. Hard to tell the difference isn’t it? From now on Christmas days will be merry and bright and inclusive for the whole family!
