When 25 Women & a Civil Engineer Decide To Build an 18-Foot Christmas Crochet Tree Together |
An eighteen-foot Christmas tree stands inside the Museum of Goa this season, and it does something most festive installations don’t: it avoids plastic entirely. No PVC needles. No synthetic tinsel. No imported ornaments. What gives it presence instead is yarn, crocheted into more than a thousand individual pieces and stitched together by hand.
The tree exists because a group of people decided to make it exist. Twenty-five women from across Goa crocheted every component. When the pieces were ready but had nothing to hold them up, a civil engineer stepped in and built the metal frame, donating the structure and the logistics needed to move it. The museum’s curator made space for it, backed the idea, and allowed the work to unfold without compressing it into a spectacle.
The women did not outsource labour. The engineer did not bill for materials. The museum did not treat the tree as a prop. Each part depended on the other, and none of them functioned without trust.
The result is a Christmas tree that glows without shine. Its surface is uneven by design because it was made in different homes, by different hands, over weeks. The absence of plastic doesn’t make it minimal; it makes the work visible. You can see where one piece ends and another begins. You can see time in it.
And that alignment, between women whose work is often kept indoors, a civil engineer who chose to support without conditions, and a museum willing to hold the outcome, is what holds the tree up.
Someone near you says it reminds them of their grandmother’s house. Someone else runs their fingers lightly across a patch, as if checking whether it’s real.
It is.
This is Goa’s first large-scale crochet Christmas tree, an installation created by The Crochet Collective, Goa, led by Sheena Pereira, Sharmila Majumdar, and Sophy V Sivaraman, and made by more than twenty-five women who came together over three months to build something none of them could have made alone.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this big,” Sophy admits, laughing. “But then again, none of us knew how big it would become.”
The idea didn’t start with Christmas. It started with crochet.
Sophy had never crocheted before this year. On her grandson’s first birthday, she decided she wanted to make him a blanket. She asked around in Goa and was introduced to Sheena Pereira, who was part of an online crochet group formed during the COVID years, a way for women to stay connected when everything else had shut down.
“Sheena told me she had a dream,” Sophy recalls.........