Juanita Watters' parents were luckier than most of their neighbours when bushfires roared out of the forest toward Cobargo on New Year's Eve.
The fires destroyed storage buildings on their property and ravaged their painstakingly-planted arboretum. But it spared the house.
When she visited to help clean up the property, Ms Watters found the family's collection of Christmas decorations inside a burnt storage trunk.
They had been packed away just days before the fire hit.
"Mum and dad's decorations had come from both of their parents' trees," Ms Watters said.
"There were things I had created at preschool, things we'd collected on our travels, and things their grandchildren had made for them.
"Some of my grandmother's decorations would have been 80 or more years old."
For Ms Watters the charred treasures inside the trunk held a grim fascination — a wooden nativity scene baked as brittle as charcoal, melted antique Christmas lights, a copy of A Christmas Carol still readable before it crumbled in her hands.
When she shared photos of the burnt decorations, one of her friends, Bianca Brownlow, made the suggestion that they put the call out for people to hand-craft Christmas decorations for the many families who had lost everything in the New Year's Eve blaze.
They started the #remakechristmas Facebook group which quickly grew to over 700 members across Australia and around the world.
"I think when we started the project, I pictured people would make one or two decorations and send them in," Ms Watters said.
"But people were making a whole box of amazingly intricate things that must have taken so much time.
"I really think people have poured a lot of love and care into the creating they've done."
Preparing for a tough Christmas
For many people in the Cobargo and Quaama communities, exhaustion is setting in after a year of upheaval.
"Everyone's in a varied state of progress," said Veronica Abbott from the Quaama Relief Centre.
"Some people are unable to come to the point where they can decide to sell their property or rebuild, others have gotten on with it quickly, and we do have one or two people who have moved into a new build. A lot of people are in between."
The approach of Christmas, so close to the first anniversary of the bushfire, is a bittersweet time.
"Christmas is so important to people, and even though we did have last Christmas — because the fire didn't happen until New Year's Eve — every joyful memory that everybody had of that Christmas with their families was wiped out," Ms Abbott said.
"It's going to be hard and filled with a lot of brutal memories, but I hope it's a time of renewal."
At Wandella, on the edge of the scorched forest west of Cobargo, 'Swampy' Tom Wotton cuts a small eucalyptus sapling, one of the few trees on his 100-acre property unscathed by fire.
Cutting a native Christmas tree from his own land has been a tradition since the family moved to the property.
"We came here 25 years ago with six kids," Mr Wotton said.
"Little old shack, no power, no water.
"We came here, and we built from nothing. Now we've got nothing, so we'll start again with nothing."
For Juanita Watters, the gesture of making hand-crafted decorations is not about replacing the irreplaceable, but helping to renew family rituals and boost spirits.
"Hopefully receiving these decorations can bring a bit of comfort to people and let them know that there are people still thinking about them, who care about what they've been through," Ms Watters said.
"It's great, people actually care around the world," Tom Wotton said.
"I'd do the same thing. I would."