Christmas past and Christmas presents

This is my penultimate post before Christmas so let me leave you with a few childhood memories.

Note: If you have no interest in my childhood memories of Christmas, and I don't blame you, I bid you adieu and wish you a very happy Christmas!

A few weeks ago I mentioned spending one Christmas with my grandparents in Colchester. It was 1967 or 1968, I can't remember which.

They lived just round the corner from my aunt and uncle whose architect-designed home, built in 1962, was featured (unflatteringly) in a Channel 4 series called Ugly House to Lovely House (see here).

Even though I can't be certain of the year, I remember that Christmas for several reasons, one of which was the minor accident we had driving to Colchester on Christmas Eve.

The traffic was slow moving but it was dark and raining heavily when we aquaplaned into the back of the car in front.

If I remember correctly, my father had accelerated in response to an approaching car whose driver had flashed his lights, inviting us to go first past some roadworks that had reduced the road to a single lane.

It was courteous of the other driver but the kind gesture had unfortunate consequences when we ran into car ahead of us.

What I remember most was the fact that our hamster was in a cage on the back seat between me and my sister, and when we hit the car in front the cage shot forward, giving the hamster a short, sharp shock.

In those days there were no seat belts in the back of cars so my sister and I must have been thrown forward too, but no-one was hurt, the car was repaired over Christmas, and we drove home none the worse for the experience. (The hamster was fine too.)

A few years before that I remember staying with my other grandparents at their thatched cottage in deepest, rural Dorset.

Parts of the house were 300-years-old and I loved going there because it was so different to our own house on a rapidly expanding housing estate in Maidenhead that was built to cater for an influx of residents following the completion of the first stage of the new M4 motorway.

I was four or five-years-old and still believed in Father Christmas, and I remember lying in bed trying very hard to stay awake to see him deliver our presents.

Needless to say I failed and the next morning Santa had delivered my presents to the bottom of my bed. (I didn't question how he knew we were staying with my grandparents, but it probably sowed the first seeds of doubt in my mind.)

Santa's presents included my first Hornby train set. It was no more than a small oval track with a single locomotive but I played with it all morning, stopping only for lunch.

Over the next few years it developed into something far more substantial - multiple trains on interconnecting tracks pinned to a large wooden board, with electric points, overhead wires, and a station. But I’ll never forget the joy of that initial track and train.

Another present I remember getting (when I was seven or eight) was a small battery powered transistor radio.

By today's standards the sound was thin and crackly but I loved it, and the first thing I did was listen to Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart visiting some hospital wards for the Christmas Day edition of Junior Choice.

The radio could be held in one hand and was small enough to fit in my coat pocket. After we moved to Scotland, and I started watching Dundee United, I would take it to games and listen to the half-times scores, followed by Sports Report on the bus on the way home.

In fact, the radio would be glued to my ear from the moment I left the ground and walked down the hill to the bus station, a distance of about a mile.

Occasionally I would listen to it under the bedclothes after I had gone to bed. Specifically, I remember listening to the commentary during extra-time in the 1970 FA Cup final replay between Leeds and Chelsea.

I couldn’t celebrate the winning goal by Chelsea’s David Webb because I didn’t want my parents to know I was listening, but they probably knew.

(I watched the first 90 minutes on television but the match was on a Wednesday, a school day, and they didn't want me to stay up beyond my normal bedtime.)

We had moved to Scotland in May 1969 so the game marked the start of our second year north of the border.

I remember our first Christmas in Scotland for two reasons. First, my father had to go to work in the morning because in those days neither Christmas Day nor Boxing Day were public holidays in Scotland. Instead, the nation’s focus was on New Year, aka Hogmanay.

Second, my sister and I were each given a traditional wooden toboggan, or sledge, as our main present. Crazy, I know, but my parents must have thought we about to experience lots of snow.

To be fair, more snow fell then than it does now, but the only time I remember using the sledge was on a day trip to the Cairngorms.

Unfortunately, the snow was so soft neither of our sledges would move an inch because as soon as we sat on them the metal runners would sink in to the snow.

I suspect we may have been the last generation of children to have wooden toboggans with metal runners because shortly after that everyone seemed to have flat-bottomed plastic sleds and our beautiful but useless sledges were consigned to history.

We got greater use out of the roller skates we were given a year or two later, but that’s not saying much!

As a child my favourite Christmas present was probably the black and white leather football I was given in 1970. A replica of the ball used in the World Cup in Mexico, it screamed Pele, Jairzinho, Gordon Banks and Gerd Muller, and I loved it.

Made up of twelve black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, the simple non-branded design has never been bettered, in my opinion.

My friends liked it too and it was adopted as our match ball for games against local teams from Newport, Tayport, and St Andrews.

It still hurt when heading it, though. In fact, I don’t remember anyone in our team heading it intentionally, even though it spent a lot of time in the air.

In contrast, my biggest disappointment was probably the chess set I was given when I was twelve.

I had joined the lunchtime chess club at school so I asked my parents for a chess set, never thinking they would buy a miniature set with tiny plastic pieces that had to be pushed into holes on a metal board.

What were they thinking?

I assume they thought it looked modern compared to the traditional wooden set I was expecting. It was certainly the sort of thing you might have found in Habitat, if Habitat sold chess sets.

Worse, I discovered their error several days before Christmas because I knew where they kept our presents so I naturally had a quick peak when they were out.

To be fair, I hid my disappointment well but my attempt to be a grandmaster was abandoned a few months later when I left the chess club following a humiliating defeat at the hands of a chess club from another school.

The game, I decided, was not for me, so perhaps my parents were right not to invest in a full size set.

Today, in my 65th year, most Christmases are a bit of a blur, partly because we do the same thing every year. The only things that have changed is that we watch less TV, and the tree goes up much earlier.

My parents used to put the tree up a few days before Christmas, and for many years we did the same. It was edging earlier (mid December) but Covid was the game changer because I swear we were encouraged to put the tree up at the beginning of the month in order to bring a little bit of cheer into our otherwise grim lives.

Personally, if it wasn’t frowned upon by ‘tradition’, I’d keep the tree, with its bright and cheerful lights, for most of January. Why not?

There's another reason, though, for extending its use. A 6-7ft Christmas tree costs around £70 and I want my money's worth!

It's worth noting too that in the Sixties a real Christmas tree would have dropped most of its needles within a few weeks, which is one reason why artificial trees became so popular in the Seventies, but today’s trees last much longer.

It didn’t help that back then our house had central heating that delivered warm air to the sitting room through vents in the wall.

The air would come on and off depending on the temperature in the room, and when it was on it had a magical effect because many of the baubles on the tree would spin round.

I remember, in particular, three red, blue and white baubles, covered in glitter, that, when spinning, created an hypnotic kaleidoscopic effect.

Unfortunately the warm air accelerated the drying out process, hence the rapid loss of needles.

In my twenties, after leaving home, I always returned to my parents for Christmas, but prior to Christmas Day I would invite half a dozen friends for an early Christmas lunch cooked by me.

One year - and I’ve told this story before - I left the Christmas pudding steaming in a pan on the stove while we went to the pub, and when I returned to my flat (in Ravenscourt Park near Hammersmith) thick black smoke was pouring from the basement window.

The pan had boiled dry, and the heat had burned an enormous hole in the bottom. There was nothing left of the Christmas pudding but, miraculously, the turkey - which was in the oven - was fine.

The walls of the tiny studio flat were blackened with thick particles of soot but it didn’t affect our lunch which went ahead as planned.

To this day I still marvel at the memory of my guests sitting down to eat in a room that, less than an hour earlier, had been full of thick black smoke.

Less forgiving was the landlord, an actor who lived with his family in the house above. As soon as I returned after Christmas I was asked to vacate the flat so they could clean and redecorate it, which was understandable.

It was made clear, though, that I wasn’t expected to return. (He now lives in France but that’s another story …)

Fast forward to 1995 and one of my favourite Christmas Days, which we spent driving from Edinburgh to Gatwick where we stayed overnight in a nearby hotel before flying to the Cayman Islands (via Miami) on Boxing Day.

For most of the journey there were relatively few cars on the road so we had a clear run, and the day was entirely stress free.

That’s the closest we’ve come to spending Christmas abroad but it’s on my bucket list.

In the meantime I've suggested to my wife that we rent a cottage for Christmas - in Cumbria, Yorkshire, or Scotland - as we did at New Year when we were younger, but she prefers to stay at home.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. If you've got this far, thank you. Let me finish by wishing you a very happy Christmas, wherever you are.

Comments

[Rose2]

Merry Christmas Simon.

I still have my wooden sledge with metal runners hanging up in the garage It came in very handy when my son and his family came for Christmas.
It really was a white Christmas , though the snow was not very deep and it didn't last very long.