Some Christmas memories

I lived in Yorkshire for my first twenty or so years. Christmas there was very different from Christmas in Australia, or even Christmas now, some forty and more years on. In Yorkshire Christmas happens in winter so daylight hours are very short, round about seven whereas Australia has a summer Christmas with long hot days. In Yorkshire there was usually frost and snow, more frost and snow.

Each evening in the weeks leading up to Christmas in post war Britain there would be a steady stream of youngsters knocking on everyone's front door, singing a couple of short Carols especially for you, collecting their reward of a threepenny piece, sixpence if they were really good, and that was used to buy presents for their family. A large group like the Salvation Army would also go round ‘caroling’, collecting money for charity. They would stay in the middle of the street whilst several members went door knocking to collect the money.

There were lots of paper streamers around the house, often hand made by making strips of coloured paper into linking circles to make chains. The Christmas tree was always a fresh tree, not artificial. We had some pretty Christmas Crackers and coloured crepe paper to decorate the bucket and we had a small set of lights which often blew a bulb so the whole lot went dark. At the top of the tree was always the Christmas fairy, dressed in white, with wings like an angel.

One year I was given a set of Angel Chimes, a brass 'ornament' which had three small angels set under a fan shaped piece. In the bottom tray were holders for four small candles. When lit the hot air rising above the flames caused the fan to rotate taking with it the angles and their wire strikers which hit two tiny bells. A sweet tinkling sound was the result, just the sound you'd expect from Tinkerbell! I still have those Angel chimes, they have been used every Christmas. It used to give me great pleasure to help my children  put them together every year and now, in their turn, my young grandchildren enjoy assembling the pieces some sixty years on.

We lived in a typical semi-detached house with living rooms downstairs and  bedrooms upstairs. Stairs went up to the left of the wooden floored hallway. One Christmas my parents had thrown a party on Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning I was very excited to report that Santa had been, but “what a mess he left with his muddy boots on the floor.” But at least he had eaten his mince pie, he left crumbs to prove it, and drunk his glass of sherry, and the handful of sugar lumps for Rudolf and Co had disappeared!

A couple of years later, on Christmas Eve, I was found with hammer and six inch nails, ready to fasten my pillowcase to the piano in expectation of Santa’s visit. My usual Christmas presents were pony books, especially those written by Pat Smythe (The Three Jays series) or the three Pullein-Thompson sisters, Christine, Diane and Josephine. Or there were headscarves with horse pictures, or brushes for grooming the ponies. I don’t recall any toys but I do remember one year receiving four copies of the latest Pat Smythe book and a horsey headscarf from each of my cousins.

We used to have a turkey roast with all the trimming, turkey being far more ‘meaty’ than goose, and the special stuffing was always the favourite. There was always Christmas crackers with their paper hats and silly jokes. And Christmas Day was the one and only day of the year when my father and grandfather washed up the pots!

When I was about ten I was given a pony of my own. So Christmas Day then meant biking down to the stables, spending time mucking out, grooming, exercising, feeding the pony and cleaning all the saddlery and then the long pull home again on the bike. Thus Christmas morning was spent with the pony, home for lunch and presents and an hour or so later it was back to the stables for the evening "feed and clean", all ready for the Boxing Day meet of the local hunt, an exciting, colourful, noisy English tradition for country folk.

And the decorations had to come down on January 6th which was the Twelveth Night... if a piece of paper was missed it had to stay up all year until the next January... in our superstitious family it was bad luck to remove decorations on any day other than the sixth day of the first month!