Memories of Christmas Past

I grew up in a large house in the small Wiltshire town of Corsham, then with a population of around 8500 people. Not for us the luxury of the now-expected central heating system. In those distant days Winter mornings meant getting out of a warm bed and onto a small rug which was positioned next to it on the otherwise cold linoleum flooring. Looking out of the window meant that you got a bit too close for comfort to the ice that decorated the inside of the panes as well as the outside! I guess that I was about eleven when my father installed oil-filled heaters underneath the windows at floor level. They were just enough to combat the interior ice and, theoretically at least, to take the basic chill off the air in the room, although it still seemed just as cold to me.

How well I remember the excitement of Christmas! In those days, long before we had television, our bed-time was very early by the standards of today's children, and I was sent up to bed by 7.30 each evening with the exception of Saturdays when I was allowed to stay up until 8.0 o'clock. And bed meant of course, to sleep, not to read, play games or even chatter to anyone else. How different times were then.

Christmas Eve was one night of the year when I never minded going to bed early, trying, just like thousands of other children, to stay awake until Father Christmas came to visit and fill my sock, carefully hung at the foot of the bed, with an assortment of goodies. Somehow sleep always got the better of me and I was in the land of nod well before the visiting hour. However, I was awake early the following morning and excitedly reaching for my now-bulging stocking. In it there would always be a few nuts -- although no means of getting into them --- a tangerine, a couple of sweets and perhaps a colouring book and crayons. Very wisely, Father Christmas seemed aware that it was not a good idea to put toys into the stocking that could make a noise!

The excitement of those times remains for ever etched into the memory, and is there to recall whenever you want to for the rest of your life. Eventually, once it was time to get up and go downstairs, I would go down into the lounge and the welcome warmth of the fire that would be burning brightly in the hearth, and there my eyes would soak up the wonder of the tree which, only the evening before, had been plain and undecorated. Miraculously, overnight, it had been transformed by tinsel and baubles, fairy lights and crackers, and along with the rest of the room managed to transport me to a magical world once again.

One Christmas my mother decorated twigs with tiny pink crepe paper flowers which several of us children had been making for days previously. She had not told us what they were for, and so the effect was absolutely magical as we viewed it for the first time, the flower-bedecked branches draped with our favourite fairy lights which had pictures of all the favourite Walt Disney characters on them. I'll never forget that picture. It's etched for ever into my memory.

After breakfast we went along to my father's office where our presents had been carefully placed in neat piles along the window seat. There would always be my favourite Comic Book Annuals amongst the presents, and it was these that I opened first of all, soaking up the latest adventures of Korky the Cat, Desperate Dan, and all the other familiar characters. We were not spoiled by vast quantities of presents, nor by inordinate amounts of money having been spent on them. In those pre-TV and pre-computer days there was no electronic thingamyjigs to cause me to invoke 'pester-power', and if I had dared to do such a thing it would have resulted in less not more as a reward for my efforts.

This year, with the current economic crisis causing us to tighten the belts a notch or two, I hope that for some children at least, it will be a time where present giving becomes a little more carefully thought out and a little more meaningful, rather than simply having their demands given in to. That way it might start to focus people away from themselves and more towards the needs for others.

We live in a world that has become selfish and greedy, and children are brought up to demand what they want and get it, rather than being grateful for what they are given. It may be a world that has a wonderful array of gadgets to entertain and to make life easier for people, but I believe that it's a less pleasant world than the one in which I was raised. We certainly had nowhere near the amount of things that children get today, but we were grateful for what we had. We didn't have X-boxes and video games, but we did have well-cultivated imaginations. We knew how to convert a cardboard box into a fort, garage, farm or hospital; or indeed anything else that our fertile imaginations wanted it to be, and we did so effortlessly because we were allowed to develop naturally rather than having our imaginations controlled via the televisual images that today's children are bombarded with.

Yes, despite the electronic advances of the current age, give me the world of simple delights, of crumpets and home-made bread toasted in front of a warm coal fire, and of seasons where everything happened just the way it should.