Precious and Priceless Christmas Memories

 

Yesterday, Pat and I put up our Christmas tree and a selection of the decorations and baubles that we have amassed over the past fifty six Christmases of our marriage. Not so many decorations this year - my bad back and the passing of time makes it more difficult to climb on chairs and put up these little treasured memories of bygone Christmases. For the first time for many, many years our two strings of little pottery angels will not decorate our chimney breast - they were gifts from our dear and good German friends, Ursula and Klaus, from Stuttgart, who we met on holiday a lifetime ago. The angels are now held together with instant glue and Blu-Tack and still much treasured, but this year they will stay in their box - I can't safely climb the steps to hang them!

And, as each year, we decorated our house I thought back to past Christmases - my own childhood Christmases and our own family affairs as our children Kate and John grew up. So many memories: the young Kate and John and me singing Christmas carols at the tops of our voices as we walked Max our lovely retriever along the disused train lines here in Ruddington - while Pat beavered away in the kitchen at home baking for Christmas; my much loved auntie Nenny standing in our kitchen at teatime on Christmas Day, buttering bread and mixing a bowl of tinned salmon for our salmon sandwich tea, laughing, swearing and cursing in equal measure as she did every year while we fell about with laughter at her light hearted grumbles; all of our family - about twelve of us - returning at midnight from our annual New Year's Eve trip to the theatre in London's West End and Pat's (then elderly!) mother - still, almost twenty years after her death, much loved and missed by us all - climbing into a shopping trolley as we, collapsing in giggles, pushed her along through the silent streets of Petts Wood. Every one, and thousands more a mundane, silly, trivial even, event but also a very precious and priceless memory reminding us of good times, of the spirit of Christmas and most of all of much loved people and places. Where did the years go?

And as I think of these times and look back over the years I am reminded of the wonderful writing of Welsh poet and author Dylan Thomas. His short prose piece "A Child's Christmas in Wales" - a true literary and magical masterpiece, this - captures to perfection the magic of Christmas for children and families. As I read it again this morning it reminded me of why this is such a special time. I wonder if children today with their hi-tech games, fashion conscious outlook on life, mobile phones, social media and the like will, when they are as old as me look back to their past Christmases with the simple fondness that Dylan Thomas does - and I do - in this short extract from his lovely celebration of Christmas?

".....There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were moustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why……….

…..There were bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons……..

…...And there were always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlours; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlours, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers…….."