"We had Simple Christmases, but Good Christmases"

Christmas. It seems the festival comes earlier and earlier each year. Halloween was barely a fortnight ago, yet it seems that the spooky Halloween paraphernalia have been taken down, only to be immediately replaced with the Christmas decorations.

Christmas is upon us already, even though December 25 is still almost two months away. The joyful anticipation has been stolen from us, and Christmas has been commercialised to the extent that many of us are bored of it by December.

Pic: Google images

Remember the old days? Those magical Christmas moments: flicking through toy catalogues; writing Santy letters; hanging stockings on Christmas Eve; queuing for ages to visit strange, bearded frauds dressed in red; trying to stay awake all night, hoping to hear the tinkling of bells, the prancing of hooves on the roof, or even a distant “ho, ho, ho!”; leaving carrots and mince pies by the fireplace; sneaking to the Christmas tree to check on the presents.

Those were the days - for my generation at least. Christmas, when the Celtic Tiger was still alive, was magical. We’ve reached the stage of depression, where stores start trying to push the expenses of Christmas on us from the first of November, or in some cases, some time in mid-October.

Is this how it was before the Celtic Tiger? Was this how it was before we were even born? To get an idea of Christmas in the 60’s and 70’s - before the recession, before the Celtic Tiger, and even before the big recession of the 80’s - I asked my father what Christmas meant to his family when they were children. Born into a family of seven kids, Christmases for him were far from the expensive affairs that define Christmases of today.

“Christmas came once a year,” I was told, “and you never heard about it until three or four weeks beforehand. It was a much simpler affair - nothing like today. Today is really commercialised.”

Christmas wasn’t such a big event back then - not like today where Christmas goes on for two months. Today if you turn on the television in November, you’re guaranteed to see a number of Christmas ads. This wasn’t the case back in the 60’s and 70’s until December, which was when the shop windows would have a display of toys.

Pic: Google images

“We used to look in the shop windows at the toys, dreaming that maybe Santy would bring us that,” my father reminisced. “Little did we know, our mother would go down to the shop and ask for toys to be put aside for us, if she could afford them.”

The shops displayed a variety of traditional toys - “stuff you’d see in antique shops today” - including dinky toys, corgi rockets, clockwork trains, and a variety of other toys.

“We used to get small presents,” my father continued, “cowboy hats, toy guns, books, jigsaws. We always got a Christmas annual - the Dandy, the Beano, Batman, or Superman. I got a spinning top one time - all very basic toys.

“The presents were wrapped in brown paper and hidden under our beds. We had stockings too with something small - money sometimes, or fruit. I got a rubber monkey in mine one year.”

These were toys that the children of today - so used to video games and electronic toys - would find boring. This wasn’t so back in the day. Toys were appreciated and loved, and never taken for granted, and my father can remember many of the toys that brought him hours of enjoyment as a child.”

“We played with our presents all year long,” he informed me, “even though they were very basic toys. I always seemed to get a gun at Christmas. I loved playing cowboys.

Pic: Google images

“Another year I got a Santa Fe Train, which was battery operated, but on Christmas day I had no batteries for it so I couldn’t use it until the next day. Denis [his older brother] got a black train like a Cannonball Express - a slightly better train than mine. It must have been a prosperous year that year. These toys would cost about five pounds, which was a lot of money back then.”

The conversation soon moved on to Christmas decorations and how elaborate they are in the present time. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, shops were decorated, but this certainly wasn’t on the first day of November, as was the case this year. Homes were decorated simply, rather than covered from roof to floor with decorations - everybody knows that house that is the tourist attraction of the neighbourhood at Christmas!

“We had paper decorations hung from the ceiling,” my father said, “and a paper, fold-out star that fitted over the light in the hall. We had a real Christmas tree every year up until the 1970s when my mother bought an artificial tree because the real ones left needles all over the floor. The fire in the sitting room was lit at Christmas too.”

One thing that my dad said that sticks in my mind is: “We had simple Christmases, but good Christmases. We always looked forward to it.” I can’t help but feel that the chance to ‘look forward’ to Christmas has been robbed from us.

Gone are the days where families could hardly wait to get the dusty old tree down from the attic on the eight of December. Dead are the days of ‘looking forward’ to Christmas. Unfortunately, we’ve reached an era where Christmas sneaks up on us unexpectedly, whilst out for a morning stroll. It has almost become a chore. There’s no way of escaping it. We can only embrace it, and try to enjoy the two months for which it will last.

14 Nov 2011

by Jessica Thompson