Christmas Memories

Ideal Christmas gift: An Action Man deserter!

IS it that time of year already? It seems like only yesterday I was wittering on about Christmas Umble Pie, made by peasants from the innards of a deer. Umble Pie is now so far from ‘umble that Heston Blumenthal serves it with powdered duck and smoked confit fennel. Powdered duck? Smoked confit fennel? Don't ask me…

Yes, Christmas looms on the horizon.  I know some parents who spend a small fortune on buying presents for their kids. It wasn't so in my day. Oh dear, I'm becoming one of those boring people, always harping back to the good old days when all I got was a new frock and a tangerine in the foot of a (very small) sock.

But looking back at my own Devon Christmases I have only fond memories. Like most kids in the year dot, we had presents only at birthdays and Christmas. There was always one main present and several little ones, including the very un-PC gifts of sweet cigarettes and a chocolate pipe with desiccated coconut "tobacco". There was always an annual of some kind usually the Beano, Rupert Bear or Champion the Wonder Horse.

In my family there were strict gender demarcations which would make any equality rights officer these days shake their head in despair.  The girls had dolls and books while the boys had tools and Meccano and, one glorious year, a small steam engine that powered the wonderful Meccano creations made by my brothers.

As for the main gift, one year I had a walkie-talkie doll called Susan with black hair and bright red lips. I still had her up to a few years ago when she finally gave up the ghost to depart for that great dolls’ hospital in the sky. By then she was minus her lovely black hair which I cut off when playing hairdressers one day. My mother tried to glue on some new hair so she looked like a minor male celebrity with a bad toupee. Susan was made of hard plastic so not exactly cuddly. Her ‘talk’ was a cry when you tilted her and her ‘walk’ a very stiff-legged perambulation from the hip when you pushed her, resembling not so much a little girl strolling as a Nazi goose-stepping.

Then there was the desk with the lift-up lid which, little swat that I was at Chawleigh Primary School, was one of my favourite presents ever, and one year a Timex Cinderella watch in a ‘glass’ (i.e. plastic) slipper.

As soon as we stopped believing in Santa we started assiduously searching for the hidden gifts in the run-up to Christmas. We children performed a fingertip search of the house and farm buildings which would make any forensic scientist proud but we never unearthed as much as box of crayons. It was only later that we discovered that all our presents were safely stored at my Auntie Rita's house in Wembworthy and were collected by my father on Christmas Eve when we were  tucked up in bed.

 Of course we saved up our pennies to buy presents for mum and dad. Dad nearly always got Polo mints because we had horses and they liked them! Mum was the recipient of a range of cheap ornaments which she pretended to love with a passion. They would stay on the sideboard for a few weeks before being quietly stowed away inside. Or if we were cash-strapped we watched Blue Peter avidly in the run-up to Christmas before cobbling together some flimsy pen pot or a Santa made of cardboard and cottonwool with the obligatory "sticky-backed plastic" holding it all together.

They managed never to look anything but delighted and I know it's a cliché, but it really is the thought that counts.

I’m not quite ready for Christmas yet but I will know that the festive season has well and truly begun when the better half delivers his one and only Christmas joke. He claims that one year his parents gave him an empty shoebox - and told him it was an Action Man deserter.

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Essential Christmas Tips

Think I might open up a few cans of this.
Do you think my family will notice?

IT'S that time of year again - the family fights, the tantrums, the crocodile tears and the melodrama. Yes, that’s the EastEnders Christmas special all wrapped up and ready to be broadcast.

If you're anything like me you are staring at a pile of unwritten cards and frozen into immobility by the remembrance that you are hosting the family Christmas day dinner this year.

Still, over the years I have amassed a few tips to help me over the festive period.

• Be sparing with the red food colouring, otherwise your Christmas nibbles will look like you’ve accidentally sliced open an artery while cooking.

• Do not blindly follow last year’s Christmas card list. A certain percentage will have died, divorced, had a sex change or moved to Timbuktu, probably to get away from Christmas.

• Never do those Christmas quizzes which ask for things like your month of birth and the first letter of your name so they can ascertain your ‘Christmas fairy’ name - not unless you want to be called Sparkly Knickers for the rest of your life by your young niece.

• Always leave your Christmas lights carefully wrapped around cardboard to avoid hours of frustration and rage as you try to untangle them, only to find three hours and a bucket of tears later they don’t work because one of the hundred bulbs has blown.

• Wrap up a box of chocolates so that if someone you weren’t expecting turns up with a present you can quickly write on the tag and give it to them, as if they were on your mind all the time. Make sure it’s chocolates you particularly like yourself so that if they’re not needed you can eat them after Christmas. Actually, better be on the safe side and wrap up two boxes of chocolates, plus a couple of bottles of red wine and maybe some nice perfume and that scarf you’ve had your eye on for a while.

• Do not offer to make Christmas decorations with children under the age of 10. By the time you’ve finished with all that glue, glitter and tinsel you will look like Liberace’s twin.

• Don’t believe parents when they tell you their children are ‘just as happy playing with a cardboard box as the present inside’. I can assure you, you will get some very sideways looks if all you give their child is the old box your Amazon books came in. Don't ask me how I know...

• Gentlemen, do not buy your wife any kitchen appliance, ‘sexy’ red underwear that’s too risque for a burlesque dancer or a woolly bed jacket that’s too boring for your granny, or a box set of Top Gear DVDs, a car-cleaning kit, any book by a super-model that tells you how they lost two stone in a week, or a Black and Decker drill - not unless she has expressly requested such a gift.

• Remember, just because that liqueur tastes like melted toffee swooshed around in cream, it still contains alcohol. A few glasses before cooking dinner is not recommended - as I found out to my cost one year.

• Don’t forget to say well done to ALL the children in the nativity play, even though your nephew, Third Shepherd From The Right (the one with the crooked tea towel on his head kicking the child next to him) was the best by a country mile.

• Disconnect the front door bell so that if unwanted visitors turn up, you can pretend you haven’t heard them.

• And finally, sweep the chimney, hang up your stocking and wait for Santa to bring you everything you have ever wished for.

Before you leave:

You can follow me on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. As you can see, I have far too much to say for myself.

• Please feel free to leave a comment. I love to hear from you and will reply and visit your blog, if you have one, if I can. 
• You really don't want to miss my next post. It could be my best one ever (or not... who knows)! Enter your email address below and FeedBurner will tell you every time there's an update.

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