Calis Beach and Fethiye Turkey Discussion Forum
General Topics => All things that have nothing to do with Turkey => Topic started by: Colwyn on December 20, 2011, 12:20:18 PM
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What do you remember about those Christmases in your early days of childhood? In my case that meant those of the early and mid 1950s.
Presents
Our Christmas treats were quite limited as rationing was still in place - the Sweet Ration of 4oz per person was not abolished until 1953. However, oranges - generally reserved for children and pregnant women - were still available. It was customary to have a blood orange in your stocking on Christmas morning. Indeed, this practice was so common that if you did someone a small favour during the year they would jokingly say "I'll give you a blood orange for Christmas".
When the sweet ration came off a whole new world of treats was opened up. One of my father's younger brothers worked as a manager for East African Airlines and lived in what we then called Salisbury in Rhodesia (technically The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland) and thus, we assumed, was wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. Every Christmas, by some incomprehensible miracle of international communication, he not only ordered but actually paid for our presents - for me and my brother - to be delivered to us in Bristol whilst he never left Rhodesia. Imagine that! Wondrous technology in the new post-war world! Our presents didn't have to come very far; just down the road from Keynsham two miles away. Each of us got a Fry's Selection Box of chocolate bars and buttons that were then careful metered out to us so we would not get sick and they would last into the new year.
Along with this megatreat would be some nuts and, if we were lucky, a Dinky car each (so my brother and I spent Christmas morning racing round the mat) and a few other little toys. When I was older an Eagle Comic Annual was added (trashy comics such as Beano and Dandy that were not "improving" were not tolerated in our house).
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Ah Colwyn, such emotive memories. Similar era I guess.Sounds like Horace Batchelor was also running a sweet shop !
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My childhood was spent in Jamaica. Xmas day was playing cricket on the beach with a coconut palm for a bat & a tennis ball so it floated in the sea & gave the dogs something to chase/fetch.
Always an amazing bbq lunch where Dad would manage to have 1 Red Stripe too many lol & Mum would have to drive home, happy days!
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My xmas memory was of great excitement until you were allowed to get up. Opening the presents. For some reason the fire was always brighter and the feeling of family was stronger. (That could have been because my dad worked away a lot but was always there at xmas)
Then we went out to play with our pals...toys forgotten.
Still have that special feeling today. :)
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I was the second youngest of 8 kids and my mum loved Christmas so although we didnt have a lot of money she made a big fuss on the day, decorations and the tree was up on the night of 11th December, as it was my younger brothers birthday on the 12th, he was 50 last week
Us youngest 3 always put a pillowcase out on Christmas eve, downstairs though not in our bedroom
Every Christmas morning we would get up so excited but would have to get washed dressed and have a christmas,once a year breakfast of tea with a drop of rum in and a couple of biscuits from the Christmas assorted biscuit tin
Then the present opening. We always had one big present, not always exactly what we wished for but as close as they could afford, one of us would receive a game, Monopoly, Cluedo or the like, which would come out later in the day and the whole family would play. A jigsaw, selection box, an annual, beano,sparky and the like, paints and colouring book each, and at the bottom nuts an apple and a tangerine! With the glut of tangerines I have had this year I cant believe how I used to look forward to that!
I continued the tradition with my 2 boys but they had Jaffa Cakes for breakfast, not the tinned biscuits, One year I asked my youngest son who would have been about 5 at the time what he would like for Christmas After a lot of thought he could only come up with a selection box! And hes still the same at 33 years old
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Julesp, Lovely post my kids are the same they too love xmas.
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Visiting
Visiting was an important part of our Christmas. This had to be arranged in advance, since we had no telephone. Special visitors would be entertained in the Front Room. When we were small this was out of bounds to us boys. It was the "best" room and it had an old upright piano as well as a number of comfortable chairs. As I recall there were two types of visitors.
Daytime visitors were mostly women from the chapel and my brother and I were required to dress in our best clothes and sit still and quite in the Front Room while the guests were there and only speak if addressed directly. Our reward was that we could share the Welsh cakes that my mother had baked for the visit.
Evening visitors were quite different. Men and women would arrive. My mother would have made cawl (a clear stew of lamb and vegetables - but without leeks since my mother, unaccountably, didn't like them). We boys sat in the Front Room whilst steaming bowls of this were devoured along with doorsteps of bread. Soon we were whisked away to an early bed, but not before taking a peek at bottles coming out from the cupboard under the stairs - IPA and Guinness for the men, and sherry for the women. A little later sounds of piano-playing and singing began to drift upstairs.
For our own visiting the best was when my brother and I were allowed to visit "Auntie" and "Uncle" Rees on our own. Our house was at the bottom of a hill on the edge of some allotments and the Rees' house could be seen, some 400 yards away, on the top of the hill on the other side of the allotments. Each house could signal the other by putting a brightly coloured blanket out of the back bedroom window - to show we were leaving our house, and then had safely arrived at the other. Auntie (Dot) Rees and Uncle (DIP) Rees, much older than my parents, were an oddly matched pair. She was a wonderfully hospitable, happy woman who was stalwart of the Welsh Congregational Chapel in Bristol; he was a small genial man with a twinkle in his eye - an atheist, communist, technical college lecturer and stalwart of the Bristol trade union movement. We loved them dearly. Unlike visits to our house, going to the Rees' was a very informal affair. We sat around the coal fire in the kitchen (as in our house food preparation and cooking, washing up, clothes washing and similar tasks did not take place in the kitchen; all this was done in the attached scullery) eating Auntie Rees' Welsh cakes and sponges (she was a rather better cook than my mother) and later, when I was a teenager, discussing politics with Uncle Rees (which my mother always advised me not to do since he might lead me astray into left-wingism). Then the blanket would be taken in, signalling to our home that we were just leaving, and we tore back down the allotments.
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Your mother was right though :)
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Quite so.
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In the late run up to christmas, after the pay out from the christmas club, my old man would go to the local off-license (the offy) to order the christmas booze. The list always included:
Quart bottles of Courage Beer
Stones Ginger Wine (to make whiskey macs)
Egg Flip aka Advocaat:D
Bells Whiskey
R Whites Lemonade (4 Shandy and to drink neat!) 3d back on bottle after xmas
Port (4 Port and Lemon)
Manns Brown
Always a drink to offer any visitor over christmas, and when it was gone, well that was it for another year as regards drink in the house. I can still smell that Courage Beer now :)
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It was usual to say to the Offlicencee "Christmas, eh? If it wasn't for the kids we wouldn't bother".
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We started our festivities late on Christmas Eve, between 4 and 5 in the afternoon when we would be given a measly amount of money and sent down to the Christmas tree yard to see what they had left at last knockings that they would sell for next to nothing rather than close up and leave it to rot. This almost always resulted in the Leighton Buzzard "Walk of Shame" - carrying this dry, brown conifer with huge branchless sections up through the full length of the bustling High Street, itself in the last minutes of the Christmas Eve market. It's amazing how everyone you know is out buying last minute gifts and all manage to see you when you are doing your best to hide behind a fully see through festive stick. Once home the tree decorations were out once more, same as last year exactly - in fact the same decorations as every year - including the broken ones, the baubles with no loop that have to be balanced between branch and trunk, the ones you made at school...then the annual ritual of finding the bulb that needed replacing and was stopping they big switch on. How difficult must it have been in the 70s to invent a string of bulbs that carried on working when one bulb blew!!!
We appeared to get a pretty good deal when it came to opening presents (if not the best presents perhaps) in that most of our friends would have to wait till the next morning to get stuck in to get theirs. We were normally dragged up the hill for "Midnight Mass", and as is the way with Catholism, bribes are the proven way - you come to Midnight Mass, you shut up, you can open your presents when you get back. Being dragged to church every Sunday morning was one of the most awful and dull things in childhood - grey people listening to grey sermons and singing grey songs. But Midnight Mass was different - it wasn't exactly like that. It was grey people and drunks off the street which made for an electric atmosphere, wondering which one was going to start a row with a complete stranger, talking loudly to himself, pass out or something equally entertaining. The long kneeling benches in front of each pew almost always sent at least one flying.
Best days of your life etc ;)
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Letters
After Christmas, my brother and I would be required to write letters to our relations who had send presents. These gifts were invariably (except from my Rhodesian uncle) of a very practical kind. They were socks, or home-knitted, matching gloves and bobble hats, or sleeveless pullovers with gaudy, horizontal, zigzag stripes that were too big for us but which we would "grow into". Fine gifts, but very difficult for small boys to raise any great enthusiasm about for letter writing.
Not only did we have to show appropriate gratitude, but we also had to add some other "interesting" news about our lives. [It didn't seem likely that that description of the great mud gang fight would go down too well. This was when, at the start of the Christmas holidays, the rumour went round that, on the Saturday, the notorious Knowle Gang - we had never heard of them before - were going to descend from their high ground above the allotments and rampage, looting and pillaging, through the streets at the bottom of the allotments. So all of us eight year olds in those streets formed ourselves into the Brislington "Black Hand" Gang. We took the lids off our houses' metal dustbins to use as shields and set off for the allotments on Saturday morning. We hid in a couple of the abandoned, overgrown allotments and ambushed them as they came down the hill, pelted them with lumps of earth, and saw them off in a famous victory. But this was not really the stuff of Christmas letters.] So we had to think of some school achievement to mention.
Letter writing was thus a difficult chore. Since my father was a schoolteacher, the letters had to be written in our best, fountain pen, handwriting and contain no spelling mistakes. If not they would have to be re-written. Teaching us that you always have to pay for your pleasures.