Spoiling Christmas

Christmas was never quite the same after I discovered the truth about Santa when I was about eight or nine years old.  I don’t recall being especially devastated by the revelation, I must have been having doubts and confirmation was just a reality punch.

A couple of years ago I asked my ten year old granddaughter what Santa was bringing her and she raised an eyebrow and looked at me as if to say ” Move on Granddad”

Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would inevitably spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in early December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of parents’ wardrobe.

Early December was the obvious time to find Christmas presents because it was just after dad’s November pay day and because Mrs Gamble, the Freeman’s catalogue agent who lived a few doors away, was making more frequent drop-offs than usual.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!

Richard, my brother, of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am fairly certain that I told my sister straight away and spoilt it for her early on.

Anyway, never mind the twelve days of Christmas here are my top twelve tips for children for finding Christmas presents:

1. You really don’t want to get caught by parents so search only when it is completely safe to do so. Preferably while they are gone for at least an hour or so, if they have gone to the pub this is best but if not, search while they are busy elsewhere in the house.  It helps to have a quick place to hide in if you hear someone coming.

2. Look for presents in really obvious places.  Some parents can be surprisingly careless about this.  Check their wardrobes, under beds, etc.

3. Rather like a computer game check every room, no matter how mad this may seem (even your own room!).  Search all nooks and crannies, including cabinets and cupboards and under floorboards.   Once you are sure there are no presents in the room you are in, move on to the next one.  Check the attic if you possibly can.  Don’t forget the garden shed.

4. Concentrate the most time in your parents room. You might need a step ladder for this but look on high shelves that are out of reach (this is an equally good tip for all rooms), and see if you can find anything there.

5. Take a forensic approach.  Check inside bags. If your parents are sneaky, they may have hidden things inside a plain plastic bag. Look behind books in the bookcase.  Do not disregard anything if you really want to find those  presents.

6. Take pictures of how the bags are arranged before moving them around to see the gifts. That way when you’re done looking, you can look back on the photos and arrange them back to the order they were in. You could also use a mobile phone camera if you have one.

7. Difficult this but if possible check your grandparent’s house but don’t go more regularly than usual because they might get suspicious.  They might be old but they are not stupid.

8. Snoop around in your parent’s internet history. This is so easy because kids know more about computers than old folks.  They might have bought stuff online and even if you can’t find it you can at least see what it is.

9. Ask a brother or sister if they know, or agree to exchange feedback on gifts you know they are getting, for information on gifts that they know you got.

10. Try shaking gifts that may be under the tree already (if your parents do that) and try to listen to the noise it makes, how heavy it is, and if it rattles in the package a lot or a little.

11. Try slightly peeling the gift wrap to view a minor spot of the gift, or, and this is really only for experts, if you’re skilled enough, try unwrapping the whole thing and re-wrap it.

12. Look inside your parent’s cars.  A lot of times parents leave receipts in the car so you could look there, also try looking in your mum’s purse. They usually keep them in there in case they have to return anything in January.

Follow these simple guidelines and  it’s a sure thing that you can can really spoil any Christmas Day surprises!

White Christmas

Snow at Christmas is deep-seated in British culture, and most of us (except bookmakers) look forward expectantly to Christmas Day with scenes depicted on traditional Christmas cards and in works like Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, but the truth is of course that Christmas is rarely ever white any more.

The myth of snowy Christmases has its origins in the colder climate of the period 1550 to1850 when Britain was in the grip of a ‘Little Ice Age’ and therefore could be confident of snow at Christmas.  Winters were particularly persistent and severe but it is now nearly two hundred years since a frost fair was last held on a frozen River Thames in 1813.

The trouble is that for most parts of the UK, Christmas comes at the beginning of the season for snow and wintry weather is more likely early in the deepening cold of January.  White Christmases were more frequent in the 18th and 19th centuries, even more so before the change of calendar in 1752, which effectively brought Christmas day back by twelve days.

There have only been six white Christmases since I was born in 1954.  I can remember it snowing on Christmas Eve 1970 because I was walking to Midnight Mass at Hillmorton Church and according the Met Office the last white Christmas was in 2004, when snow was widespread across Northern Ireland, Scotland, parts of Wales, the Midlands, north-east and far south-west England.  I can’t remember that!

Christmas Day

The other Christmas that I remember was when I got my first train set.  This was at my other grandparent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time.

Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery.  There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself.  He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock.  But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning.  The reason for this was quickly discovered.  Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education.  Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!  My brother Richard is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

Christmas Eve

“Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all thirty feet tall.”  Larry Wilde

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus.  In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after.  I can remember one of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside.  One year, I was five years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the street lights outside even with the curtains drawn there was just enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents.

Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that I had got the cowboy outfit that was top of my Christmas present list!  It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming.  For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days.  In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out.

Granddad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process.  After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon.

There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year.  This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today.  Granddad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure.  There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.

Life was a whole lot simpler then and expectations much lower!

Christmas Lights

It was Christmas market time again and by undertaking detailed research of the flight schedules and destination options there was an opportunity on December 13^th 2007 to visit two neighbouring countries by flying to and staying in Ljubljana in Slovenia and taking a day trip to Klagenfurt over the border in Austria.

For a week or so before the holiday, as is our normal practice, we had been keeping an eye on the weather in Ljubljana and although it had been a complete mixed bag Micky was still reasonably optimistic and was forecasting snow and extreme cold and we all hoped that he was right.  You can imagine our disappointment therefore when we landed in a wet and soggy Slovenia with a sullen sky full of rain.

The airport is about twenty-five kilometres from Ljubljana, which was a bit too far for a taxi but we found the transfer bus with an obliging driver who drove us the forty minute journey into the city and then took a detour off of the scheduled route to deliver us directly to the front door of the City Hotel and in view of the rain we were grateful for that.

The hotel had been recently modernised and was clean and new with a slightly curious combination of Mexico and Salvidor Dali as a theme in the public areas.  After a bit of unnecessary confusion over room allocations Micky was disappointed to find that this hadn’t provided him with the opportunity that he had been hoping for and we all retired to our rooms for the quickest of freshen ups and then a return to the bar in the lobby for a quick beer to familiarise ourselves with the local brewing arrangements.

Outside the rain had got progressively heavier so we needed our umbrellas for sure as we set off on foot towards the city centre and the Christmas market.  It was about ten o’clock now and the bad weather had cleared the streets of people and the city was prematurely quiet and many of the market stalls closed already for the day.  Even in the dismal weather however the street lights and decorations looked spectacular with a theme of planets and other heavenly objects all based on a principal colour of bright royal blue.

We walked through the deserted main square and down the left bank of the river Ljubljanica before crossing Cobblers bridge to the right bank where a number of stalls selling mulled wine and gluvine were still open and dispensing drinks.  At one of these a group of boisterous young men were waiting under an umbrella that was swollen with rain and waiting for a passer-by to deposit the contents over.  As Micky walked by one of them sprung the trap and a torrent of water was despatched to the pavement missing him by a matter of inches.  Good job that it did because although this would have given him a good soaking these boys would have got a lot wetter swimming in the adjacent river if they had successfully hit their target!

It was all a bit wet and disappointing but I suppose if we had done our research properly then we shouldn’t have been surprised because Ljubljana has the dubious distinction of being the wettest capital city in Europe and at one thousand three hundred and fifty millimetres a year (fifty three inches) that would certainly take some beating.  Before I knew this I would probably have guessed that it would be Cardiff, in Wales, because that is fairly damp as well but the Welsh capital city is left way behind at only one thousand and seventy four millimetres.

Well, the good thing is of course that it doesn’t rain in bars and in the main square just over the Triple Bridge we found a pavement bar with a rigid roof and blazing patio heaters and we enjoyed a couple of final drinks in the comfort of the warmth and the dry while the rain beat out a steady rhythm on the plastic roof sections above.  It was about midnight by now and we were the last customers of the day and after a couple of drinks I think the barman was pleased to finally see us go as he hurriedly packed up behind us to make sure that we couldn’t change our minds.

A Visit to See Father Christmas

About this time of year it is time for children to visit Father Christmas and open up negotiations in respect of this year’s Christmas presents.

When I was a young boy we lived in Leicester and mum would take me and my sister to see Santa in his grotto at one of the department stores in the city, probably British Home Stores or C&A, I can’t really be sure about this and after mum had paid a shilling or whatever then we would join the line of excitable children as they waited in turn to shuffle to the front of the queue and go through the door to see the great man himself.

When we were kids it didn’t matter that he had cotton wool for a beard, plastic elves behind him, that the present that he gave us was wrapped in cheap paper or that our time with Santa was all over in the twinkling of an eye because this was one of the big occasions of the childhood year.

On 12^th December 2010 I visited Santa for the first time in about fifty years when I took my granddaughter, Molly, to visit him at Baytree Garden Centre in Spalding and how things have changed.  This was one of the best Father Christmas visits ever with Disney style animatronic displays, a ride in Santa’s sleigh and room after room full of his friends and little helpers to keep us amused as we made our way to our private appointment with the man in red.

Eventually it was our turn to be invited through the door to go through and chat about our Christmas wish list.  Not many changes here though because he still had the cotton wool beard and the present was still wrapped in cheap paper and when it was opened certainly didn’t contain anything on the list.  I went back again this year but had a growing collection of children to accompany me.  Molly explained that she had been a good girl all year and Patsy, when asked what she would like for Christmas, asked for a pillow – but forgot to say what she would like inside it!  Daisy was too young to chat with Santa so we will have to leave present selection up to him.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.  My brother Richard is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

How to spoil Christmas!

Christmas was never quite the same after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in early December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parent’s wardrobe.

Early December was the obvious time to find Christmas presents because it was just after dad’s November pay day and because Mrs Gamble, the Freeman’s catalogue agent who lived a few doors away, was making more frequent drop-offs than usual.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!

Richard, my brother, of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away.

Anyway, never mind the twelve day’s of Christmas here are the top twelve tips for finding Christmas presents:

1. Search only when you are sure your parents won’t catch you. Preferably while they are gone for at least an hour or so, and if not, search while they are busy elsewhere in the house.  It helps to have a quick place to hide in if you hear someone entering.

2. Look for presents in really obvious places.  Some parents can be careless like this.  Check their wardrobes, under beds, etc.

3. Rather like a digital game check every room, no matter how ridiculous this may seem (even your own room!).  Search all nooks and crannies, including cabinets and cupboards.  Once you are sure there are no presents in the room you are in, move on to the next one.

4. Concentrate the most time in your parents’ room. Look on high shelves that are out of reach (this is a good tip for all rooms), and see if you can find anything there.

5. Check inside bags. If your parents are sneaky, they may have hidden things inside a plain plastic bag. Do not disregard anything if you really want to find your presents.

6. Consider taking pictures of how the bags are arranged before moving them around to see the gifts. That way when you’re done looking, you can look back on the photos and arrange them back to the order they were in. You could also use a mobile phone camera if you have one.

7. Check your relative’s house, family friend’s house, or neighbour’s house.

8. Snoop around in your parent’s internet history, if possible. They might have bought stuff online and you can see what it is.

9. Ask a brother or sister if they know, or agree to exchange information on gifts you know they got, for information on gifts that they know you got.

10. Try shaking gifts that may be under the tree already (if your parents do that) and try to listen to the noise it makes, how heavy it is, and if it rattles in the package a lot or a little.

11. Try slightly peeling the gift wrap to view a minor spot of the gift, or, and this is really only for experts if you’re skilled enough, try unwrapping the whole thing and re-wrap it.

12. Look inside your parents cars.  A lot of times parents leave receipts in the car so you could look there, also try looking in your mum’s purse. They usually keep them in there in case they have to return anything.

Follow these simple guidelines and I it’s a sure thing that you can can really spoil any Christmas Day surprises!

A Life in a Year – 26th December, White Christmas

Snow at Christmas is deep-seated in British culture, and most of us (except bookmakers) look forward expectantly to Christmas Day with scenes depicted on traditional Christmas cards and in works like Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, but the truth is of course that Christmas is rarely ever white any more.

The myth of snowy Christmases has its origins in the colder climate of the period 1550 to1850 when Britain was in the grip of a ‘Little Ice Age’ and therefore could be confident of snow at Christmas.  Winters were particularly persistent and severe but it is now nearly two hundred years since a frost fair was last held on a frozen River Thames in 1813.

The trouble is that for most parts of the UK, Christmas comes at the beginning of the season for snow and wintry weather is more likely early in the deepening cold of January.  White Christmases were more frequent in the 18th and 19th centuries, even more so before the change of calendar in 1752, which effectively brought Christmas day back by twelve days.

There have only been six white Christmases since I was born in 1954.  I can remember it snowing on Christmas Eve 1970 because I was walking to Midnight Mass at Hillmorton Church and according the Met Office the last white Christmas was in 2004, when snow was widespread across Northern Ireland, Scotland, parts of Wales, the Midlands, north-east and far south-west England.  I can’t remember that!

A Life in a Year – 25th December, Christmas Day

The other Christmas that I remember was when I got my first train set.  This was at my other grandparent’s house in Leicester; actually I think we might have lived there at the time.

Christmas morning in the front room there was a square metre of sapele board and a simple circle of track, an engine a tender and two coaches in British Rail burgundy livery.  There was a level crossing, a station and a bridge made out of an old shoe box that dad had cut out and made himself.  He was good at making things for Christmas presents and at about the same time I had a fort with some US cavalry soldiers that was made out of an old office filing box that he had constructed into a pretty good scale copy of Fort Laramie or wherever, later I had a replacement fort, this time from the toy shop but it was never as good as the cardboard box.

For many years after that there were new additions to the train set until I had quite an extensive network of track and a good collection of engines and rolling stock.  But something bad happened to the train set in about 1972 when all of the engines mysteriously stopped functioning.  The reason for this was quickly discovered.  Brother Richard who has always been more gifted than me with a screwdriver had dismantled them all as part of his engineering education.  Unfortunately at this time his skills were not sufficiently developed to be able to put them back together again with quite the same level of expertise and consequently that was the end of model railways in our house.

Christmas was never quite the same of course after you found out the truth about Santa when you were about eight or nine years old.  Some spoilsport at school with an older brother or sister would spill the beans on the myth of Christmas and this would be confirmed in the December when you found presents, that were supposed to be still at Santa’s factory at the North Pole, on top of or at the back of your parents wardrobe.

I remember when this happened and I discovered the gifts wrapped in mid-December and I sneaked them into the bathroom, locked the door and carefully unwrapped the paper to see if this was true.  It was quite a shock to find some new additions to the model railway and quite difficult to wrap them back up again to cover up my snooping.  Even more difficult of course to pretend to be surprised when I opened them again a fortnight later on Christmas morning!  Richard of course is nearly eight years younger than me so we had to continue to pretend about Santa in our house until I was about fifteen, although I am sure I told my sister straight away!

A Life in a Year – 24th December, Christmas Eve

 

As for most people Christmas was best when I was young and still believed in Santa Claus.  In those days we used to alternate between a Christmas at home one year and then at the grandparents the year after.  I can remember two of these quite clearly.

My mum’s parents lived in London and they lived in a flat in Catford and when we stayed there I got to sleep in a small box room at the front of the house overlooking the street outside.  One year, I was four years old, I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and sometime during the night I woke up and because of the streetlights outside there was enough illumination for me to see at the foot of the bed that there was a sack overflowing with presents.  Sticking out of the top of the sack was a rifle (not a real one of course) so I knew that I had got the cowboy outfit that was top of my Christmas present list!  It was still some time until morning but I am sure that I was able to sleep better after that secure in the confidence that Santa had been.

I used to like Christmas in London, the flat was a curious arrangement that was simply the top floor of a family house with only one front door but it was warm and homely and welcoming.  For most of the year everything took place in the small back room but at Christmas we were allowed to go into the best front room for a couple of days.  In the morning we would open the main presents and then at tea time there were gifts on the tree to be taken down and given out.  Grandad was in charge of this operation until one year when instead of cutting a piece of string holding the present on the tree he cut the tree lights instead and nearly electrocuted himself in the process.  After that he lost the job and my Nan took over the responsibility from thereon. 

There was always a stocking hanging on the fireplace that had the same things in it every year.  This was a real stocking mind, not one of the modern pre-packed things that we get today.  Grandad was a bus conductor before they went one man operated and every year he used to collect shiny new penny coins and each of us would get a cash bag full of the gleaming treasure.  There was an apple and an orange and a few sweets, a dot-to-dot book and perhaps a matchbox car or two.