Whether you’re for or against wind turbines, pole dance clubs and MPs enjoying freebies, maximum yuletide merriment to all and each.
For a man as close to the exit as I am, Christmas inevitably provokes memories of earlier times. Christmases then were very different to today. There wasn’t the range of goodies in the shops for a start, and many of us hadn’t the money to buy much that was.
Still, we enjoyed ourselves in our way. On Christmas Eve us kids played eenie-meenie-mini-mo to see who got to wear the coat, then Mum took us up to the High Street to admire the array of turkeys, chickens, geese and duck displayed outside the butchers.
One year the butcher yelled at us for touching and when Dad heard about it – he was out that year – he brought one home for us to stroke and prod to our hearts content.
He was very thoughtful like, our Dad. Mum couldn’t cook it of course, Dad had flogged off the oven the last time. So he exchanged it for beer at the Foul Firkin instead.
So he had a good time as well and we were glad of that after he’d gone away again.
On Christmas morning, after we’d dunked our breakfast crust under the yard tap and chewed it slowly to make it last, each of us was allowed to open our present.
It was the same one every year of course, but that added to our excitement – knowing we had a whole two days to play with it before it was carefully wrapped and tucked away for another year. Mine was a wooden block with a letter on each side; A,B,C,D,E,F.
It was how I learned my alphabet, part of it at least. Though I did get it in the wrong order.
A good educational toy, as Mum used to say.
After we’d gone out and sold our boxes of matches we all returned to our Christmas Dinner. Mum stoked up the horse manure fire and boiled water in the bucket, dangling in the discarded vegetables she’d found under the market stalls.
The number of vegetables was truly marvellous at Christmas, and the flavour of the soup was limited only by the amount of string available.
And dunking the vegetables like that meant we could enjoy the delicious soup again on Boxing Day.
In the evening we all went to watch the carriages of the rich folk jingling along to their parties. And collect the dung ready for next years fires. I was responsible for the bucket and Jeremiah had the shovel, him being the eldest. But no-one minded that. The manure was wonderfully warm.
And so to bed, offering thanks to Baby Jesus and our Own Dear Queen, for all the joy of our humble lives.
Image: Jeremy Burgin under CC BY 2.0
