Your childhood Christmases

[Gemini]

Daisy talking about her Christmas experiences growing up prompted this thread.

What are your memories, of the day , presents, people?

(Daisy you could copy and paste that maybe if you wanted to join this thread without writing it all again?)

I loved Christmas as a child. We had an artificial Christmas tree,I had presents and a lovely Christmas dinner with mum and dad .

We didn't go anywhere and no one came to us, and I had no children to play with. I believe and hope my children had a more fun time!

However, I was happy and I suppose I didn't know what I was missing, as in family Christmases.

We always went to the pantomime on Boxing Day, and that remains a love of mine and part of my Christmas.

We didn't have a lot of money and my presents would have been quite modest, but it was all exciting to me!
My most memorable present was my beautiful black doll Susan, who I had asked for and they had to go to Leeds to find!

I still have her. She is in the loft and needs her limbs restringing.

[Oma]

Gem
My black doll was called Mandy 😁

We didn’t have anything fancy basic things like books a doll etc ,
We we’re too poor for anything else,
But we always had a lovely dinner and Christmas pud,
A scraggy artificial tree and my pet hate streamers and balloons,
Even as a child I hated streamers and paper chains,
My Dad would sit for hours making paper chains ,

We never went out or had people around that I can remember.

My most memorable Christmas was the year the round table charity delivered two boxes on Christmas Eve ,
In one box was food plus a chicken in a can😁

In the other smaller box was toys, I got a little tin sewing machine,
I loved that sewing machine I think that started my love of sewing and crafts , I was about 5ish at the time.
My sister got a doll , she always hated dolls and wouldn’t even look at it😁

I can’t remember what my older sister or brother got , being teenagers by then I’m not sure they got anything to be honest.


I don’t really remember any other Christmas days as such till I was older .

We had nothing but we were happy and loved 😁❤️

[Nanto2girls]

My Christmas was much the same as Gem and Oma.
We didn't go out and nobody came to us for Christmas dinner.
My presents usually were an annual,maybe a doll and new dress or new pyjamas.
Our tree was artificial as well, but we always had chocolates and crackers on the tree,along with the baubles.

[Gemini]

A selection box was a great treat I remember

[Daisy]

I don't remember much about Christmas when I was very tiny. I remember having a teddy bear when I was 5, and it terrified me, sitting on the end of my bed on Christmas morning. Like Gem, we used to go to a pantomime on Boxing Day and we'd probably see some of my father's family one day or the other.

When I was 6 my parents bought a shop - a typical corner shop of the period (1949). From then on Christmas was a nightmare as my parents worked their socks off in difficult circumstances, and consequently they'd get to Christmas Day exhausted, irritable and usually falling out. As an only child I'd watch on and weep inside.

However, I would always have new books in my stocking, and I would bury myself in those. Some years we visited family (usually on Boxing Day) or they came to us and we'd play cards and I'd be allowed a little glass of Babycham! Other years we'd visit friends who lived down the road.

I remember one year having a new dress - red taffeta with a circular skirt and little lacey cap sleeves. I felt very grown up.

I saw lots of different selection boxes as we sold them in the shop, and it was always a point of interest to see what picture would be on things like tins of biscuits and boxes of chocolates. It made a difference to how many we'd sell! I'd usually get a very small selection box, but I didn't like most of the bars and sweets in them. (I still don't!)

I always helped my Dad to decorate the Christmas trees - artificial ones. We had one for the shop window and one for the living room. I've still got a few of the decorations from those days.

[Gemini]

That dress sounds beautiful Daisy. I would have loved that!

Her childhood Christmases were one of the things my mum regularly talked about, into her old age and with most of her memory gone.
I know all the various baby clothes items her mum made for the annual baby doll!

Mum loved Christmas trees and usually had hers up long before we did!
She talked about her mum, walking back from the market each year with a Christmas tree, then her dad decorating it with the children watching. She said they had a Fruit and Flowers set of coloured lights. Mum was born in 1928 and lights on a tree were still rare I think.

[Daisy]

Gem, I think lights were quite rare then, so those coloured lights must have been special. It's reminded me about a friend and I setting an artificial Christmas tree alight! I always used to go an play at her house on a Saturday when my parents were busy at the shop. Their Christmas tree was on the sideboard in their living room. I think we were about 11 or 12. Her mum was out, her dad at work, and we thought the tree would look nice with a lit candle on it. We didn't expect it to set the whole tree alight!! My friend grabbed it down on to the floor and I ran into the kitchen, got a bowl of water and threw it over the tree. Luckily only one branch was destroyed so we rearranged it so the space was at the back. But of course the carpet was wet. I still feel a bit guilty that we blamed her dog for the damp patch!!

[Gemini]

Good Lord Daisy! Quick thinking blaming the poor dog for the wet patch though!

There must have been many fire incidents in the days when lit candles were the way to light a tree I imagine.

[Oma]

Aww the poor dog , it won’t have known what it was getting told off for 🤣

[Plantaholic]

My elder sisters were married after the war but I was still only 5/6 years old. Christmas was always at our house. We didn’t have fridges so my mother would be cooking on Christmas Eve. We used to have a small barrel of bear but not many other drinks. On Christmas Eve, the presents would be wrapped, my brother and I crept down the stairs once and heard the adults wrapping the presents. We had a pillow case on the end of the bed for Father Christmas.

[Gemini]

Plant, I had a pillow case at the end of the bed for presents too.

My mum and dad believed in cooking the turkey very slowly overnight. I imagine that must have made it very dry, but the smell of roasting turkey as we woke up was one of the lovely memories of Christmas

[Daisy]

Aww the poor dog , it won’t have known what it was getting told off for 🤣

I imagine my friend's mum realised instantly what had happened - we didn't think about the inevitable smell of burning!!!

We never had turkey when I was a child. It varied - between goose, capon, chicken or beef.

I had a pillow case for presents, as well.

Oma, I remember making endless paper chains, and at junior school we made even more plus paper lanterns, and streamers from crepe paper. At 'big' school we did lots of fund-raising for charity for Christmas. Different year groups would do different things. The only ones I can remember now were covering textbooks with brown paper, Christmas post for cards within the school and decorating the hall and crush hall.

[Plantaholic]

My father raised the birds for Christmas dinner but he couldn’t kill them so a local butcher did it for him. I have memories of sitting in the shed with my mother plucking them. A Rupert Annual present is another memory. On a sad note, my sister was taken ill one Boxing Day and died on New Years Day, she was only 29 and had one young child.