These days, more than anything else, the festive period makes me nostalgic for Christmases past. Most of these are times growing up in the English Midlands. Although my Mom & Dad weren’t well off they always made this time of year feel special.
The twelve things I remember most are:
- Getting a canary yellow shirt as a gift and my Dad saying “All the girls will be after you now”.
- Receiving a portable cassette tape machine and recording a family rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. The tape must have looped because on playback “….one horse open sleigh” was repeated at the end. This must have been how sampling was invented!
- Finding where my presents were hidden in my parent’s bedroom and having to feign surprise on Christmas day.
- Feeling grown up (I must have been about 12) by going to the pub with my Dad and Grandad. I drank shandy.
- Dad offering me a cigar. I refused.
- Mom getting hot and bothered while preparing Christmas lunch.
- Opening a box of gifts with my brother before breakfast, then distributing presents to the ‘grown-ups’ later in the morning.
- Watching the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special on TV with all the family.
- Christmas in England soon after my first marriage collapsed – feeling I’d rather be on my own than with my family.
- My first Christmas day lunch in Italy – eating cappelletti, vegetables, not roast and panettone – feeling as stuffed as a turkey.
- My daughter getting baptised on boxing day in Italy 1995 – an event organised to please the relatives rather than to praise the Lord.
- A general feeling of excitement as a kid I no longer feel.