Ghosts of Christmas Past

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I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break.

Isn’t it nice to meet up with your family during the festive break, share stories and talk about traditions, some of which you inherit and some that you create for yourselves as your life moves on?

After Christmas dinner in our house this year we were talking and I began to reminisce about what it was like when I was a lad - how my dad and mum always went downstairs first on Christmas morning to see if “he” had been.

It was only when I was in my twenties that my dad told me why this was - so he would be able to see our faces when we walked into the living room where our presents had been laid out.  What a great idea and I had never realised.

This year, when I began to talk about Christmas stockings I suddenly became the butt of all the jokes.

The tradition in our house when we were children was that, every Christmas Eve, we would put a stocking on the end of the bed (I think they were my mum’s old football socks) knowing that they would be filled with small but exciting goodies.

When we awoke in the morning we would take our stockings to my parents’ room and feverishly dig into the contents with excitement before going downstairs for the main event.

One year, I suppose I would have been about nine at the time, I awoke in the dead of night in pitch darkness and felt down at the end of my bed to see if my stocking had been filled.

Feeling it all heavy with surprises I dug my hand in and fished about quietly trying not to awake my brother.

It was dark and I couldn’t see anything but it was easy to work out that the toe was stuffed with a couple of walnuts and a satsuma. 

I never understood why there were always walnuts and satsumas in there.  I will put it down to my mum being worried about us getting our 5-a-day - not to her being tight.

Anyway, inside I could feel several odd shaped items but one stood out as it felt like a lipstick in my hand.

I removed it and, in the dark, pulled off the lid and the found I could twist the base; just like a lipstick.  Obviously the next thing to do was to put it to my mouth, naturally!

In retelling this I was asked a question which had not, in all my years, occurred to me – “Why would your mum buy you a lipstick for Christmas?”

I was gobsmacked - I had never thought about this. As a nine year old I had found a lipstick shaped object in my stocking and never questioned for a moment why my mum may have put it there.

Anyway, back to the tale.

So, I put it to my lips and it tasted awful. It felt dreadful, all sticky and weird.

I wiped my mouth on my arm, pushed everything back into the stocking and tried to go back to sleep.

In the morning, stockings in hand, my brother, my sister and I rushed into our parents room and began to go through the contents of our stockings. I was more than a little curious as to what I had been secretly examining during the night.

In my stocking was, amongst other things, a Pritt Stick.  Yes, I had painted my lips with paper glue!

Now, I thought this was a funny story with a pleasant ending until, in the retelling, my 16 year old son looked at me very quizzically and asked “Why would someone buy you a stick of glue as a Christmas present?”

I had to explain that when I was nine Pritt was an amazing invention and that before that glue was only available in bottles and tins with a brush in the lid.

Glue in a lipstick type tube was a miracle of science fiction and I was a very happy nine year old (but I would never suggest you try it as a lipstick).

How times have changed.

by Chris Allan

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