A 70s Christmas

When I was planning my Blogmas entries, I thought this would be one of the easier entries to write. I mean, I lived through it, and it has been endlessly replayed in so many ways. ‘Aye, there’s the rub’ as Shakespeare once wrote. When you drift back in your memories, it isn’t always clear what is the individual memory of Christmas past, and which is the cultural memory that we are now familiar with? I wanted to make this entry as personal as possible, and to reflect what Christmas was actually like for those of us who were children at the time. As a result this entry is a fragmentary kaleidoscope of memories.

The build-up

As a youngster in the 70s, I do remember the build-up to Christmas, in the shops particularly, being a lot shorter than it is now. I suppose we would be eyeing up possible gifts from late October onwards, but the real build up didn’t get under way until after Bonfire Night fireworks had finished.

At school, the main focus was on the carol service, especially if the class you were in was presenting part of it. I remember that my primary school St Andrews went to a nearby church for our service, and it was a large church so the children chosen to read would need a strong voice to fill it. Our headmaster, who had somewhat idiosyncratic methods, decided that the way to discover if our voices carried was to shut the door to his study and position potential readers two flights of stairs below him! Apparently, he could hear me loud and clear over that distance and through a closed door (!) so I had the opportunity to read a lesson in the church during my final year at the school. The carol service was full of songs that we all knew, songs that we sang year after year. I am sure that my love for carols directly stems from those three years at St Andrews. As well as that, we made Christmas decorations, very inexpertly in my case, although I have strong memories of making a bell using a deodorant can lid covered in foil containing bells made from balls of foil around two pieces of wire topped off with a red bow. That decoration appeared on the Christmas tree for a few years, which I considered a success! We had a post box in the school hall in to which we posted our cards for our classmates and other pupils. Although I loved the feeling of a card being delivered by a postie – a prefect – I do remember certain pupils in the class getting way more cards than others. It certainly put you in a clear pecking order in terms of popularity! Finally, I remember the class parties with small sandwiches, crisps, jelly, games and party hats. They were always on the last afternoon and sent us off on our Christmas holidays in the right way.

Outside of school, our cub pack went to a local church for the Christingle service on one Sunday in Advent. The sight, smell and feeling of those services has never left me. There was something magical about a church lit only by candles, and something even more magical about just the children singing Away in a Manger. My final memory of carol singing is that a couple of years whilst I was at primary school, I went out with the cubs and we went carol singing door to door. We probably weren’t very good, but I remember the feeling of the cold on my face and the lift we got when a household gave us money for the cub pack charity.

The presents

Well, there is the first element of a child’s Christmas, the presents. A few gifts stand out. My kaleidoscope was one of my joys as a young child, and I could sit there for hours watching the shapes form, change, collapse and reform over and over again. I remember a few other presents, but chief amongst them was my cassette recorder and two tapes which I received on the Christmas I was nine years old. I have blogged about that particular Christmas in this article as it is one of the strongest memories of my entire childhood. As technology started to become more accessible I remember a couple of cutting edge gifts that I received. The first was Pong, the original computer game, and the second was a hand held Space Invaders console game. They were both incredibly primitive, but they were incredibly exciting to a child in the 70s. The final thing I remember about childhood Christmas presents are of course the stockings, which genuinely did have satsumas in the toes and much bigger and better selection boxes with full size chocolates and packs of Smarties, Jelly Tots and Tiger Tots. I really miss the latter!

Christmas Day

Now, bear in mind I was an only child, so I never really felt the same magic on the day itself that others might have felt. Once the presents had been opened, the day itself was similar to a Sunday for our family. My Dad often went to his local pub, which always had a lunchtime session on Christmas Day, and most years he invited friends of his who were going to be on their own otherwise. It was his quiet, very personal way of marking a day whose message meant a lot to him. Every Christmas lunch started off with Baxter’s Royal Game soup, so ever since it is the one soup that is associated with celebrations for me! We would always watch the Queen’s Speech of course, a tradition I still maintain with my own family. After that, it was all about the TV. In those days, of course, there were three channels, and BBC1 ruled supreme, so my memories are of those programmes. Morecambe and Wise were, of course, the undoubted kings of festive television, but actually it is Mike Yarwood who holds the 70s crown in terms of audience size. In 1977, his Christmas show had 21.4 million viewers, beating the Morecambe and Wise special by just under 100,000 viewers.

Thinking back to the 1970s, the Christmas was simpler and, probably, less oriented towards children, although as an only child that could well be just my own personal experience. It shaped my adult attitude to the festival and also shaped the type of Christmas I wanted to create for my family for a host of reasons. The one thing that has stayed the same is that sense of magic that lies at the heart of it.