I love writing this series and thought I’d take a little festive trip down memory lane and reminisce about Christmas. Isn’t Christmas magical when you’re a kid?

I think Christmas has changed a lot from when I was little, probably to do with with the type of presents that children get nowadays. When we were kids there were no mobile phones, no such thing as PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, no iPads or iPods. Life sure was simpler. A lot more money is spent over Christmas now and I feel it is much more commercialised, whether that’s because I’m an adult and looking at it from a different perspective I don’t know.

Anyway I don’t have loads of memories of Christmas, just snippets of things, I don’t actually remember any Christmasses when our Dad was still at home, he left when I was about eight I think. That’s quite sad I have no memories of then, I don’t know why…

We always used to have an artificial tree and it had these things on the end that looked like chocolate raisins, goodness knows what that was about! My mum used to let my sister and I decorate the tree, which we used to love. Our decorations weren’t really all colour coordinated like the ones you can buy now. Well perhaps they were – a lot of them were like little characters made out of fir cones and chocolate decorations. My sister still has some of the decorations so it’s lovely to see them on her tree when I visit over Christmas. We would stick all the decorations on then smother it in tinsel and lametta. Lametta was this thin shiny ribbon like stuff that you hung from your tree in abundance. I’m really not sure what it was supposed to look like, icicles maybe? Perhaps you know!

I have fond memories of visiting my godmother, I really remember they had a ginger cat called Mog, who used to lie in front of the fire and they always had a little bowl of chocolates underneath the Christmas tree. The adults used to drink Snowballs and we were allowed to make our own drinks on the Soda stream and for other people – that was such an important job, filling the bottles with fizz! On the way home we used to admire all the colourful lights on people’s houses – I remember it so well!

From what I remember on Christmas Day, we had a sack – perhaps it was easier to stuff presents into a sack rather than a stocking – who knows! In our sack we would, have without fail, a satsuma and some chocolate and then probably a couple of little things. We would go downstairs and after my mum had heated sausage rolls and mince pies for breakfast we were each given our pile of presents and then opened these amongst mince pie and sausage roll scoffing! We had this fancy thing that went on top of the sideboard with nuts and crisps in. Actually it wasn’t fancy at all because it was made of plastic but it was quite cool because at the end of the feasting session if there were any left you could push it together to keep the food fresh.

I remember one year getting a bike from my Gran that was just the BEST present ever! It was a Raleigh bike and I really loved it! We would get games and toy cars, maybe clothes for Sindy, fuzzy felt, I remember getting a new duvet set when ‘continental quilts’ had just been introduced, that was really special. We would get a selection box from our neighbours two doors down, who we called uncle and auntie but they weren’t our uncle and auntie…every year we would get one of those long tubes filled with jelly tots or fruit pastilles. Wow times have changed so much haven’t they because I could scoff one of them in a weekend now and that probably would have lasted me ages and ages!

My Gran would often have Christmas Day with us and her and my mum would have a couple of glasses of sherry. As a young teenager I was allowed a cinzano and lemonade IN THE MORNING, it probably wasn’t very strong though. I don’t recall people drinking wine, although there was always a bottle of Mateus Portuguese rose in a bottle shaped basket thing on the sideboard. It was always there though so guess no one liked it! The posh cutlery would come out at Christmas which personally I didn’t like, I think it was silver and it tasted funny. We would pull our crackers and wear our hats and save the wishbone to pull when it was dried out enough.

A few hours later we would eat turkey sandwiches, Christmas cake and nuts and raisins and other snacky things. I think then we would play with our new toys or watch TV all together in the living room. No TVs in bedrooms in those days.

Life really was much simpler in those days but I think it’s lovely that people carry traditions on in their families.

As the year ends I would like to thank you all for your support and friendship. I feel so privileged to have met some truly amazing people in the blogosphere ❤️

I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, peace and inner happiness. I know Christmas can be a very difficult time of year for some people so if that is you, I wish you good thoughts, peace and inner happiness.