Tuesday, 10 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 11

 


A Special Edition for Christmas...

It’s such a time-honoured tradition that it scarcely seems worth a mention – the seasonal episode of your favourite series, broadcast during Christmas week, often on the day itself. It goes back almost as far as television itself, but only really got going in the 1970s.

The trouble with Christmas episodes, as far as broadcasters are concerned, is that they don’t fit nicely into a run of repeats, which could end up being scheduled at any time of year. If there’s a Christmas episode in the run, what do you do? Omit it, ignore it or take the trouble to schedule it at the appropriate time of year? In America, where episodic television series are sold into syndication after their network debuts, this would have been something of a headache. There certainly were Christmas episodes of television series as far back as the 1950s – I’ve seen an example of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, dating to that era – but not all series played the festive card. Of the 144 episodes of The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt Bilko), produced from 1955 to 1959, there isn’t a single Christmas episode. Granted, there are a couple where the platoon is snowed in by blizzards, but at Fort Baxter it’s a case of, to paraphrase Narnia, ‘sometimes winter, never Christmas.’

Here in Britain, we’ve got used to Christmas Day television: the schedule will invariably comprise family films, a brand-new children’s animation, and ‘Christmas episodes’ of everything from Dr. Who to Call the Midwife. These Christmas Day episodes aren’t always set at Christmas, though, a fact which I’ve often found disappointing – such episode are ‘special’ only in terms of their length (over an hour for a standard sitcom) and the transmission date. To me, a bona fide Christmas episode has to be set in the festive season. This, of course, presents production teams with obvious problems: most Christmas episodes tend to be filmed in the summer or early autumn, and any location work immediately gives the game away: I’ve seen so-called ‘Christmas’ episodes, purporting to take place during December, where the trees are still in full leaf. So it’s easy to understand why some of them avoid a seasonal setting.

Looking back through some BBC listings from the very early 60s, the Christmas week line-up usually featured a sitcom or two, although not in the profusion that we see today. As for drama series, it was rare indeed to find festive episodes that far back, with one of the first examples I can find coming in 1961 with Maigret’s A Crime for Christmas, broadcast on Boxing night.

The following year saw in a new tradition: rather than complete episodes of popular series, short sketches of ten to fifteen minutes’ duration would be bundled together, with links from an avuncular presenter, in this case Eamonn Andrews. Although in later years the accent would be on comedy, this first edition of BBC Television’s Christmas Night With the Stars, lasting ninety-five minutes, found room for music spots from the likes of Russ Conway, Kenneth McKellar and Adam Faith; variety in the form of Billy Cotton’s popular Band Show; light drama from Dixon of Dock Green: and even an edition of Juke Box Jury – albeit the latter was, according to the Radio Times, a comedy sketch featuring characters from sitcoms Citizen James and Hugh and I.

ITV did something similar, with their ‘All Star Comedy Carnival’, a kind of fun-size grab bag of sitcom goodies which peaked in the early 70s with contents including On the BusesPlease Sir! Doctor in the HouseFather Dear Father and a host of others. By the early 80s, though, this festive tradition was all but played out, with its last gasp coming on Monday 27 December 1982. BBC1’s The Funny Side of Christmas was exactly like its 70s counterparts, a line-up of short Christmas sketches from the likes of The Two RonniesYes Prime MinisterLast of the Summer Wine and Butterflies. I remember watching this at the time and being surprised at the inclusion of a Reginald Perrin sketch – there hadn’t been a Reginald Perrin series since 1979, which suggested that this particular festive segment had been lying on the shelf for some time. Equally head-scratching was the BBC’s decision to repeat the compilation on Monday 22 August of the following year!

Whilst many series have celebrated Christmas on numerous occasions, the best of the festive episodes tended to do it once and once only: there’s only one Christmas Good Life, and it couldn’t have been bettered. Equally, there’s only a solitary seasonal episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, unique for the one and only appearance in the series of Rodney Bewes’ beard. Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em served up a bona fide set-at-Christmas extended special in 1974, but the following year’s episode was poor stuff by comparison, much of it being taken up with a drawn-out segment featuring David Jacobs encountering some of Frank’s attempts at DIY. The series’ third Christmas special was one of the ‘not set at Christmas’ variety and focused on Frank taking flying lessons, but still failed to live up to the standard of that first year.

Porridge clocked up two – 1975’s No Way Out saw a planned Christmas escape while the following year’s edition, The Desperate Hours had Fletcher caught up in a hostage situation, while Steptoe and Son didn't get a Christmas episode until the show was more than ten years old – then two came along at once. Last of the Summer Wine, on the other hand, just kept on churning them out. An early example, A Merry Heatwave had the characters celebrating Christmas in the summer – writer Roy Clarke must have thought he could have his Christmas cake and eat it.

Dr. Who has presented Christmas episodes on numerous occasions since its return in 2005, some of them snow-covered, others not: but the Doctor’s first brush with the festive season came all of fifty-nine years ago. It happened that on this particular year, 1965, Christmas Day fell on a Saturday, and Saturday was Dr. Who day. The production team therefore decided to interrupt the ongoing epic The Daleks’ Master Plan with a lighthearted romp that saw the series regulars involved in a brush with the law before a madcap chase around a silent film studio. To cap it all, William Hartnell broke the fourth wall, raising a glass and wishing a merry Christmas to everyone at home! Opinion is divided as to whether this was planned or ad libbed, but given that the programme was recorded in advance of transmission, an unwanted ad lib could surely have been edited out. The episode no longer exists, but you can view a reconstruction from off-air photos here:

Dr. Who: The Feast of Stephen

Gerry Anderson’s puppets, on the other hand, did what they were told. His Supermarionation series clocked up three Christmas episodes, beginning with Stingray, whose festive edition was first broadcast on 20 December 1964. Thunderbirds also managed a Christmas edition, first seen by viewers in the ATV Midland region on Christmas Day 1966. I happen to remember Christmas Day 1966 very well – it was a brilliantly sunny day, the first time I’d ever seen blue skies at Christmas – and while I can remember the bicycle I had bought for me and various other presents, I’ve got no recollection of Thunderbirds featuring anywhere in the mix. Quite likely, given the nature of Christmas Day, it got overlooked, and I don’t remember being aware that there even was a Christmas episode of Thunderbirds until some years later. 

Captain Scarlet and Christmas simply weren’t a good mix: the tone of the series was just too dark to admit of a Christmas edition, although there were a couple set in snowy landscapes that often seemed to get broadcast close to the festive season. Joe 90, however, with its warmer, character-driven feel went all Christmassy the following year with an episode that feels almost like a puppet version of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas.

And with that, puppets and Christmas parted company. The Secret Service would have been a natural, but with only 13 episodes in the run, there wasn’t room for a seasonal outing for Father Unwin. Gerry’s next Christmas episode wouldn’t come until 1983's Terrahawks with the episode A Christmas Miracle, going out on Christmas Eve.

As viewers drift away from conventional broadcast television to streaming services, will the tradition of Christmas episodes continue? Almost certainly: the addition of a bit of snow and holly to any popular TV series will no doubt remain popular for as long as Christmas itself continues to be celebrated. One day, though, perhaps not far off, there may no longer be such a thing as a ‘Christmas Day schedule’ and viewers will simply pick their festive viewing from an on-screen menu. This, of course, will mean an end to another festive tradition, that of the Double Issue of the Radio Times. For more on that story, have a look back at my blog entries of last year:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2023/12/christmas-at-radio-times.html


"I bring you tidings of great joy... put another bag on." Frank Spencer does the nativity, Christmas 1974



Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 10

 


What's in Your Cracker?

Around 1965 – it might have been earlier or later – I pulled a Christmas cracker and out dropped what looked like a plastic bat. It was black, had two ‘horns’ in the centre, and wings on either side. What on earth was it? I think our dad probably demonstrated how to use it: it was a plastic moustache, and the ‘horns’ were there so you could fix it into your nostrils.

These daft novelty items – still manufactured to this day – were but one of any number of pieces of plastic tat you’d find in the average Christmas cracker, alongside rings, small combs, cowboys and even a kind of useless magnifying glass. These days, plastic is the antichrist, and there’s actually a petition on Change.org to ban the sale of Christmas crackers with plastic tat inside them, which strikes me as being somewhat joyless and Scrooge-like: I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to be flushed down the toilet to pollute our waterways and oceans. Are they?

Anyway, if they’re not going to our oceans, then where exactly do the old Christmas cracker novelties go? I’ll tell you the answer to that: I’ve got them. There’s a drawer in my dining table into which I put any cracker premiums when Christmas is over. In there, you’ll find items such as miniature playing cards, doll-sized notebooks and pencils, interlocking metal puzzles and no end of tabletop spinners.

In a previous post I mentioned our so-called ‘rummagy boxes’ whose contents comprised a whole host of Christmas cracker toys. Going through them, I would always turn up tiny playing cards which I knew dated to around 1966, and many different examples of the plastic bat-moustache. Christmas crackers must have supported a whole industry out in Hong Kong. Alongside the obligatory toy, you got a ‘motto’ or cheap joke on a tiny scroll of paper and a tissue paper hat, time-honoured traditions dating back a century or more.


Contemporary cracker toys, 2013-2023: compare them with the 1960s and 70s items below.

It’s fairly well known that the first Christmas crackers were invented by British baker and confectioner Tom Smith as a means of reviving a flagging range of sweets, initially using quite small wrappers. Smith was inspired by a crackling log on the fire to add the ‘banger’ element, which meant upscaling his original design somewhat. The bon-bons were eventually replaced with small trinkets, and the cracker as we know it today had been born.

You get what you pay for with a box of Christmas crackers. Anything under a tenner, and you can expect the familiar round of plastic tat; between ten and fifteen pounds, you might find a small metal comb or puzzle of some kind, maybe a couple of dice, or a random metal object that appears to serve no immediate purpose. Over twenty pounds, and I think one is entitled to expect a better standard of novelty, but the sky’s the limit where crackers are concerned, and super deluxe contents push prices towards the stratosphere.

Of all the items that ever dropped out of a Christmas cracker, the most useful to me by far has been a set of tiny screwdrivers, of about the right scale to be used by Brains out of Thunderbirds. Despite their size, they’re fully functional and have been put to good use on many occasions, tightening the unusually tiny screws you sometimes find on guitars, or pairs of spectacles.

As to the jokes, they seldom rise to the level of The Beano. For the best Christmas cracker joke, we have to look to the festive edition of The Good LifeSilly But It’s Fun (1977) wherein one of Tom Good’s home-made crackers memorably contained the information that ‘the ooh-ah bird is so called because it lays square eggs’, utterly mystifying its recipient, Margo Leadbetter...

In my childhood, crackers were invariably wrapped in crepe paper, but today they're more likely to be thick cardboard, which doesn't always break as easily. The banger remains exactly as it always was: two thin strips of card, coated at the join with a tiny amount of gunpowder – yes, actual gunpowder. The amount is so small that only a modest amount of heat is required to set it off, and the friction of pulling the two halves apart is always sufficient. So now you know – there's gunpowder on your festive dining table...






Monday, 9 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 9

 


Snow on the Masthead

No self-respecting comic ever missed out on the chance to do a celebration number, and Christmas was always a time to expect festive issues. Normally, these would appear on the week in which Christmas Day fell, but occasionally you might find some seasonal editions the week before and even the week after Christmas when a few titles went in for New Year numbers.

My first encounters with Christmas comic numbers would have been in the early 60s, when we were bought various nursery titles such as Playhour, Teddy Bear, Pippin and Playland. Not only did the characters have Christmassy adventures (invariably set in snow-covered winter wonderlands), but just to make the comic extra special, the masthead was usually decorated for the season, maybe adding a sprig of holly or two and of course that all-important covering of the white stuff.

I was minded to wonder when this tradition got going – British comic papers don’t go back much beyond the turn of the last century, with one of the earliest being the adult satire Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. Ally is credited as having the first Christmas comic number back in 1884, but the masthead was devoid of snow – the font was rather too slender and cursive to allow for much of an accumulation in any case. The earliest example of snow on the masthead I’ve been able to find was Jester & Wonder, cover dated 17 December 1910, and illustrated in one of Denis Gifford’s impeccably researched volumes alongside various other examples from the same era, including FireflyMerry and Bright and Chips. The comic weekly Puck even offered its readers a ‘Grand Xmas Double Number’ in 1913, anticipating the Radio Times’ own festive tradition by fifty-six years.

One comic always seemed to consider itself above such festive frippery – you’d never have known it was Christmas to judge from the covers of TV21. In 1967, the editor caved in and ran to a snowy scene featuring Captain Scarlet’s SPV and a panel wishing readers a Merry Christmas, but it was the only time in the comic’s history: curious considering that Gerry Anderson’s television series often went in for Christmas episodes. Other adventure papers were rather more inclined to adopt a snow-lined masthead if nothing else, with titles like TigerLion, Pow! and Smash! all showing evidence of sub-zero precipitation around their title blocks.

Eagle usually managed to add a few holly wreaths and a sprinkling of snow to its Christmas week cover, even if Dan Dare rarely acknowledged the time of year – he was usually out in space somewhere, and it’s unlikely the Mekon went in for yuletide festivities on Venus.

My first sighting of a Christmas number of a British ‘funny paper’ came in 1970, when my brother and myself were bought the Beano and Dandy. Both of these have survived, and are excellent examples of seasonal comic celebrations, the Beano especially so.

Of the 1970s’ crop of comics, Look-In went all snowy in December 1971 with a Christmassy scene courtesy of cover-artist-in-residence Arnaldo Putzu, but Countdown kept up the austere tradition of TV21: no snow, no holly, nothing. TV Comic did better with its covers, whilst IPC’s titles were guaranteed to have snow and all the trimmings come Christmas week.

Scroll down for a gallery of covers, sourced from my personal collection (click on the images for a larger version):






















Sunday, 8 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 8

 


“’Tay Christmas till I say so.”

So runs a familiar internet meme of recent years, accompanied by the grinning, rubicund face of the spirit of Christmas past himself – otherwise known as Noddy Holder. Spend a quarter of an hour in any supermarket around this time of year, and you’re sure to hear Slade’s evergreen Christmas hit being played in the background. When you do (and you will), take a moment to reflect on the fact that the song is now fifty-one years old, which is the equivalent, in 1973, of listening to a song from 1922. We were singing carols of more recent vintage than that in our school choir.

So, imagine yourself in a supermarket at Christmas 1973. If a fifty-one year old song came on the tannoy, who might have been singing it? Well, the top selling artist of 1922 was one Fanny Brice, closely followed by Paul Whiteman and Al Jolson. Would any of those songs have been familiar to listeners fifty years later? Surprisingly, yes: the chart includes ‘Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye)’, ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Way Down Yonder in new Orleans’. Conclusion: Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everyone’ has joined the pantheon of popular music standards: but we knew that anyway.

What we don’t find in that hundred-and-two-year-old top fifty are any Christmas records. Not that there weren’t any around – a few Christmas hits from 1922 include ‘When the Christmas Chimes are Ringing’ by Lewis James, and Ernest Hare’s novelty waxing ‘Santa Claus Hides in the Phonograph’ (not a song so much as a recitation with a brief rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’). So Noddy and co weren’t exactly breaking new ground.

In recent years, the race for the Christmas number one has become a tedious face-off between talent show winners and downloads, and the bar for quality (never very high) has been brought almost to the ground by some particularly worthless endeavours. Was there someone called manbaby or similar? I neither know nor care.

Back when Slade were current chart-toppers, the idea of a Christmas single still had a certain novelty value. There had been a flurry of entries around the late 50s and early 60s, courtesy of Harry Belafonte (‘Mary’s Boy Child’), Nina and Frederick (‘Little Donkey’) and Adam Faith (‘Lonely Pup in a Christmas Shop’), but since then artists had shown no interest in yuletide waxings. It was all about to change.

Slade’s Christmas single was the icing on the cake of what would prove to be the band’s most successful year – they’d already scored two number ones and a number three hit – but it would be the band’s last release to hit the top spot. When it entered the charts on 15 December 1973 – straight in at number one for the third time that year – I doubt any of us thought it would still be getting regular airplay half a century later. Noddy’s rationale for doing the record was simple – people needed cheering up in a time of economic doom and gloom: strikes, runs on the pound, power cuts, you name it. Did he see it as a potential pension fund? Possibly not, although the thought may well have occurred to fellow Midlander Roy Wood, whose ‘I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day’ began with the jingling not of sleigh bells but a cash register. Roy knew exactly what he was doing. Wizzard’s Christmas confection stalled at number four, but has been doing very nicely ever since.

Two glam rockers going head-to-head with Christmas pop songs was bound to have repercussions, and they arrived the following year in the shape of Mud, whose dreary Elvis-by-numbers knock-off ‘Lonely This Christmas’ secured them the number one spot in 1974. Hard on their heels came the Wombles’ ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ and further down the festive charts we find Showaddywaddy’s lumpen effort ‘Hey Mr. Christmas’ and Gilbert O’Sullivan’s pensive (and predictable) ‘Christmas Song’. The lid was off the bottle of Christmas pop and the contents were fairly fizzing up the hit parade…

For me, 1973 was the year of Slade: I even had a poster of the band on my bedroom wall. But I was about to lose most of my interest in contemporary pop on account of something that happened during that festive season: the BBC showed the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night on Boxing Day morning, the first time I’d seen it. I knew the Beatles well enough from back in the 60s, but it was only now that I began to take a more serious interest in the band and their music. By Christmas 1974, glam rock (which was dead in the water anyway) would be kicked into the long grass, and my presents included no fewer than three Beatles LPs.

It wasn’t just me, either: after their incredible success in 1973, Slade began to slip, although they made a creditable number 2 later the following year with ‘Far, Far, Away.’ Leaving the UK to try and crack America (without much success), the band lost sight of their fanbase, many of whom defected to a certain tartan scarf-wearing Glaswegian ensemble, and hits were suddenly harder to come by. The feature film Flame (released in January 1975) didn’t help, with its downbeat portrayal of the seedier side of the music business. The band Flame may have been a fiction, but when they split up at the end of the movie, it might as well have been the real thing – as some fans inevitably perceived. Flame was a daring move – up to then, pop music films had mostly been lightweight nonsense – but what Slade really needed was a cheerful Carry On-style romp rather than a dour, darkly-lit exposé of pop’s crass commercialism.

Luckily, they had secured their financial futures for eternity back at Christmas 1973.





Saturday, 7 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 7

 


Queuing up the Stairs...

In the 1960s, Birmingham was well served with Department Stores – Lewis’s, Rackhams, Greys, The Co-Operative, The Beehive. Come Christmas, each of them had its own in-store Santa in his grotto, keeping up a seasonal tradition that got started back in 1890 in Brockton Massachsetts. It was here that store owner James Edgar came up with the idea of dressing up as Father Christmas and giving out presents. Unsurprisingly, his idea was a huge success, and by the turn of the century many American department stores had followed his example.

By the time I was being taken to see Santa in his grotto, the staging had become quite elaborate: in 1964, Lewis’s store presented a tableau of characters from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, a display which I must have seen, although I have no recollection of it. I’m not sure that the grottos didn’t occasionally run to a live reindeer or two, although how they would have got them up to the fifth floor is anybody’s guess. If you were lucky enough to live in London, you could have seen Christmas grottos in the 1960s featuring some more contemporary characters including the Magic Roundabout, the Daleks and Thunderbirds, but ours were mostly traditional affairs.

The deal with Santa’s grotto was simple: you paid at the entrance and in return you got a brief audience with the man himself, and a present – always wrapped, so you didn’t know what you’d been given until you left. Santa usually kept two bran tubs beside his throne, one filled with presents for little girls, the other for little boys. You had to trust him to know which gender you were: and he didn’t always get it right. One time, in the Beehive (a fairly tatty emporium of middling to cheap goods), a bespectacled Santa (clearly an imposter) asked me if I’d like something to make myself beautiful. I was wearing a hood, so he couldn’t see my boy’s haircut – even so, I didn’t think I looked that much like a girl. I had to pull down the hood to show him his mistake. And don’t think that was the first time… back in 1964 (at a guess), another Department Store Santa palmed me off with a present for girls – a dolly in a bath. I can still see it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The doll, a kewpie-sized thing, with no clothes on, resided in a pink plastic bath (I remember being secretly impressed by the tiny plastic taps). The whole package came in a cardboard carton done up to resemble black bathroom tiles, with a transparent top through which dolly could be seen in all her glory. Our dad thought this was the most hilarious thing ever, and for years afterwards would refer back to the incident of the ‘dolly in the bath.’

Sixty years ago it may have been, but I can still picture the setting in which I became the unwilling recipient of that dolly: it was on the upper sales floor of Lichfield’s Co-Operative department store, and Santa’s throne had simply been plonked down in the soft furnishings section, surrounded by rolls of carpet, arm chairs and occasional tables. I’m not saying there mightn’t have been a few token drifts of cotton wool snow, and maybe a bit of red and green crepe paper on show, but it was a decidedly cut-price affair compared to the elaborate settings you got in Lewis’s.

For a long time, I was encouraged to believe that Lewis’s Santa was the real deal. He certainly looked the part (though the beard was probably false) and his jovial, avuncular voice could have won him a voice-over gig selling Mr. Kipling cakes. His grotto resided on the store’s fifth floor, and such was the clamour to see him on a typical Saturday in December that one ended up queueing up the staircase for half the morning. The store remained open until around 1990 and once, towards the end of its existence as a trading entity, I found myself on that same stairwell where we’d waited our turn to see Santa all those years ago.

Lewis's department store, Birmingham, decorated for Christmas

Bringing a bit of order to the proceedings was Santa’s ‘minder’, a green costumed, top-hatted Dickensian-styled character called Uncle Holly. For some reason, he always put me in mind of Hughie Green. Uncle Holly kept a watchful eye on the queue of eager children and justified his existence by doling out badges, the wearing of which made you an honorary member of the ‘Uncle Holly Circle.’ I still have several examples of these badges: they kept the same design year in, year out.

Uncle Holly wasn’t unique to Lewis’s – Selfridges’ on Oxford Street had the same character, of very similar appearance, who also gave out badges featuring his own image, but as far as I can Google, these were the only two examples. Unsurprisingly, he’s remembered by only a few people, judging from the forums I’ve seen online, and his name seems to have been appropriated in a ghost story of more recent origin, possibly conflated with the pagan ‘green man’ of folklore.

As to the presents we got from those department store Santas, the one thing they all had in common was their cheapness. One of my personal favourites was a red plastic racing car of vaguely futuristic appearance. As you can see (below), I still own it to this day. But Santa’s gifts weren’t all as good as this: I recall a motor racing game which was essentially just a lot of cardboard with a plastic spinner that you had to guide around a printed track. The size of the box fooled you into thinking you’d come away with something substantial. Another present from Santa’s grotto was a traditional puzzle called the ‘Tower of Brahma’ (also known as the Tower of Hanoi). This consisted of a pile of small coloured discs of different sizes, and three plastic spindles. The object of the game was to move the discs from spindle number one to spindle number three, preserving their original order and only moving one disc at a time. After a few attempts, I managed to reason it out... or maybe I followed the printed solution included in the box...


Department stores were always the traditional place to meet Santa, but they have largely vanished from our city centres, forcing Santa to decamp to the likes of garden centres and shopping malls. Do today’s internet-savvy children even believe in Santa any more, when they could easily go online and discover the truth? I was definitely a believer, until the age of eight or nine: but close to Christmas in 1971, I discovered an Airfix ‘Pontoon Bridge Assault Set’ in our airing cupboard: I’d seen it in a mail order catalogue and had put it on my Christmas list – so how come it had got here so early? I was ten, after all, and should probably have cottoned on by that age, although I'd begun to have my doubts. At least I didn’t have to hear it from Terry Collier who thoughtfully left it until Christmas Eve to inform his pal Bob Ferris that ‘Santa Claus is dead’...

TERRY: I did not say that. I merely said he’d never been alive to begin with.

BOB: No you didn’t – you said he’d been gored to death by his reindeer.



Friday, 6 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 6

 


A load of old baubles...

Look at any set of images online, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Christmas baubles are like snowflakes: no two are the same. This was certainly the case in the days when such items were decorated by hand, but even then manufacturers usually had a few design templates to follow. The earliest examples were spheres or teardrops of hand-blown and painted mercury glass, sometimes decorated with glitter, but despite their extremely fragile nature, they can survive for decades, through the simple fact of being brought out only once a year. I still have many of the same baubles that my mum and dad bought back in the very early 60s.

Baubles are often extremely tacky in appearance, with manufacturers often running to excesses of decoration. For me, there’s a kind of happy medium, where the design is just enough to look attractive without being over the top. And ideally, they’ll want to have a kind of vintage flavour. The best way to get this is to buy vintage, which can be an expensive proposition. 

As mentioned in a previous post, Woolworth’s was the prime place to buy Christmas decorations, although all good department stores would have offered a large selection. You can spot those old Woolies’ baubles a mile off, assuming the original box is still present. It was a simple lidded affair of white cardboard, divided up inside into nine or twelve sections in which the baubles sat like eggs, protected by tissue paper. Our Christmas baubles became like old friends: there were three specific designs in the set – the first were matt white spheres whose lower halves had been dipped in shiny coloured lacquer – gold, red or blue. Above this came a row of hand painted dots and stripes, and the lacquer, when dried, was decorated with various flourishes. The second type again came in three colours – pink, pale blue and pale green, and were decorated with star patterns, some of them outlined in gold glitter – very 1950s. The third type, which were my favourites, were large white spheres encrusted in white glitter, with small indentations highlighted in shiny coloured lacquer. Several of the old baubles have long since gone to dust, the earliest casualty being the 'blue star' bauble, victim of the cat’s attack on the Christmas tree circa 1964. Fragments of it could still be found in the bottom of the box many years later. Around ten years ago, I found a replacement on eBay, but to say it’s fragile is a decided understatement. There’s a small hole in the glass, revealing exactly how thin it is. I mentioned eggshells above, but this is of an even finer consistency, something like 0.05mm compared with the 0.3mm of a typical eggshell…

Our earliest tree decorations also included a number of ‘indent’ baubles, usually teardrop-shaped, which had large shiny concavities on their surface. Getting these to face front is always a challenge when decorating a tree. Sadly, Binkie (the cat) did for all of them, which is a shame as I found them particularly attractive.

To me, those old decorations became iconic, and I would sometimes spot examples on other trees when we went visiting friends or relatives, noting interesting (to me) variations in colour and design. Our primary school put up a Christmas tree in the hall, which included some miniature versions of the white baubles I liked so much. It took me years to find an example.

Vintage baubles are very popular on eBay and Etsy, but buying them comes with the hazard of transportation. Fine if the seller is local and you can pick up yourself, but hardly ideal if the baubles have to be sent out by mail.

Today’s sets have limited appeal to me, although I occasionally look out for any retro styles that hark back to the 50s or 60s. Around 1980, I was pleased to discover a brand new set that were a perfect match for the old ‘star’ design and had clearly been copied from the original, but these proved to be a one-off. Colour-themed trees have become popular in recent years, and whilst these can look extremely attractive if done well, a properly vintage tree should follow no particular colour scheme – gold, red, blue, green, white, anything goes. But of course, it’s all a matter of personal taste. I find our old Christmas decorations nostalgic because I grew up with them – but one man’s nostalgia is, to another, merely just a load of old baubles...


Some of the vintage decorations on this year's tree: the blue and gold star designs look like they came from the same set but were in fact purchased nearly twenty years apart.



Thursday, 5 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 5

 

The Spinning Santa... and other decorations

We had the same Christmas decorations year after year. Some of them still exist. Baubles for the tree, paperchains for the living room. We didn’t have paperchains as such, not the traditional variety – you know the form, gummed strips of coloured paper linked together. I’m fairly sure we made those at school, but at home the decorations came pre-formed, and usually from Woolworths, who seemed to enjoy a monopoly on festive décor in the 1960s and 70s.

Paperchains or ‘garlands’ as the manufacturers referred to them, were like multi-coloured concertinas: once unfolded, it was quite a job to get them to go flat again when they all came down in January. Around the mid-60s, our mum bought some quite spectacular colourful examples, fully four inches wide, and long enough to stretch from the corner of the living room to the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling. We also had plenty of the traditional honeycomb paper type decorations, one of which we called ‘the boot’ because that’s what it looked like when folded flat. It opened out into the shape of a bell. These are still available to buy today, along with other traditional honeycomb shapes, such as balls and discs.

Decorations like this go back to the turn of the last century, when they were introduced by German-born American businessman Bernard Wilmsen. He’d first employed the honeycomb technique in a range of decorative pop-up books, and in 1916 patented the process, leading to the manufacture of tissue paper bells and balls as festive decorations. Wilmsen was no stranger to Chrismassy stuff: he’d started out producing tinsel using machines of German manufacture, and subsequently branched out into the arena of glass ornaments, which soon caught the attention of Woolworth. Small wonder, then, that it was from Woolies we purchased all our Christmas decorations.

As to tinsel, it goes back as far as circa 1600, around fifty years after the first recorded use of a Christmas tree, a tradition associated with Protestant Christian reformer Martin Luther. Early tinsel was made from shredded silver, no less – a far cry from the cheap foil you’ll find on sale in every garden centre and supermarket today.

Oddly enough, we never seemed to have very much tinsel on our tree back in the 60s, and what we had was of a very meagre and stringy consistency. Our mum wound it around the wire on our Christmas tree lights, and there was never very much left over to use elsewhere. One item that always featured on the tree, and which I still have to this day (illustrated in today’s advent door) is a small honeycomb paper Santa Claus face. Unlike the bell and ball type, this tiny decoration didn’t have to be folded out, although it was made in the same fashion, trimmed with glitter, and with small pieces of paper and a plastic button for his eyes, moustache and nose respectively. It originally hung on a thread, and a favourite game of my brother and myself was to wind up Santa Face and then let him go, so that we could enjoy watching him spin round and round. You might think that, after a few years of such treatment, he’d have long since gone to dust, but apart from losing his thread, he still looks the same as he did five or six decades ago.

Until today, I’d never seen another example and wondered whether, as such an ephemeral item, it might be a unique suvivor. There certainly can’t be many left around. A quick Google search reveals that there are a handful of examples for sale on Etsy, with one seller claiming they were ‘made in Japan’ and asking £33 for a set of five.

Five? What would anybody want with five? There’s only one Santa Claus – and for us, there was only ever one Santa Claus tree ornament. His days of spinning may be over, but he’s back in place on this year’s tree.





Wednesday, 4 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 4

 


Sweets...

Our Christmas tree was never quite finished until the addition of some edible decorations. These chocolate novelties generally came in two kinds – flat slabs often in the shape of a bell or circle, and hollow, moulded figures usually of Santa Claus. The latter sometimes contained cream or caramel but in general tended to be full of thin air. They came with little lengths of glittery string attached, by which means they would be tied onto the branches of the Christmas tree. For the first few days they were left there for decoration, but come Christmas my brother and myself would each be allowed a ‘pick from the tree’ on a daily basis.

Other Christmas comestibles included little red string bags of chocolate money, a tradition which is still going today, and large cardboard tubes of favourite sweets such as Rowntrees’ Fruit Pastilles, Fruit Gums, Smarties or Maltesers, another tradition that is still going strong (see below). Today’s advent door shows the top of a Maltesers tube from a Christmas back in the mid 60s, that had been imaginatively conceived as a ballbearing game: you had to get the three silver balls into three little indentations – and believe me, it was hard going. I think everybody had a go that Christmas without anyone managing to get all three balls located at the same time. Curious how a trivial item can become such an object of fascination...

For some reason, this ephemeral item has survived down the years – our mum would regularly round up any small stray plastic toys and novelties left floating around after Christmas and consign them to what we referred to as ‘the rummagy box.’ There were several of these, all of them derived from old biscuit tins (see day one for more on that story), and down the years they provided a reliable source of random entertainment on rainy afternoons, when we would root through them and see what manner of odds and ends came to light – here was Mike Mercury, long since ejected from the now highly sought after ‘Plaston’ Supercar toy – here’s a Lego tree, or streetlamp – here’s a novely out of a Christmas cracker. And here’s that Maltesers Christmas ballbearing game.



Many decades later, I went through what was left of these boxes, trying to make sense of their contents: badges, cereal premiums and all kinds were mixed in together. In so doing, I turned up the old Maltesers game, now well into its fifth decade, and decided I was going to solve it once and for all. It took a while – maybe half an hour on a spare Saturday morning – but I finally did it, and had to photograph the result for posterity. The funny thing is, I was never that keen on Maltesers as a kid. They tasted too, well, malty… which I suppose is understandable.

One Christmas – I think it was 1967 or 68 – my brother and myself were each given a box of some hard, coloured sweets called ‘Fruit Dragees’. Don’t ask me how that’s pronounced; we simply called them ‘fruit drags.’ I suppose they were intended to be sucked, but it was like sucking a pebble – the damn things seemed to last forever. We decided we didn’t like them, and even made up a silly song about them, to the tune of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, as played on my brother’s Companion Chord Organ, a big present that year.

I can’t deal with the topic of Christmas sweets without mentioning the Selection Box. These seem to be as popular as ever, and probably still contain a lot of the same sweets we had in ours back in the 1960s (although I’d like to bet they’re a great deal smaller than they were fifty years ago). We always got several Selection Boxes, and they were very welcome with one small proviso – there was almost always one chocolate bar in them that we didn’t like. What? I hear you cry, kids who didn’t like chocolate? Certainly, if the chocolate in question happened to be Nestle’s Milky Bar which I couldn’t take at any price. Or even Macintoshes’ Caramac. I’ve already mentioned Maltesers, and I was never a fan of anything containing coconut, so Bounty Bars were a no-no.

The early 70s saw a new arrival on the festive sweets counter in the form of ‘Fun Size’ bars of Mars and Milky Way. We definitely had these as far back as 1975, and it became a tradition to receive a bag of them every year, usually from our grandparents. A Fun-Size Mars bar or two was the ideal accompaniment to an afternoon of festive TV, old films, repeats, Christmas episodes, or whatever. They’re still available in the shops, but I was shocked to see how small they’ve become. The Fun-Sized Mars bar of the mid-70s was just a shade smaller than a regular Milky Way. Today, they’re barely bigger than the mini-bars you find in packs of Celebrations. Two bites and you’re done. Whether reducing the size of the bars means you get more in a packet than previously, I don’t know, but I think I can guess the answer to that one.

There’s one more genre of confectionery we can’t pass over in this review of festive sweeties, and that’s the jellied fruit. Meltis New Berry Fruits were the kind of thing you gave to your grandmother in hope of being offered one or two when she opened the box. They were small ovoids of sugared fruit jelly with a liquid centre. In similar vein were the classic Christmas sugary confections known as ‘crystallised fruit.’ As a child, I genuinely believed that these sweet sticky things had somehow been created from slices of real fruit. Now, in the case of bona fide crystallised fruit, that’s certainly the case, the fruit being prepared and cooked in sugar syrup before being coated with sugar crystals. But the type that was sold in little disc-shaped packs of orange and lemon slices had never been near a fruit tree and is today sold as ‘flavoured jelly slices’. You’ll find proper crystallised fruit in more specialist (and expensive) retailers. But somehow it wouldn’t be quite the same…

As to New Berry Fruits, I’ve not had sight of them for years, but in the course of writing this piece, I thought I’d look them up online. Surprise: they still exist, and are apparently made to the original recipe. Just saying, what with Christmas around the corner…


Festive Fruit Pastilles tubes, saved from the 1990s.


Tuesday, 3 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 3

 


Fairy lights

No Christmas tree is complete without lights. Our first tree had a set, but they never seemed to work. These were fairy lights of traditional appearance, with coloured shades shaped like flowers, and were probably bought at the same time as the old artificial tree. I can remember our new kitten having the whole lot over at Christmas 1964, which was probably the last time those fairy lights worked. Felines notwithstanding, the big trouble with those old, cheap Christmas lights was that whenever a bulb blew – which was frequently – it would break the whole circuit. And we just never seemed to have enough spare bulbs to keep up. Today’s festive lights rely mostly on LEDs, which seem to last forever, although if you shop around you can still find examples of the old, unreliable sort, ideal if you’re after a retro look for your tree, but you’ll need to stock up on bulbs (I bought a whole spare set to use for replacements on mine).

In 1967, we finally got a set of lights that worked. Pifco were pre-eminent in the field of home electricals, producing all manner of items including hairdryers, fans and torches, and it was a set of their ‘lanternlites’ that we obtained from a local retailer at Christmas of that year. These were attractive lights, much brighter and more colourful than the original set, and they did pretty good service, lasting more than ten years.

Today, you can’t buy a set of Christmas lights without a plug/adaptor, but back in the 1960s, those Pifco lights came with bare wires on the end. Our dad wired them into a bayonet connector, which we then plugged into the socket on a standard lamp. This still strikes me as a curious arrangement, and it persisted even after the lights were upgraded. This happened around 1980 when I found a new set of more elaborately styled lantern lights in our local branch of Woolworths’. We ended up with two sets of them – there were twenty lights in a set, which wasn’t quite enough for a five-foot fir tree. The two sets were wired together and were still working until around ten years ago: I hunted them out to use on my first ‘retro tree.’

Working sets of vintage Christmas lights are much sought after: at time of writing there’s a fully functioning set of Pifco lanternlites on eBay, and I’d be tempted if it weren’t for the fact that the final price is likely to be steep. There’s also the issue of reliability: any set of 1960s Pifco lights that’s still working today has probably seen scant use over the years, and I doubt they’d get through a single season. They require coloured bulbs of the screw-in variety, which are getting hard to find, push-in bulbs having largely replaced them.

This set is absolutely identical to the ones we owned, right down to the packaging, which I can remember like it was yesterday. As the image shows, the lights came in five colours: red, yellow, green, blue, pink and purple. In operation, the pink and purple lanterns were hard to tell apart from the red ones. Multi-coloured lights were all you could get – the trend for all white (or red, blue, or whatever) wouldn’t come until much later.

One thing these old lights definitely didn’t do was flash – today, it’s a job to actually stop Christmas lights from flashing, with most LEDs offering a whole menu of different programmes. Back in the 1960s, Christmas lights only flashed when there was a loose wire somewhere, and ultimately after being left on for hours at a time over Christmas, they would burn out. It was always a matter for speculation as to whether or not the Christmas lights would still work when they were brought out for another year, and we would inevitably end up going through the set, tightening every bulb until – bingo – they all came on. Or not, as the case may be.

They were also designed specifically for home use, but that hardly mattered: in 1960s Britain, no one decorated the outsides of their houses, except maybe a few ostentatious types who happened to have a decent-sized fir tree in their front garden. Anyone wishing to do so would have needed a proper set of professional coloured bulbs of the type used by councils to decorate shopping streets, whereas today almost all LED lighting sets seem to be fit for use indoors or out.

There’s one other point to be made while we’re on the subject of fairy lights. Once upon a time, fairy lights were just for Christmas (unlike the proverbial puppy). I remember seeing a set around the bar counter of a guest house in Llandudno in the late sixties, and it struck me as unusual for anyone to have Christmas lights on display when it wasn’t Christmas. Today, plenty of pubs seem to have permanent displays of fairy lights dotted about the place, and there’s been a trend in home décor for bunches of twigs and skeletal trees with fairy lights attached. I even discovered a battery-operated set wound around a pergola in my garden and left there by the previous owner, but they could never be made to work. Not that I’d have used them if they had – to me, fairy lights are still specifically for Christmas.

So, we’ve got the tree, we’ve got the lights – what else do we need?


Monday, 2 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 2

 


The Tree

When Greg Lake sang about ‘that Christmas tree smell’ in his famous festive hit, I could only imagine what he was talking about. If our Christmas tree smelled of anything, it was dust. For as long as I could remember, we’d put up an artificial tree every year, an artefact that dated back to the late 50s or early 60s.

By the time of Greg Lake’s chart entry at Christmas 1975, the old tree was looking a bit the worse for wear. It consisted of two metal tubes, which had to be joined together in the middle, and the joint had become increasingly wonky with every passing year. The rest of the tree was comprised of wire branches attached to the metal trunk, the whole covered in what I can only describe as paper tinsel – which is to say, it had the general appearance of tinsel but was in fact dark green paper. We decorated it with a variety of baubles and other gubbins, which I’ll say more about in future posts. I’ll also have a bit more to say on the subject of Christmas lights – but for today, let’s stick with the tree.

Artificial trees were originally made from goose feathers, dyed green and attached to a wooden stem. I’ve seen one and the effect is unusual to say the least. A little later, a manufacturer of toilet brushes saw an opportunity and began to manufacture trees using the same cores of wire and bristle that under other circumstances would end up getting poked down the lavatory bowl. We had one of these trees too. It came from our grandparents, who’d owned it for goodness knows how many years but had never put it up in living memory. I noticed the resemblance to a toilet brush without realising the connection. The bristling branches were decorated with ‘snow’– thick white paint of a similar consistency to that used in roadlining. It was certainly durable. So, there you had it – a toilet brush tree with roadlining snow: it stood in our back room for a good many Christmases, while the ‘proper’ tree occupied the front room.

By 1977, the old paper tree was deemed no longer fit for purpose and for the first time ever, we got ourselves a real tree. Now I understood what Greg Lake had been going on about – the subtle pine fragrance greeted you every time you entered the room, at least for the first week. After that, it began to wear off as the tree slowly succumbed to the centrally heated atmosphere. We had it stood in front of a radiator, which didn’t assist in arboreal longevity.

And what of the old trees? I wish I knew. They both lived up in the loft, until such time as our mum, during a clear-out, decided to dispose of them. That was a bad move: vintage Christmas trees can command high prices from collectors. Vintage lights, of which more later, can be found in ebay listings for as much as £200.

The little tree in today’s window is one that got away, a tiny table decoration, but made in the same toilet-brush manner as our grandparents’ old one. 

Behind tomorrow’s advent door, you’ll find… no, wait and see.


My parents with a fully decorated Christmas tree, round about 1990


Sunday, 1 December 2024

Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 1

 


From now until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a new blog entry every day – an advent calendar of pop culture nostalgia, festive trappings and assorted… biscuits?

In my garage I have several venerable biscuit tins, which, I am happy to report, do not contain venerable biscuits. One of them serves as a repository for plastic cowboys – well, they have to live somewhere – whilst another contains marbles.

These tins – and they are all tin, as opposed to the plastic variety we get today – are survivors of many a Christmas past when a box of biscuits was invariably gifted to us by one of the family’s friends or relatives. Judging from a recent trip round the supermarkets, this is one festive tradition that shows no sign of abating. Of the many biscuit assortments we were given at Christmas, the most popular was, without a doubt, Family Circle. In 1967, the pop trio Scaffold sang ‘thank you very much for the Family Circle’, although to this day I’m not sure if it was the biscuits they were referring to or the popular women’s magazine. On balance, I’d go with the biscuits…

Family Circle is still sold in recognisable packaging, and comprises an assortment of biscuits made up of the following varieties: shortbread, chocolate digestives, custard creams, chocolate chip cookies, jam sandwich creams, milk chocolate fingers, crunchy oat, Nice and Bourbon creams, a line-up which hasn't changed much if at all in over fifty years. Today's Family Circle is sold by McVitie’s, but the branding was originated by Huntley and Palmers, as my vintage tin illustrates. 



I was reminded of this festive comestible tradition while browsing recently through some old annuals. Teddy Bear, produced from 1964 until 1981, was a nursery title, derived from a children’s weekly paper of the same name. The 1967 edition has, for its endpaper, an illustration of various different kinds of biscuits, many of which can still be found in Family Circle, whilst others may prove a little harder to find today.


The first thing that struck me about this page was how nicely some of the illustrations had been handled – look at the grids on those Neapolitan wafers: this is an artist who knows his or her stuff. Just don’t ask me to eat one of those, because I’ve hated pink Neapolitans since childhood…

The Bourbon is also excellently rendered, and the whole spread is a good example of what was once known as 'duotone' printing, using black with, in this case, pale red as a second colour. The brown tones are achieved by combining the two. 

The next thing that struck me about this spread was to wonder how many of these biscuits could readily be obtained from any supermarket in 2024. Well, many of them are still to be found in Family Circle, but there are a few here that aren’t on McVitie’s radar. The real head-scratchers are the Chocolate Vienna (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a thing) and the curious ‘Fondant Finger’ which looks like something that’s just emerged red hot from a blacksmith’s forge. Were these ever a thing?

Clearly, the ‘chocolate crisp’ is a Kit-Kat in all but name, while the Chocolate Cream seems to have evolved into today’s ‘Oreo’. The various creams remind me of how little I cared for biscuits like this. I’d eat them if there was nothing else available, but I’d much prefer a chocolate digestive (very evocatively painted) or a Maryland Cookie (wasn’t that a trade name?) If I was ever offered a Custard Cream or similar, I’d begin by carefully breaking off the top, thus turning it into two biscuits for the price of one – a plain biscuit and one with an iced topping.

As to the Lemon Puff, I’d forgotten they even existed before turning to this page. Awful things these – the kind of pasty that instantly makes a mess when you bite into it, and sugary lemon icing inside. Nasty! I imagine the ‘Fruit Puff’ must have been a variant of the same thing, although it’s hard to tell it apart from the Garibaldi above. Is there anyone in the civilized world who doesn’t refer to these as ‘squashed fly’ biscuits? I wouldn’t touch them as a kid, but these days I reckon one would go nicely with a cuppa.

The wild card here is the Sponge Finger, more properly used as the base when making trifles. Would anyone want to eat one ‘raw’ (so to speak)? I can remember doing so many years ago and being rather repelled by the excess of sugar. Even as a child, I knew my limits (if you’ll pardon a biscuity pun).

On the whole, this was a nicely illustrated spread, with one example. Can you spot it? For me, it really stands out alongside the carefully rendered Bourbon and creams. It’s the Ginger Nut. It’s almost at the end of the spread and I reckon the artist got this far down and thought ‘sod it, I’m not going to paint in all of that texture.’ Hence it’s just a lot of impressionistic swirls. It's also worth pointing out that the biscuits shown on the vintage tins were also artists’ impressions whereas today, most packaging makes use of photographs – often heavily rendered and retouched on a computer, but photographs none the less. And before long, it will all be done in AI... 

I almost always get given a box of biscuits at Christmas – never Family Circle, mind – but this year may well prove to be the last, as the neighbour who has provided them for the past eleven years has just put her bungalow up for sale. If you get any yourself, take a moment to reflect that, although they may not be the first thing you think of when Christmas comes around, festive biscuits go back a long, long way. And when you’ve finished eating them, you’ll have somewhere to put your plastic cowboys and marbles…