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…
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| Festive Fruit Pastilles tubes, saved from the 1990s. |
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