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 Firefly, Merry 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 Tiger, Lion, 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):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?