The annual Christmas blog repost...

First published 22/12/2013. Images from my collection of vintage cards and postcards. Updated December 2016.

Christmas: for some a religious festival celebrating the birth of Jesus.  Others are more than keen to point out that Saturnalia and the pagan Winter Solstice celebrations have more bearing on why we celebrate in December (it’s not clever, by the way, we all know this).  There are elements of all in the modern Christmas and to an extent we can pick and choose what parts we observe.

I am not a Christian.  I was not brought up as one by my parents but was by school and a couple of years ago during a time of crisis I did get baptised but I have since come to believe that there is no God.  I don’t say that to offend; I have no problem with those who do (unless they use their beliefs to be shitty to others) and I find the Christian bashing attitude of some atheists rather tiresome. I just don’t think there is a divine deity that watches us; not even Father Christmas (he knows when you’ve been sleeping?  Kindly old elf or MI5 spook?). And yet I celebrate Christmas whole-heartedly, including Christian elements of it.  You think that makes me a hypocrite?  Well, I don’t like your attitude!  Fuck you!

Yesterday I went to the village square and sang carols rejoicing a god that I don’t believe in.  So what?  I don’t believe Star Wars (episodes IV to VI) is real either but I still enjoy it and even find parts of it inspiring.  Ditto ghost stories.  There are no such things as ghosts.  If you have seen one you are either insane or a liar.   Nonetheless I still enjoy a ghost story (and am looking forward to Mark Gatiss’ take on the MR James classic The Tractate Middoth on Christmas day, 9.30pm, BBC2).  I celebrate Christmas mostly without the religious aspects but I like a good carol and I call it Christmas rather than Yuletide or what have you mainly for convenience. And don't get me started on the closet racists moaning about the "PC brigade" trying to "ban" christmas, or rename it or whatever... it's just bollocks. 

So what is it I like about Christmas still when so many others find it such a chore?  There is one aspect of the season that becomes more apparent each passing year and that is that people moaning about how early Christmas starts and how commercial it has become getting earlier.  Chaz was already moaning about Christmas in October.  Christmas is commercial because we live in a capitalist system and people need jobs to live.  Now that we no longer produce much in this country that means buying and selling stuff we don’t really need to each other.  You don’t like it; think of that next time you vote.  For me Christmas starts in December because I have this amazing super-power called being able to ignore stuff if it doesn’t interest me.

Christmas for me is largely about eating and drinking well but it is also about nostalgia and evocation.  I like and attempt to replicate the kind of things that remind me of the Christmas times of my youth.  I was born in the early seventies and can remember very little of what happened to me before I started school so it was the late seventies and early to mid-eighties Christmases that I remember most. I will now bore you with a long list of Christmassy things and memories that evoke that warm feeling in me…

One Christmas in the late seventies I had a toy gun from my Dad.  I can barely remember that but I still remember the label on the box had a spaceman on it.

Carol singing, door-to-door with my sisters.  I rarely went out at night in the dark so just being outside when it was dark and cold in the crisp night air, all wrapped up, was slightly magical.

Top of the Pops Christmas Special on Christmas day in the days when I was not only interested in pop music but liked almost all of it.  Around 83’ to 85’ was possibly the high point for me… and covered the Band-Aid phenomenon.

Star Wars Episode IV recorded off the telly followed by a Duran Duran concert which cut off half way through because the VCR got switched off by a Satsuma kicked across the room by my brother.

The Christmas my Great Auntie Kit came to stay.  My Mum had only re-established contact with her earlier that year and she died the following Spring so it was a wonderful memory of a lovely lady.  Somehow the thing I remember most is staying up past midnight on Christmas Eve to watch Santa Claus And The Martians which was the finale of a terrible-movie season on BBC2!

One year having an advent calendar that instead of a picture (and before the days of chocolate filled ones) had a little novelty gift in each door.  I still remember in particular a little plastic seal (as in the semi-amphibious mammal, not the Kiss From A Rose bloke).

The same Christmas I think having a stocking filled with little knick-knacks on my bed on Christmas morning.  This was all silly things, little ornaments and the like but I loved it.  I still remember a little resin pig in a rocking chair reading the Wall Street Journal but couldn’t tell you what my “main present” was that year.

Then there was the hamper year.  This was before I was at secondary school, I'm guessing I was nine or ten.  We had a fairly un-elaborate diet at home but one year my parents bought one of those hampers which are in essence a massive rip off. This introduced various exotic foods to us that I'd never tried before... in actual fact it was really not that exciting but at the time I'd never had canned game soup (posh oxtail), canned french onion soup, tinned crab and chocolate limes.  Chocolate limes has become part of my own tradition, I always buy a bag in December even though they're actually not very nice. 

Reading the double festive issue Radio Times from cover to cover is still a tradition for me but goes back to the days when we’d have the Radio Times for BBC TV and radio and the TV Times for the commercial channels (and before 1982 that must have been one channel!). I still find old issues of these fascinating.

Quality Street… not Roses!  The old tins with the soldier and the lady on were much better though. I do regret the year I announced that I liked the green triangle best and then got given all of them for the next five years. 

Scrooge.  The 1951 version.  I now also like the Muppet one but that was not around until the early nineties.  There used to be shown an animated version which used Alistair Sim’s voice but that never gets shown any more. 

Add to this the sort of films one could only possibly enjoy at Christmas like Digby The Biggest Dog In The World and also classics like the Ray Harryhausen Clash Of The Titans (Christmas Eve, 12.40pm, Channel 5) and who needs modern blockbusters?

Christmas Shopping at Havant Hypermarket (now Asda Wal-Mart) with my Dad.  It was about the only time of year there’d be alcohol in the house and he’d spend a good deal of time deliberating on what to buy.

My Dad, who never really had his finger on the pulse of contemporary music, inexplicably coming home with Now That’s What I Call Music 6 and Now – The Christmas Album in December 1985; on Vinyl of course.  Until then I’d never heard Mike Oldfield’s In Dulce Jubilo.

Mr Thomas, my oft derided Headmaster at Junior School (years 3 to 6 I think) going bonkers for Christmas, including a spooky reading of A Christmas Carol in assembly.  I also loved the school being decorated for Christmas and the season started with the Christmas Fayre, which was usually in November (so early commercialisation started in the public sector… we really are a bunch of gits, aren’t we?).

The year I got my first stereo was a good one and when I really started to get into music. It was a Toshiba with a three band graphic equaliser (all the rage at the time) and detachable speakers.  I was mildly disappointed at the time not to get tape-to-tape but the Toshiba was still working twenty years later when I sold it at a car-boot-sale.

Tapes.  Getting tapes, both pre-recorded and blank, for Christmas was great. These were generally gifts from my Sister but I would also get more with any Christmas money I had.  A multi-pack of c90s would then allow me to copy albums that Mark over the road had on his tape-to-tape Matsui (which I doubt lasted 20 years!).  Albums I remember getting on cassette for Christmas include Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, Madonna’s Like A Virgin, Depeche Mode’s Singles 81-85 and Kate Bush’s The Whole Story.

There was the year I went to stay with my cousin Lisa in my aunt and uncle's pub in Titchfield just after Christmas until new year.  That was my first pub related christmas, I was 15 but they let me have a few beers. I also met a girl on New Years Eve who became my very first girlfriend for about a month! This Christmas introduced Lipstick On Your Collar by Connie Francis to my annual listenings as Lisa played it so often on the jukebox it now makes me think of that time of year. 

Christmas Tips as a paperboy.  In Christmas 1989 (when I really should have given it up by) I made around £150 in tips from my various rounds and spent much of the time in various pubs around Chichester and Havant with Harry at a time when going in a pub at Christmas still seemed special.  I seem to remember getting drunk 16 times in two weeks.

Christmas 1989 was the end of the best days of Christmas for me.  That boxing day my girlfriend, who had just come back from visiting relatives in the USA , dumped me.  I was 18 and grown up stuff kinda took over then.  By Christmas 1990 I’d left home for the first time and the less said about ’91 the better.  Things started getting better once I’d started work but I was stuck between boy and man and never got the balance right.  Too much drinking, not enough money, lack of real involvement in anything left me always feeling like I was not really at the centre of Christmas for anyone.  Then in 2000 I met Becky.

Christmas 2000 we spent apart but since then we have spent every Christmas together; either at her Mum’s, my parents or later at our own.  We tend to mix it up each year.  The last few Christmas seasons have been hard due to not having any money and last year in particular was not too good because I was mental.  This year we are still poor but with the prospect of a more affluent Christmas in 2014 a very real one and I am not nearly as bonkers and sleep deprived as I was last year. I am determined to enjoy it!

Update: December 2016

I'm no longer sure I'd call myself an atheist but I don't like the term agnostic; I am open minded about spirituality but I do occasionally go to church. Why? Because I find it relaxing and interesting. It's almost like meditation when I'm there.  I've been going to the advent services; carols in the (Westbourne) square has become a tradition and I intend to go to either Midnight Mass, the Christmas morning service or both this year. Another tradition that Becky and I have developed is getting a "real" tree (which I'm assured is from an environmentally sustainable source).  As a kid my family always had an artificial one and the tree we had from when I was an infant until I think my secondary school years probably lasted around eight years in total.  But I like a traditional look for decorations and prefer a real tree for that purpose.  Also, dragging it down to the square to be chipped is, for me, where Christmas is well and truly ends and I always feel a pang when I do that.