Our childhood Christmases took place on a farm in Ayrshire, a mile from the nearest town and 600 feet above sea level. Even so, white Christmases were infrequent. Many mild winters were spent waiting in vain for a decent snowfall to take the rust off the sledge runners; but we did get a lot of hard frosts. The old curling pond half a mile from the house sometimes froze solid allowing the creation of huge slides. Wellingtons were no protection against the ice and our feet had to be thawed out in basins of warm water in the kitchen afterwards. It made your toes ache.
On the lead-up to the holidays a couple of rocks stuck up out of the rapids. The first problem was the annual SDF Social Club children’s party. With 120 staff there were a lot of children. Dad held the party in our hotel. I had to perform an excruciatingly childish grace (Thank thee Lord for the food we eat, Thank thee Lord for the world so sweet, Thank thee Lord for the birds that sing, Thank thee Lord for everything… Amen) to the assembled company. This humiliation was followed by party games like The Farmer’s in His Den and Bee Baw Babbity. The latter was a kissing game. I once tried running away but was hunted down by Martha the Hotel manageress.
My father then gave a film show using his own Bolex projector. I recently discovered the catalogue for the cartoon films he hired in Glasgow. He supplemented these pieces with some family cine. Despite having promised never to do it, he showed a film of me, dressed in full cowboy regalia of fringed hat, waistcoat, gun-belt, wellies and ‘Lone Star’ spurs, trying and failing to get onto my pony. She was adept at taking a deep breath when you tried to tighten her girth, then breathing out when you put your weight on the stirrup. The saddle then slid down under her belly. Hilarious – and tremendous ammunition for those who would use it.
After this affront was over, the lights suddenly went out and Santa arrived on his sled loaded with presents. The sled was made of plywood and was kept in a store room behind the cafe for the rest of the year – we discovered. Santa had his hood up and with his big beard and moustache only some deep-set twinkly eyes were visible. We were called up in turn to shake his leather-gloved hand and receive our present. Those of us in the know recognised the voice of the dairy manager and his signature miasma of cigarette smoke.
Later in life there were the primary school parties, which I also dreaded. That awful cavalry charge from one side of the gymnasium to the other when the boys were told to take a partner. Did you converge on the most desirable option and find yourself in an unseemly maul while the object of boyish desire made her selection, or pick a mid-range model and beat the rush? After this pairing game ran its course the teacher would cue the appropriate Jimmy Shand record and a clumsy Gay Gordons, Dashing White Sergeant, Strip the Willow or Canadian Barn Dance would follow.
It wasn’t all bad. I quite liked doing the March of the Mods – and I once won a dance competition with Janice Harrison. We did the Shake and I got an Airfix model for a prize. I can’t recall what Janice won.
Back home, the Christmas tree, always a Norway Spruce, stood in the hall in a disguised galvanised bucket. It was braced with kindling sticks and weighed down with gravel for ballast. Needles started falling off immediately. We decorated it with those fragile glass balls that had glittery bits and silver sunburst inserts. We added some glass toadstools, tinsel and tree lights. The shades covering the light bulbs had scenes from nursery rhymes: dishes and spoons, cows and moons. If one bulb went, all the rest went too. Re-ignition was a laborious process involving changing the bulbs one by one until the deceased party was identified. The tree was always topped out with a star because my mother felt there was a hint of idolatry about angels and fairies.
Our Christmas cards hung on strings between the wall lights above the fireplaces in the hall and in ‘the lounge’. There were a lot of pheasants in the snow and olde stagecoaches. We put up a modest number of paper swags that mysteriously un-concertina’d themselves when pulled apart. We also had paper bells and fat snowmen that expanded from their folded-up state with a faint crackle.
Given the strength of my mother’s Christian belief and my father’s role as an elder of the Kirk there was surprisingly little religious symbolism. I am sure this reflected the traditional Presbyterian suspicion of Christmas, which was not even a public holiday in Scotland until relatively recent times. It seemed to include the word ‘mass’ after all. An exception to this secularism was the large cubical red candle my mother placed on a window ledge at the top of the stairs. It had four paper decals of stained-glass Christmas scenes, one on each side. Over time it slowly burned down in the middle to illuminate the windows. The lighting of it filled us with tingly anticipation. The scene on the window side shone out into the black nothingness of a Scottish winter night.
When you live on a farm there is no Christmas break as others might understand it. The animals need fed and attended to just like any other day. In fact, you may be even busier due to the absence of the usual staff. Because we had a milk retail business on Christmas Day my father and I often had to deliver extra supplies of cream and milk to grumpy chefs in hotels and restaurants. He felt it was important for customer relations that we were constantly available. The black bakelite phone in the morning room was ‘switched through’ from the office in town at the end of the working day and a tear-off notepad with carbon paper to make copies was placed beside it. Some customers – like the posh Miss M from Park Circus in Ayr – liked to micromanage their orders. We suspected they deliberately phoned out of hours so they could speak to my mother in person. Miss M always seemed slightly irritated if it was me who picked up. Last thing at night we took the ‘lines’ out to the dairy manager’s office next to the ‘platform’ where the lorries would load up in the morning.
Granny and Grandad came to stay for the duration of festivities. They were my mother’s parents, my Dad’s mother and father having died long before we were born. Grandad was a meticulous planner and a very competent driver. He always put a hundredweight bag of fertiliser in the boot of the car over the rear drive wheels for added traction on snow or ice.
When they arrived the burden of keeping us entertained passed to our grandparents releasing my mother to her endless kitchen drudgery. My father was always occupied elsewhere anyway. The card table was set up in front of the fire with upright kitchen chairs so as to be more businesslike. Granny and Grandad started us off on rummy, whist and ‘Slippery Anne’ before we finally graduated to their favourite game – bridge. I never had the concentration to play really well and quite liked being ‘dummy’ so I could wander off to the kitchen for a snack. Grandad thought I should have stayed and learned how to play out a contract.
Warmth was always an issue at home. We had central heating of sorts powered by a solid fuel boiler at the rear of the house. There was no access to it from the house. Dad had to go outside in whatever weather prevailed to stoke it from a pile of coal. There was something delicious about doing it when it was actually snowing. The radiators were warm, but not hot and functioned merely to take the chill off the room air and melt any ice feathers that had formed on the inside of the windows overnight.
After nightly baths we were tucked tightly into bed with our hot water bottles, pinned down by cold sheets covered by wool cellular blankets, feather quilts and a counterpane. In a masochistic way I enjoyed seeing how long I could tolerate holding a bare toe against the hot water bottle. Getting up in the morning in the lowest temperatures was daunting. Mum would turn on a rattly fan-driven electric heater and hold our clothes up in front of it to tempt us out of our cocoons.
Rooms you actually wanted to sit in needed an open fire for real comfort. Stores of coal, logs and coke were piled up in a shed behind the car garage and fetching new supplies of these also involved an open air expedition. Heat wasn’t a problem in the kitchen where the solid fuel Aga stayed lit for the entire winter. It was a welcome source of comfort for frozen fingers and toes. Dad would come in, lift the lid over the hot plate, rub his hands, and complain of being “starving of the cold” an expression my mother, from the East, found perplexing and annoying. However it is in the dictionary as a Scottish and North English term for feeling extremely cold. Perhaps it comes from the German sterben meaning ‘to die’.
The quotidian ritual of riddling the ash out from the bottom of the Aga and filling it up with coke through the hole in the top went on throughout the season. We were never allowed to riddle it ourselves in case we dislocated the thing that held up the burning coke. That would have meant shutting the stove down to re-site the part. The brief intrusion of fumes into the kitchen during filling left an acrid taste in the mouth. In the other rooms the open fireplaces needed cleaned out every morning and a fresh fire built to be lit later.
A pleasant refuge from the elements on a cold night was the byre. Dozens of large animals produce plenty of heat and the smell of the cows combined with sawdust, turnips and sharn* was not unpleasant. On proper snowy nights flakes drifted down through the ventilation gap that ran along the ridge of the roof like a bovine Pantheon d’Agrippa, while the satiated cows lay chained in their stalls, grunting sleepily.
My mother’s strong faith undermined her commitment to the fantasy of Santa Claus. She felt we would not believe her about God and Jesus were she to be caught lying about Santa. It took minimal pre-school questioning from me to extract a confession from her. As a result it was very difficult to get us to go to sleep as we knew the presents had to arrive before Mum and Dad went to bed. Eventually Mum allowed us to open one present and a box of Edinburgh Rock before we fell asleep. I can remember waking up in the early hours once with a stump of half-eaten rock stuck in my hair.
And then it was Christmas morning.
*Noun: (chiefly Scotland): The dung or manure of cattle or sheep. From Middle English: scharn
The Bohemian Waxwing 