Childhood Christmas memories

My family enjoyed an old Hollywood musical and, as we spent most of our Christmases growing up in warmer climes, we were particularly drawn to White Christmas, believing it to be how Christmas was meant to be – snow, cozy jumpers, open fires, log cabins, and pine trees. While we did have the traditional fare for our festive meal regardless where we lived, my memories around Christmas have nothing traditional about them.

When we moved to Nigeria I was 11, my sister 10, my brother 5, and my littlest sister wasn’t even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes. We’d previously spent Christmas with one or other set of grandparents in attendance, as my little family all lived in India until we departed, so things were going to be different for us from now on.

When my mother discovered the paucity of the real tree options in Nigeria, she arranged for a visit to Selfridges in London and purchased a fake tree. It was quite the magnificent thing; so tall even my father struggled to reach the top, and so realistic as it was made up of individual branches, each of which was made up of little individual branches (and so on). It lasted my family for decades much to my shop-a-holic mother’s dismay, until she finally persuaded my Dad that nothing beat the smell of a fresh tree in order to banish it permanently to the attic 🙂

Said tree figures in my two Christmas memories from childhood. The first is when a youngish teenager, I was left fiddling with the lights which had decided to stop working after we’d gone through all the effort of getting them on the tree, and the tree decorated. I’d tried everything to no avail, until I looked at the two cables which I hadn’t yet tried… only to be terrified I’d melted the tree when the lights blew with a rather spectacular blue flash. Neither tree nor I came to any harm 🙂

And then there’s the year my brother decided he wanted Hot Wheels, and in order to make sure my parents couldn’t come up with any of the usual responses they supplied when asked for the impossible to obtain, he announced that he’d sorted it with Santa 😉 Now, being the much longed-for boy, my mother moved heaven and earth in order to make his wish come true, and decided they’d set it up in front of the tree for him after we children had gone to bed so it would be the first thing he saw upon entering the room.

Except… our neighbours invited my parents round for drinks on Christmas Eve. Worse, they’d friends visiting from Finland, and many a vodka shot straight from the freezer were imbibed during said evening. When it came time for my parents to return, my mother turned somersaults each time she attempted to pick up her shoes. Not intentionally you understand 😉 The neighbour children were all having fun at our house and didn’t want to return, so my father decided to pick up the twins in order to return them, only to walk into my closet rather than through the door. On his way back to their house, he met my mother struggling to figure out where the hole in the fence was (to be fair, not easy to see in the dark) and us remaining children fell about laughing watching them both bouncing off the wire until they found it.

After firmly shooing us off to bed, it was lucky my sister and I woke up first… for we found my father asleep on the floor in front of the tree in his pyjamas. To give him his due, he had managed to put together the Hot Wheels set into a rather snazzy display, so all we had to do was persuade him to get up off the floor before my brother awoke. And thus the magic of Christmas was saved for my little brother for one more year 🙂

Are you team real tree or team fake tree? What are your childhood memories of the festive season?

© Debs Carey, 2024