This is when it started to get serious...
Christmas really was coming.
The first sign was the appearance of the advent calendars...
Not that they were a massive surprise because they were the exactly the same ones as we'd had last year...
When I say exactly the same... they WERE the advent calendars that we'd opened last year... only all of the doors has been closed again. We didn't have a load of money, as you can probably guess.
Did it matter that they were the same old, familiar calendars returning?
Not one jot!
It was all part of the Christmas build-up ritual that we loved.
Familiarity breeds...
... nostalgic memories.
And I'm smiling just thinking about them as I write this.
This was way before the days of chocolate advent calendars...
Our joy came from a picture of a robin, or a snowman, or a "what is that?" (some of the little drawings weren't the clearest!) not from calorific temptations.
Any chocolate that there was (and there usually was) would arrive on Christmas Day and not before.
Next on the list of Christmas rituals was the writing of our Christmas lists. And that meant research...
Hitting the catalogues...
I think my first memory was looking through the Green Shield Stamp catalogue...
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Remember glueing shedloads of Green Shield Stamps into the book? (I'm not sure why I give them capital letters but it just seems right, so there!)
So much licking... nasty taste...
What a relief when you got some of those mega stamps which counted for 10 of the normal green ones... so 4 megas equaled a whole page of greenies... and saved your tongue from the majority of the nastiness.
Then the Green Shield Stamp shop became Littlewoods (I think).
A different, but reassuringly similar, catalogue for Christmas list research.
And then Index.
Ditto.
And currently Argos.
Double ditto.
And then there were those other funny little brochure thingies that seemed to get invariably be inserted into other magazines in the run up to Christmas...
You know, the brochures full of items that no-one would ever want except to give as a get-out-of-jail gift for a hard-to-buy-for person at Christmas...
(Allegedly) funny aprons...
Plastic things (no doubt "made in Hong Kong" like everything cheap seemed to be back then... the only things the World seemed to get from China were pandas!) to stop the blue tits from pilfering the cream off the top of the milk...
Coin countering machines... (why oh why...?)
Battery operated money boxes in the shape of a coffin where a hand would come out and grab the penny, accompanied by a tinny vampire laugh....jpg)
I have a strong suspicion that a money box that I was given as a nipper came from one of those very catalogues...
Twas wooden... with a slot in the top and a plastic stopper in the bottom...
Very practical...
But it was the rhyme written on it that makes me suspect that I know its slightly questionable origin...
It's a rhyme that hasn't crossed my mind for probably 40 years... and yet is clearly carved in stone in my memory...
Our little boy...
is a wise young man,
he saves in this box...
all the new pence he can"...
"New pence"... must have been 1971 or thereabouts.
Ahhhh Christmas memories...
PS oh my giddy aunt... I just had a quick search on Google and I found exactly my old money box... but with slightly different wording. .jpg)
What are your pre-Christmas memories? Please share them in the comments below.
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