The Ghosts of Christmas Past by Ross Macfarlane

Illustration: Lesley-Anne Barnes Macfarlane

Christmas memories? Did I ever tell you about the time that I nearly killed my father?

It was Christmas Eve, 1967. I was nine. I was walking with my mum and dad along the street. And as we neared home, my dad and I were playing a game. Side-by-side, we were playfully kicking each other’s legs from behind. A great game, and I was chortling away every time I delivered my childish blow to my dad’s legs.

But then it happened. Our legs got tangled. I remember the puzzled and slightly panicked look on his face as he began to fall. Forwards. Face first. I was small then. My dad seemed enormous. And here he was now, falling forward - with both hands stuck in his pockets. I saw his elbows wriggle as he tried to get free. But too late. Like some giant tree falling in the forest, he swayed at first, and then, picking up momentum, he hurled forward towards the ground. Helpless. Face-first. Without his hands to protect his face. Did I mention that the ground was covered with broken bottles?

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It must have happened in real time, but I can only remember it now in slow-motion. Falling. Falling silently. Eyes shut now, accepting his fate. And when he landed - face-first - my mother (who had been watching in horror from behind) sprang into action: she slapped me on the head.

But all was well. All forgiven. Because the next day was Christmas Day.

Okay - here’s a question for you. If you had a time machine that could take you back into the past, then where would you go? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the question should be: when would you go? What period of time would you visit? Let’s narrow it down. Let’s leave out the big, big historical events. So, no going back to witness, say, Landing a Man on the Moon in 1969 or sneaking into the first night of Hamlet in the late 1500s.

And also let’s leave out “The Biggie”: The Nativity. If you were to be able to go back and witness that event (assuming that Joseph didn’t chase you out of the stable waving a carpenter’s tool over his head), then I suspect that the scene before you wouldn’t look much like the typical school nativity play. Look closely at your Bible and you’ll see no mention of snow, no inn-keeper, no animals in the stable, no “kings” - and Bible experts tell us that it wouldn’t have happened in December anyway.

Oh, and excuse me for asking - but it is likely - at that place and time - that Jesus would have been a child with bright blue eyes and blond curly hair? As we Scots say: “I hae ma doots...”. Remembering the Christmas cards of my childhood, the images of the Baby Jesus evoked not so much The Lost Tribes of Israel as The Lost Brother of Shirley Temple.

SO - where should we go with our Time Machine? Let’s keep it focused on you. Let’s go to Christmas Past. Your own Christmas Past. Remember when those ghosts took Ebenezer Scrooge back to his past in “A Christmas Carol”? The lonely wee boy Scrooge at the deserted school - but all made right when he was taken home by his big sister; later, as an apprentice, Scrooge remembered the joyful Christmas parties and dances held by his old employer, Fezziwig (I always get that name mixed up with “FOzziewig” because I’ve watched “The Muppet Christmas Carol” far too many times...). Even grumpy Scrooge, when he’s taken to those Christmases past, has to smile at the good times when kindness is shown to him by others

So what will happen when we take our own Time Machine and set the dials for “Christmas Past”? What do we see?

For me, it’s the wee, small things that I remember vividly from a childhood in the 1960s: a hardback UK Superman Annual where all the colours were wrong (“Dad - why are Superman’s trousers red???”); look - chocolate and sweets: JelliMallo...Old English Spangles...and Fry’s Five Boys (“But mum - why is that boy always crying?”). And one year, a cardboard castle - with toy soldiers: mediaeval Crusaders in grey chain-mail and white shirts with that blood-red cross at the front. And they’re defending the castle from – who else? – soldiers of the American Civil War.

And what’s on the television tonight? Only two channels: BBC and ITV - turn it on, wait for the picture to emerge from the grey fuzziness and the white noise, get the aerial straight (near the window is best) - that’s it: look - it’s “Billy Smart’s Circus”! No tv remote in those days: get off your backside and go to over the telly to change the channel - see what’s on the other side: clunk the handle of the channel changer: look - it’s “Billy Smart’s Circus” again - on both channels! And what’s the Big Film tonight? Ooh - “The Courage of Lassie”!

And the coming of Christmas led to other events too. The Christmas Telephone Call. We were the first family in our street to have a telephone. A phone in the house. ONE phone. Can you imagine only one phone in a house? I can hear generations of future children recoiling in horror at this unimaginable deprivation. I hear their anguished cries: “One phone? One phone? But who chose the ringtone?” And this old telephone led to an unlikely web of relationships, as other women in the street asked my mum if they could come to our house and receive their once-yearly Christmas telephone call from their emigrated family in Canada or Australia. I used to sit on the floor, playing with my toys, and eavesdrop: “Aye, oor Billy...aye, got a good job...Lavatory Attendant...whit? You’ve just got whit? A swimming pool? A swimming pool?? In December??? Aye...right enough…it’s Australia...”. Waves of emotion would flash across their faces - just like the Fry’s Five Boys, I thought - and, like that chocolate bar, there would always be tears. I never worked out then (or now) if those were tears of happiness for their emigrated family’s good fortune, or sorrow for their own missed opportunities in life. But always tears.

But the best part of Christmas and New Year in the 1960s - the absolute best part for a child was: the adults would get drunk - and they would sing.

I soon learned that different types of alcohol had different effects on the different singers. The whisky drinkers, for example, would start gently and then slowly fade into the background, as if becoming part of the wallpaper, their voices getting softer, their language less intelligible (with a gradual stiffness in the mouth that resembled lockjaw). End result: a kind of blissful oblivion, like somebody dying slowly in a warm bath. In contrast, those singers partial to a drop of fortified wine could become (how shall we put it?) somewhat more forthright in their musical interpretation.

In these lubricated social situations, we would thrill to the cries of “Gie us yer pleasure” or “One singer, one song!” - as Uncle Jimmy would get up to do the necessary. Ah - Uncle Jimmy. The man who dressed like Frank Sinatra in a Celtic scarf, but sang like a camel being castrated.

And then, the older folk would give heartfelt renditions of the songs from the 1920s, 30s and 40s - “Side By Side”, “Girl of My Dreams” (“I love yeww, ’onest, I doooo...”), “Slow Boat to China” and (my favourite) “Shanty in Old Shanty Town”. And again - the tears. Always the tears. Today, in a world that seems to be spinning out of recognition on a daily basis, it’s the memory of these old songs that ground me to an understanding of the past. Gone now. Gone forever.

Of course, before the house could be ready for The Visitors, everything would have to be cleaned. My mother, like a drill sergeant, would ensure that the place was clean top to bottom (my job was cleaning out the ashes from the coal fire). And the problem about such rigorous cleaning was that it often left the cleaners themselves...what’s the right word? “Manky”. (It tickled me many years later to learnt that the word “manky” originally came from the Latin word “mancus”, meaning “permanently injured”. Although, it doesn’t specify slaps to the head on Christmas Eve...)

And being manky could be a problem since none of our tenement flats contained a bath. We were lucky. We had the privilege of an inside toilet. Luckier than my aunty, whose cludgie wasn’t in the house, but was outside in the common stair for use by all residents in that stair. Whenever you entered that common toilet, you’d see ripped up copies of newspaper scattered all across the floor. The whole thing looked like an incompetent ransom note.

No bath in the house? No problem. Have a bath in the sink! My mother would boil some kettles, fill up the sink, get the temperature just right, get it nice and soapy - and then plonk me in. I still remember as a wee child sitting, bare-bottomed, on the draining board waiting to ease myself in - and waving out of the window to passers-by.

Was it simply that I was more innocent in the Sixties, or did the innocence belong to the time itself? The cheery music for “Dr Finlay’s Casebook”; Val Doonican’s seasonal cardigan (the memory is a blaze of colour, impossible, since the tv was black-and-white); is that Dusty Springfield advertising a Mother’s Pride loaf (Dusty Springfield???). Or the advert for the slimming bread - “Nimble” - (“She flies like a bird in the sky...”) where a girl trapped in an out-of-control hot-air balloon looks unconcerned as she noshes into a slice of bread and butter (while the band plays: “I Can’t Let Maggie Go” - even though some idiot had obviously let go of the rope that had secured Maggie’s balloon the ground...).

Is it me, or is the world spinning faster and faster these days? Time was, when you had a fair idea of what lay ahead of you in life. It all seemed clearer in the 1960s. All mapped out and safe. After a certain age, you were meant to be old and to stay old. Remember The Beatles’ song “When I’m 64”: “Every summer we could rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight/If it’s not too dear/We could scrimp and save...” Everybody understood what older folk were meant to be like (including, apparently, having grandchildren on your knee, called “Vera, Chuck and Dave”). But that was then. These days, it’s more likely that granny and granddaughter have just polished off a bottle of prosecco, compared their matching tattoos and settled down together to watch “Love Island - Christmas Reunion”.

So - back into our Time Machine - what is the first Christmas that you remember? When I think about this, I find it hard to separate the fact from the feeling. But I’ll bet that when you cast your mind back, it’s not going to be a Great Event you remember, it’ll be a small, small detail that will stick in your memory: like the vivid, bright red of that scooter; the slightly sinister, eerie glowing of the Christmas tree lights on the wallpaper; or that lovely, gradual cracking sound as you step onto the frozen puddle. And in those days, was everyone - and I mean everyone - smiling? Foggy memories, but sharp feeling: here I am, just tiny, sitting beside my mum, peeling the potatoes - “helping” with the Christmas dinner. The plop of the water as the peelings drop into the plastic basin on the floor; and now I’m up high, so high - sitting on dad’s shoulders - easily the Best Dad in the World - laughing and on the way to the tobacconist/newsagents to pick up the Christmas “Beano”.

Christmas is meant to be a happy time, isn’t it? But it’s inevitable, as with all occasions that mark the passing of time, there can also be sadness attached to it. Sadness for days that are gone for good. Sadness for the people we have lost forever. These people exist only in memory now. The mum who bathed me in the sink and the dad who carried me on his shoulders - both gone now. Gone these many years. And I still think about them every day. Time, like a long-forgotten snow, has covered them entirely. Today, they are remembered like some ghosts of Christmas past. And then it strikes you: at some point, we’ll all become the ghosts of someone else’s Christmas Past. We will exist only in their memory.

So, here’s the challenge – harder this year, perhaps, than any other: if you are lucky enough to see the people you love this Christmas – whether inside your “bubble” or in cyberspace - take that little bit more care to be kind. Remember – whether you like it or not - you are a Memory in the Making. Make it a happy one.