Merry Christmas! But is it all a bit much? - Christine Grahame
The story of Scrooge Christmases past, present and future got me thinking about how that would translate into our modern world.
In my eighties my “past” goes way back into a childhood in a prefab at Sighthill where I lived until I was 10.
It was a charming wee house, but walls and ceiling were as thin as paper mâché. There was one fire, lit for the evenings and baths only, with brickettes and dross eking out the coal.
Post war, in the fifties money was tight and life of necessity simple. The Christmas tree was propped in a bucket, decorated with paper chains, a few glass breakable baubles and lit with small candles on metal holders. Paper chains and the expandable paper bells completed the fire hazards.
Alcohol was usually one bottle of sherry and some beer. Christmas, however, brought out the whisky and even wine (a rarity in working class homes). Lemonade, usually a treat, was aplenty.
Stockings were my father’s old woolly socks, easily filled by one mandarin, wax crayons and a notebook. We had only one “big” present. I fondly recall the doll with the straw hat, yellow frock and sandals, my “must have” that year. Or the toy cooker, heated by white spirits, which could boil potatoes. No Health & Safety then.
The aroma of turkey filled the living room with mum happy in the kitchen with a table been placed in the centre of the living room, with more candles, fruit piled high (dad worked for Rankins Fruitmarkets), Mackintosh apples polished within an inch of their skin, gleaming like red baubles.
The windows steamed up and the fire was allowed to burn all day. I brimmed with happiness and a sense of security which I only recognised in my adulthood.
Today you can buy an “off the shelf Christmas” ready decorated and lit tree, dinner table ready.
Today my grandchildren have money sent to their parents so they can buy appropriately. They have customised stockings and so many decorations they could open a shop. There is more than one “big” present.
It is of course by no means the universal story for children, many of whom can’t even have what I had. Commercialism has exposed even more the divisions in society when you can hardly get through Halloween before the tinselling begins.
So what of the future? Well one thing for sure, that the sales drive for Christmas will be earlier and earlier. Surely there must come a point when enough is enough.
Do we really need several Christmas trees in the house, more outdoor illuminations, an even bigger telly screen, even more piled into the shopping trolley when you’re not feeding the whole street, bins overflowing with wasted food?
I know we can’t return to the Christmas of my childhood when inequalities did exist. Before the telly, then the internet, I was in complete ignorance but we are not in complete ignorance anymore.
At this time of year, do we really see a society which makes as proud when so many children are in poverty, when foodbanks, clothing banks, when starvation and war are all taken for granted?
Yes, let’s celebrate but also reflect on how we as a society should all be Jock Tamson’s bairns.