Month: December 2020

For all of us, and for all our children, there comes that terrible day when we discover a dreadful truth about Christmas. As soon as we do it seems so obvious, and the intense pleasure we had enjoyed before can never, ever be recaptured. I refer of course to the moment when it dawns on us, despite never having considered it before, that, well, to be frank, crackers are a bit rubbish.

It’s true – even though I can remember as a child being thrilled by the small, painfully rough, hard black plastic moustaches; by the magnifying-glass in the shape of a pink key; and by the ‘moves in a mysterious way’ fortune-telling fish.

I still have a certain grudging admiration for the awfulness of the cracker jokes, especially the atrociously ‘pun-ny’ ones – but they lose some of their sparkle when the (shiny red plastic fish) scales fall from your eyes and you realise they aren’t exactly Galton & Simpson.

I’ll admit I was never that keen on the paper hat, and in fact I don’t think I can recall anybody other than my grandparents actually wearing them. Certainly nobody has ever pulled a cracker and scrabbled around in the debris to find out what colour hat they’ve got (not when there are green tiddlywinking frogs or impracticably tiny hair combs to be had).

I suppose in mixing the awful and tacky, with the (to a child) thrilling and exciting, the ‘umble cracker is Christmas in a nutshell. And realising that they’re just tat, it’s hardly the biggest ‘coming of age’ discovery we all have to go through is it? I mean, it’s a much bigger shock when you find out Father Christmas isn–

No, of course I’m not going to reveal that in public!

I’d have to be crackers! 

Those of you with long memories may recall the smartly-liveried toy phones my brother & I were given one Christmas. Alas, although I would never downplay their entertainment value (01, if you’re outside London, 811 8055) their status as the very cutting-edge of technology was usurped the following year when, yes, we got Pong-ed.

Pong, for anybody too young to remember it and too lazy to Google it, was a distant ancestor to Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, a forerunner to Donkey Kong and Pac Man, possibly even pre-dating Space Invaders – because it was (as far as my memory (backed up by no actual research) tells me) the very first electronic home game-play entertainment system.

Pong came programmed with four different ball games, magically recreated (well, blockily approximated) in pixels on a TV screen. This was a time before even Lego people had faces, so the visual side of Pong was what you might charitably call basic. The rackets were simple rectangles; and eschewing the traditional roundness, the ball itself was square.

And the four games were very much variations on one theme, being Tennis, Doubles Tennis (Tennis with two rackets), Squash (Tennis, but you bounce the ball off a wall) – and Practice (like Squash, but now it’s just you against the wall).

By today’s standards it was probably closer to a YoYo than the Playstation 5, but back then, when we fully expected travel to the moon to be like catching a bus, when we were promised flying cars and food pills and robot butlers, it felt like a sign of things to come.

Which I guess it sort of was – having superseded the phones, Pong was soon knocked off its pedestal when my brother got a ZX Spectrum.

Rubber keys and cassette-tape – NOW the future had arrived! 

Long before the advent calendars began to open, earlier even than the clocks going back, the firsttentative sign that Christmas was on the way when I was a kid was the Coming of the Catalogues.

Littlewoods, Marshall Ward, Kays: all household names (well, in our household anyway) the catalogues were a twice-yearly event. There was the Spring/Summer edition, and the Autumn/Winter one, and there were two ways to tell which was which. One was the writing on the front cover (boring!) and the other was that the Autumn/Winter catalogue had over a hundred pages of Toys!

The Spring/Summer ones usually included half a dozen pages labelled ‘Toys’ as a quite scandalous ploy to lure easily-excited children inside – but it was just paddling pools or slides or swingballs, large-scale items very much stretching the definition of toy (if not actually pushing the limits of the Trade Descriptions Act).

But Autumn/Winter – now THAT knew how to do toys. Action figures, dolls, playsets, board games, annuals (I love an annual), latterly even computer games. All brought together into one massive section (in an epic ‘Avengers Assemble’ sort of way) full of photographs and wild claims of hours of pleasure, and signalling that Christmas, in all its cynical materialistic majesty, was on the way.

On a more practical note (although by ‘practical’ I mean ‘misleadingly and dangerously seductive’ in a way that tends nowadays to be more the province of credit card companies and payday lenders) it allowed you to spread the cost over several months hence, at least in theory, easing the burden and lessening the shock. Even without a catalogue, of course, I think it’s pretty obvious by now that another Christmas is fast approaching. I hope we can make our way there together. (In twenty-four manageable instalments.)