Andrew Curnow's Ramblings

December 13th already, nearly time to get the stockings out. (I tell my wife this every year, but she’s never yet taken the hint.)

I say stockings but of course your ‘wrapped present receptacle of choice’ may be, as it was in my childhood, a pillowcase instead. That’s not a complaint – there’s one immediately obvious advantage to this arrangement because, unless you have very small pillows (or very large legs) the odds are that a pillowcase is going to be bigger, and therefore hold more presents, than a stocking. I can still recall the soft rustle of wrapping paper against cotton, and the sight of a pillowcase often reminds me of Christmas – I occasionally get quite the Proustian rush when I’m ironing them.

Yes, ironing!

Possibly some hereditary quirk, but there’s a very pronounced ‘laundry gene’ in our family (although I have a strong suspicion that in my daughter’s case it’s skipping a generation). As a consequence, for example, at the height of Summer, when clothes can dry out on the line, I dream of ‘doing the triple’ – that is, wash, dry and iron all in the same day. Christmas day is a ‘no wash zone’ of course (well, except in emergencies) but it’s by no means unheard of for the washing machine to be back in action by Boxing Day.

This may all sound like a dreadful affliction, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it was my laundry capabilities, in particular my ironing skills, that initially attracted Mrs Curnow to me. (And the purple cardigan I was wearing when we first met sealed the deal – naturally, I mean she’s only human.) In one fell swoop, she acquired a new surname and room service.

What a lucky woman.

Although I’m not suggesting I’ve had no liquorice at all since she passed away, it’s nevertheless true to say I could ALWAYS rely on my mother-in-law to get me a large box of allsorts for Christmas.

Mainly, I’m sure, because she knew how much I liked them… but there was probably also a bit of that same devilish naughtiness which compels people to buy drum kits for other people’s children. Because of course she knew that my wife, her daughter, would be stuck with the ‘fallout’ – that is to say, the unfortunate side effect, the peripheral problem, the (to be blunt (well, ish)) the vast quantities of wind, that come from me eating too many sweets.

In the days before lactose intolerance took her out of the equation, Mrs Curnow would sometimes buy, say, a Mars Bar because she “just fancied one” – but would then bring it home and put it away in the cupboard!

To my mind, if you’re not eating it straightaway you didn’t really fancy it all that much; so in the interests of fairness and democracy and all that stuff I instituted a twenty-four hour moratorium. Meaning if something’s not eaten within a day of being bought, it becomes fair game. (And obviously by ‘fair game’ I mean I’m going to eat it.)

It’s a policy that has served us (well, me) in good stead all these years. I admit I’m probably rather too inclined to eat too many sweets, too often and too quickly. It’s something I’ve inherited, if I can casually devolve all responsibility in that way. But I accept, even if I cannot understand it, that there are people who aren’t bothered about sweets at all, who can happily leave them unopened and uneaten for days and weeks on end.

Well, it takes all sorts. 

A lot of our individual opinions on whether things are ‘Christmas-y’ or not are probably established in childhood. For example, I’d never even heard of eggnog until well into my teens, clearly far too late for me to ever consider it in any way seasonal – and consequently, it suffers a Scrooge-like scorn whenever it’s mentioned.

I mean, what even is it? How does one nog an egg? I’ve never heard of anything else being nogged, so why not just call it ‘nog’? And so on.

(Although, playing Devils’ Advocate with myself (these long Winter/lockdown evenings, I’ve had to make my own entertainment) I suppose nothing other than eggs are ever scrambled, but you’d never talk about having ‘scrambled on toast’.)

However, I accept that I’m inconsistent and contrary, because at the same time as humbugging the eggnog (which is an offence in some Southern states) I absolutely maintain the fundamental Christmassyness of The Wizard of Oz, a film which seemed to be on TV every year when I was a child.

And yet it’s not even slightly Christmassy.

Although, perhaps I’m doing a disservice to the BBC programming schedulers of the mid-70s, by suggesting they  had an “it’s in colour and it’s got some cute song, that’ll do” mindset. Even years later, when you know what a health & safety nightmare the production was, and how Judy Garland’s life played out, it’s still a lovely, feel good sort of a film.

For all its no-Christmas, no-tinsel, no-Santa, no-nothing, appearance, it’s about helping people, it’s about being good, and selfless, and (at the risk of being schmaltzy) it reminds us that ultimately there’s no place like home.

Plus it’s about a girl who ends up happy because she’s got a fantastic pair of slippers. You can’t get more Christmassy than that!! 

In the mid-eighties/in their early-forties, my parents started to do a Christmas letter. I don’t recall now what prompted it, whether it was a sudden fancy or a long-held dream finally realised due to Dad acquiring a Gestetner duplicator (thus allowing multiple copies to be run off, in a pre-desktop publishing, highly labour-intensive, incredibly-noisy sort of way) but whatever the reason, they began one Christmas and at time of writing are still, um, writing.

I’m assuming that by ‘Christmas letter’ everybody knows the kind of thing I mean. Usually sent alongside a Christmas card, the letter is topped and tailed with Seasons Greetings, but its main purpose, for some people at least, is a bit of passive-aggressive oneupmanship, as the family in question reviews the year gone by, regaling us lesser mortals with all their many triumphs and accomplishments.

As you can imagine, all this put tremendous pressure on bruv and me each year to scale the North face of this or develop a miracle cure for that or broker some kind of peace treaty between the others, so as to give Mum and Dad something to brag about when it came to December. I’m not sure we ever quite managed it (except perhaps the year when, at the risk of sounding like a Richard Curtis knock off, we managed two weddings and a pregnancy) but even so, a letter has been produced every year since. And to their credit, Mum and Dad have never yet resorted to my childhood ‘thankyou letter’ tactic of padding out their Christmas missive with jokes.

Mind you I haven’t seen this year’s yet, so they might have had to do that this time round. I mean, it’s been such an uneventful year hasn’t it, they might not have found anything to say about it…

We can probably blame EastEnders. (Cue dramatic drumbeat!)

Soaps seem to treat Christmas as the biggest night of the year, perhaps because more than ever there’s a captive audience; meaning you can guarantee some huge plotline will reach its improbable climax shortly after the Queen’s Speech.

It wasn’t always like that. Corrie’s 1963 Christmas episode, for example, was a home-made This Is Your Life in the Mission Hall (spoiler alert, Annie Walker was the guest with Dennis Tanner as the Eammon Andrews). And Crossroads, in 1979, had Noele Gorden without a hint of embarrassment (and with a casual disregard for fictional reality and fourth walls) burst into song surrounded by all her closest family plus assorted members of staff.

But then along came EastEnders, and in 1986 when Den delivered Angie’s divorce papers in precisely the ludicrously-melodramatic way nobody in real life ever would, it netted a (still) record audience guaranteed to make even the most jaded of program schedulers sit up and take notice.  (Cue dramatic drumbeat!)

No wonder then, that Christmas Day has subsequently become the perfect time for soap folk to get married or move house or blow something up or play a recording they’d improbably made admitting to some affair or other….

It’s been a hard year for everyone, but hopefully we can all derive some comfort from knowing that at least we won’t be stood around freezing and hungry on Christmas Day while the photographer takes yet more shots of the bride and groom (who odds are will be divorced by Easter anyway); we won’t have to agonise over who shot our Uncle Terry; and we won’t find ourselves confronted by the unexpected arrival of a never-before-mentioned long-lost relative.

Or will we…? (Cue dramatic drumbeat!)

It’s a truth universally acknowledged (to coin a phrase) that nothing newsworthy ever happens over Christmas.

Even as a kid, I was aware that the news programme on Christmas day was only ever a shadow of its usual self, 15 minutes at most and you could rely on probably 5 minutes of that being plucky nurses singing in the wards, or a dog in a Santa hat. It was so news-lite that, to be honest, just like we did with the newspapers, we could have probably gone the whole day and done without completely.

My recollection, nevertheless, and in all honesty it’s to his credit that he liked to make sure he was keeping up with world events, is that my Grandpa still liked to catch what news there was of a Christmas Day. Not that he and Gran spent every one of them with us by any means, nor vice versa, but certainly when they did (or when we did) at some point during the day, cutting across the hubbub and general chaos, would come the cry, “Hark!”

Not, as you might expect, a precursor to a quick burst of ‘Herald Angels’ to settle us all down, more a note that he wanted to listen to the news – in other words, a polite (and, I suppose, faintly seasonal) way of telling us to shut up.

As far as I know it’s one tradition that hasn’t passed down to subsequent generations. It certainly hasn’t to me, and although my parents and bruv like to watch the Queen’s Speech, I’m not aware that any of them is all that fussed about catching the bulletins.

At least, if they are, it’s news to me!

At the risk of being indulgent, or at least dull, I’d like to talk about slippers.

When I was younger I can remember Grans and Aunts and Mothers getting excited about the prospect of a new pair of slippers for Christmas – and now that I’m not younger, I find myself exactly the same. (Though, just to be clear, my slippers aren’t flowery with bits of fur round the edges, mine are manly man slippers. For men.)

I usually get some for my birthday too and given that this falls almost exactly halfway through the year (29^th June, feel free to put it in your diaries now) it means that as long as each pair of slippers lasts six months I’m never without.

Which would be fine except somehow my slippers don’t ever quite manage six months – and by late May / November, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and suddenly the sole is flapping away nineteen-to-the-dozen, or my big toe is showing. Whatever the particular problem, somehow they always end up on their last legs (well, last feet) with several weeks to go before they can be, without undue emotion or ceremony, chucked in the bin and replaced with a newer, younger model.

Last year my daughter, in a staunchly practical fashion which she’s inexplicably inherited from somewhere, solved this apparently insoluble problem, by getting me TWO pairs of slippers for Christmas. And yet still, somehow, somehow, I found myself ending November with no good slippers, and very chilly toes. Almost as if there’s some kind of immutable law, that slippers will inevitably decay just before Christmas, regardless of how many pairs you have.

Maybe, to counter that, she’ll have got me THREE pairs this year!

Or would that be the start of a slipper-y slope?

As if maintaining the pretence of Father Christmas wasn’t difficult enough, explaining how he manages it all in a single night, how nobody ever sees him, and how reindeer are even able to fly anyway; as if all that wasn’t hard enough, somebody somewhere had the bright idea of the Santa’s Grotto.

Because, having established that nobody ever manages to see Santa on Christmas Eve while he’s busy about his work, it obviously makes perfect sense to tell already-excitable children that they CAN see him just casually sat around passing the time of day in some tinsel-strewn corner of their local garden centre / shopping mall / village hall.

As an adult, the whole thing is riddled with illogicalities – I mean, he’s quite a famous guy,  what’s he doing playing Holsworthy Town Square when surely he should be headlining at the O2?!

As a child though, I don’t remember ever questioning it. Mind you, I also don’t to be honest remember visiting many Santas. One at Bulloughs maybe in the late 70s, one in Carlisle pannier market around the same time, but it’s all rather vague.

Odd really. You might have thought an event of such monumental significance for a 6 or 7 year old, would have seared itself forevermore into my memory; but no, I don’t recall any residual sense of excitement or, alternatively, of disappointment or suspicion. Whereas my recollections of taking Claudia to visit Santa at his pied-a-terre just outside Launceston, are much more vivid.

Mind you, that WAS pretty memorable. Unquestionably the old gentleman had a genuine snow-white beard growing on his chin, and he was such a jolly chap, so welcoming and friendly, and his voice…

I wonder…

You don’t think he could have been the real…?

>Ahem<. No. Silly. Daft. Tt. Kids eh. Etc.

I almost ate our Christmas cake in October.

In my defence (he added quickly) I came home from work to discover an anonymous un-iced fruitcake had taken up residence in the biscuit cupboard. It looked very appealing, even if its sudden random appearance had about it the air of things from my childhood which could be labelled “I went to a Bring & Buy sale and felt I had to buy something”.

Luckily (for the cake, if not for my stomach) Zel soon after mentioned that there was a Christmas cake in the cupboard, and she was going to ice it nearer the time, and could I find a tin for it please – and although she didn’t then go on to say, “and make sure you don’t eat any of it now, you gutty git” I think we both knew this was implied.

My memory tells me that when we were kids, Mum used to make the Christmas cake, but Dad was always the one lumbered with icing it – usually a neat, almost certainly symmetrical, latticework pattern, with a wall of beautifully-nozzled swirls all around the perimeter, it would be meticulously applied during December when (arguably) he ought to have been trying to think up some new angle for a Christmas sermon.

Sad to report, like many (many!) other skills, the ability to ice a fruitcake is not something I’ve inherited from my Dad and with that in mind I’m more than happy to leave the icing of this latest example to Zel. I’ll stick with my own particular skill set, thank you very much. That is to say, I’ll eat it.

Just not in October.