13 things we miss about Christmas growing up

There is plenty about Christmas that remain the same every year. However, there are also many things that have changed over the years.

These days, we watch countless festive films on streaming services and spend a small fortune on presents for our children’s teachers. We also battle to have the Insta-perfect Christmas and to create lots of memories.

From the cheesy gifts which were the same every year, to the toys everyone wanted, hopefully our children will look back at the Christmases of their childhood as fondly as we do ours…

Carol singers

When I were a lad, people would come to your door and sing Christmas carols at you. They came in one of two varieties:

1. Middle aged and older people armed with sheet music and at least two trained singing voices. One of them might even have a lantern on a stick.

2. A gang of three or four mildly menacing nine-year-olds who struggled to remember the words to ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas.’

The latter were infinitely preferable because they’d get it over with quickly so you didn’t have to stand there for long freezing and pretending to enjoy it. Punting them a seasonal shilling as they were taking their first deep breath was usually enough to send them happily on their journey of festive extortion.

Firearms

When I were a lad, Santa could be relied on to augment my formidable arsenal of pretend weapons, because boys played with guns back then. These came in all shapes and sizes, many of them firing percussion caps which never sounded even slightly convincing.

Several decades of liberal soul-searching, the feminisation of education and other factors have made toy guns unacceptable. Instead, small boys nowadays ask Santa for hyper-realistic computer games in which they pretend to be criminals who steal cars, deal drugs, pimp prostitutes and murder people.

Cowboy gear

When I were a lad, me and every other lad had a cowboy hat and a sheriff’s badge, six-shooters, holsters and belts and cowboy waistcoats. The obsession with all things cowboylike passed with the diminishing popularity of Westerns, though round our way it also went out of fashion after one of the gang came out to play on Boxing day wearing a particularly fine set of cowboy togs, prompting the girls to compare him unfavourably to the Milky Bar Kid.

The fashion also gave rise to the joke heard in many 1960s workplaces: Millionaire asks his son what he’d like for Christmas. “A cowboy outfit” says the lad, so the bloke bought him (insert name of the firm you work for here).

Candied fruit, marzipan fruit and chocolate coated Brazil nuts

You can still get all these things. I saw them in Lidl, er, I mean Waitrose, the other day but we don’t consume them in nearly the quantities we used to since more enticing confections came along. See also liqueurs and actual nuts. Many people still buy nuts at Christmas, because it’s traditional, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to eat them. The decline in nut-eating is because so few men do hard physical jobs these days and thus are too feeble to crack a walnut, let alone an almond.

(Health & Safety notice: Almonds are best cracked using a hammer. This procedure should be carried out outdoors. Ensure you wear safety goggles and that a trained and certified first aider is present.)

Billy Smart’s Circus on telly

And ‘The Great Escape’ and Marx Brothers films and (best of all) the Morecambe & Wise Christmas special. Nowadays, TV fills the spiritual void left by the decline of religion by making us watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ yet again. Many people nowadays consider ‘Die Hard’ to be a Christmas movie and this, too, can remind us of the Really Important Things In Life, which mostly seem to comprise of using the oedipal expletive and causing improvised explosions.

Bath Salts

Bath salts were the pocket-money present of choice for mums and aunties. These pink or purple rocks came in a jar or bottle and looked like pieces of sea-salt or crystal meth.

Ladies were supposed to put them in the bath to make them smell nice. They have long since been superseded by bath bombs, which are more fun and fill your bath with colourful little fragments of glitter, which then go down the plughole and thus into the drains, mingling with hair, fat and unspeakable things. If Bristol’s sewer system gets clagged up by a giant fatberg in January, expect it to be fragrant and to sparkle beautifully.

Power tools

Feminists get quite rightly het up when you show them newspaper and magazine adverts from the 1950s to the 80s which suggested that cookers, washing machines and vacuum cleaners are the Ideal Christmas Gift For The Little Lady. But you will find an equal and corresponding amount of ads from the 1970s to the 1990s suggesting that if your husband is a Real Man he’ll want a power tool or the Black & Decker Workmate adjustable workbench.

The implication that the thing men really wanted for Christmas was DIY stuff was grossly offensive gender stereotyping.

Hamlet cigars

When you were old enough to spend your pocket money on presents for family members, the very first Christmas present you bought your Dad might well have been a packet of Hamlets. A primary school-age child could go into a tobacconist and purchase cigarettes and cigars, no questions asked.

Train sets and Airfix kits

Back in the day these were for small boys. Nowadays they are for grown males with a large disposable income.

‘Top of the Pops’ LPs

Bloody awful albums of cover versions of chart-topping songs of the day were produced by Hallmark Records from the late 1960s to the mid-80s. They sold in large quantities because they were cheap, and available from Woolworth’s.

You would be given them by aunts and grandmothers who had never been into a record shop in their lives, but who knew that you liked “that Top of the Pops rubbish.” From 1970 to 1996 every charity shop in the land had a big stock of unwanted TOTP LPs. There are probably people out there who are serious collectors of these things nowadays; if this is you, please don’t write in.

Willy Warmers

Hand-knitted willy warmers were big in the nineties; the perfect humorous present for the office Secret Santa or as a seasonal stocking filler for the Man in Your Life. The willy-warmer was one of the final gasps of the great Postwar British Sense of Smutty Humour (see ‘Carry On’ films and every ITV sitcom from the 1970s). Our exposure to sex in all its many forms is now so commonplace that you’ll find more humour in a Haynes car manual.

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Mistletoe

With the media full of truly horrible stories of sexual harassment (and worse) by various prominent males up to and including former Presidents of the United States, the management of 95% of the workplaces in Bristol will have banned mistletoe from their premises now and for all time.

Yet some women could even the score. I once knew this girl – let’s call her Debbie from Accounts – who was always being hit on by male colleagues. One year, she very deliberately went to the office party despite being ill in order to take spectacular revenge.

At the works do, she stood nonchalantly under the mistletoe which, as she knew from previous occasions, would be used by many males as a pretext to grab her and stick their tongues into her face. Several had done so before all present realised that Debbie had a stinking cold and that 90% of her entire body-mass was made up of snot. She would be better by Christmas Day, but they would not.

The bloodbath down the Centre

This still happens, though not nearly on the scale it used to … In the Good Old Days, the last working day before Christmas was celebrated with a daylight orgy of bloodletting and vomiting in Bristol’s city centre as office workers knocked off at around 11am and headed for the pubs.

Middle-aged women, unaccustomed to alcohol for the rest of the year, turned into screeching harpies after their second sweet sherry, while the menfolk would decant themselves onto the streets at around 4pm for a recreational fight before staggering off to Broadmead to do their Christmas shopping. Happy days!

This article was first published in December 2022 and was republished in December 2024.