CHRISTMAS DAY

For various reasons, I didn't feel much like celebrating Christmas this year, so I... didn't really...

Instead, here's a couple of snapshots from our family Christmases way back in the mid-1970s... days when I could be persuaded to wear a paper hat, and my mother bought all my shirts...

Poor love, her choice in clothing always tended towards the patterned... Although I note that here she's dressed me up in rather ghastly loud designs so that she didn't have to wear any herself...

Strange, too that given these pictures are a year apart, we seem to all only have had one set of "smart" clothes which we kept for special occasions, and even the candles seem to have come out of the same box two years running.

Odd, too, how we fell into the same habits each and every year, sitting in the same seats having been bludgeoned into submission by an hour or so of my Grandfather playing a selection of tunes on his Hammond Organ, probably sitting down to eat at much the same time, after the Queen had said her piece, and probably eating exactly the same "traditional" selection of meats and vegetables, and going through all those familiar rituals like "Granny's Gorgeous Gravy" and the mysterious after-dinner "Christmas Pie" which involved extra gifts attached to pieces of string bearing name labels which you pulled to receive a late Christmas day "extra" surprise...

I suspect that my grandfather took the second picture because of my grandmother's lousy framing of the picture on the previous year.

That said... At least hers actually came out.

Lost moments... Now gone forever.

Most of them have gone now, of course. In my grandfather's case, he'd only see three more Christmas Days after this one, and my father only another eight. These days I wonder what it would be like to talk to them now. I wonder what it might be like to have proper "grown up" conversations with them now that I'm vaguely "adult" myself. Would it be all terribly sensible and intellectually stimulating, or would we just fall into the same old platitudes, disappointments and disinterest which so marred my conversations with my mother these past few years...?

Now, of course, the years have rolled by and there's only two of us left from these pictures and, somehow, I'm finding that a far stranger feeling than I ever expected to...

But other people's Christmases are never all that interesting to anyone else, so I'm going to shut up now and just wallow in my own small vat of, well, not exactly "nostalgia" exactly, perhaps more a sense of slightly melancholic ennui...?

Happy Christmas, and I hope that those of you who are able to, will savour each and every moment of your own little "traditions..." o<[]:-)