Bicycles and tribal masks, seersucker swimsuits and underage whiskey, holly and handguns, family feasting and slamming doors: we never forget our childhood Christmases

Ralph Steadman

I believed everything my mother and father told me until I was 16. That Christmas - it must have been 1952 - I still believed in Father Christmas. And why not, eh? There was God all else to believe in. I was promised a Raleigh bike with three-speed Sturmey-Archer gears, chrome-plated handlebars and wheel rims, and - wait for it - in metallic green! Some bicycle mechanic in Mold in North Wales was getting it all ready for me. Don't worry, my father said. It will be here in time. I couldn't contain myself and, what's more, I let my feverish imagination loose on it. The bike would sparkle, and the chrome would enhance the colour like a New World meadow in sunlight. At 1am on Christmas morn, I was woken by the sounds of someone stumbling and grunting his way up the tiny, twisted staircase to the attic where my sister and I had our bedrooms. I watched a figure wearing my dad's black Homburg hat (he always wore one), a stiff white Van Heusen detachable collar like Neville Chamberlain's, and sporting a huge white beard of Boots cotton wool. I pretended to be asleep. I think I tried to snore to drown out the reason that was driving my mind insane. Oh, oh, I thought, it's the BIKE! It was indeed, and it was my father, too. I awoke at first light and turned to behold my dream. It was an old bike, hand-painted in puce green, and with rusty chrome that had been touched up in the worst places with silver paint. Sure, I got it out proudly. There was nothing else to do but cling desperately to my dream machine. I wobbled along for a few yards until I fell off, which was just as well, really, because the brakes also needed new rubbers. My father had been swindled. The whole bike was a hurried botch-up, and the front tyre was flat on account of a perished inner tube. But I still believe in Father Christmas. It's with God that I have a problem. My mother and father had done their best, and I laughed and cried as I wrote this tiny memory.

Denis Healey

As a small boy, I lived in a rather sombre terrace house in Keighley, near Haworth. My little brother and I always woke up early on Christmas Day and crept downstairs to look at the parcels under the Christmas tree, hoping, unsuccessfully, to guess what was inside them. After opening the presents, I would walk up the hills above Keighley to skate on the tarn with my father - it always seemed to freeze in those days! Then an enormous dinner with turkey, Christmas pudding with a stalk of holly on it, and mince pies, followed by a sleep - nowt to touch it, as we used to say.

Janet Suzman

Hot Christmases. The full turkey/fiery pudding thing. People stuffed to the gunwales and sweating. After lunch, lolling outside in the blazing sun. Christmas when I was two years old was unforgettable. I remember fetching bright parcels from under a huge tree and handing them to men on crutches with maybe a hand missing, faces hid-den by bandages. Scary. But they had sweet, soft voices and kissed me tenderly. During the war, we moved out of our large, airy house in Johannesburg - it became the Lady Dunvan Auxiliary Hospital - and there a wonderful plastic surgeon called Jack Penn (a protege of Archie McIndoe, I believe) mended faces that had been burned beyond recognition. These men had been rescued from the torpedoed convoys of the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and they all missed children, though many were too young to have any. And thus were my brother (he was four) and I roped in to do our little Santa bit for the war effort.

William Boyd

The first 22 Christmases of my life were spent in West Africa, first in Ghana and then Nigeria, so for me Christmas conjures up heat and the surreal incongruity of sitting down to lunch in T-shirt and shorts to eat turkey with all the trimmings, followed by an early-afternoon swim. The Ghanaian Christmases I remember particularly, because the day would be punctuated by the visits of groups of young kids, six to ten years old, who would dance and play drums. One child would wear a grimacing tribal mask and the others would beat out their astonishingly complex percussive riffs as he danced and chanted. It was an amazingly accomplished show. Christmas carols have always seemed a bit feeble since.

Carmen Callil

Every Christmas, my mother gave my sister and me our new seersucker swimsuits. We would find them in the pillowcase tied to the bottom of the bed, along with all the other goodies from our tribe. My Irish grandmother lived next door, and we would spend Christmas evening with her. There was my mother, my grandmother, the four of us, and Uncle Norm until he got married when the war was over. English Christmas it was, with all the trimmings: a capon and Christmas pudding - hot, with sixpences and threepences in it. My Irish grandmother much preferred bread and jam, but she always did the necessary with flourish. Over the road lived my Lebanese grandparents and many many aunts and uncles. Their generosity stuffed the pillowcase to bursting. Once, it was tied to the wheel of my first, magical bicycle. On Christmas Day, we would go over the road to say thank you, then belt down to the beach a minute away and baptise the swimsuit. Back home, Mummy would be toiling over trifle and the kibe my Lebanese grandmother forced upon her. By evening, we would all be ill, and burnt to a crisp.

Arnold Wesker

Though we contributed Jesus to Christmas, the Jews don't seriously celebrate the day. It didn't always turn out too celebratory for them. To complicate matters, my parents were atheistic communists - no trees, no decorations, no piled-high presents. (I made up for it later in life, after marrying a gentile; we stacked presents so high it took a morning of Black Velvets and smoked-salmon sandwiches to unwrap them all.) But I do have one memory, from when I was around seven or eight years old. The other kids were talking of hanging up their stockings, so I thought: why not me? Did Father Christmas discriminate? I hung up a pillowslip. Lo and behold, next morning, there was something in it. An orange! My sister, eight years older, couldn't bear the thought that I'd wake up to an empty "stocking". An orange was all she could afford. She's looked after me ever since.

Ann Pasternak Slater

Christmas had its own special smell of pine needles and sour milk. The tree was draped with chains improvised from red and silver milk-bottle tops, roughly rinsed and saved from year to year. The 30 candle-holders came from Germany, each with a tiny, frilled dish to catch the wax. We would sit together watching the last candles die. Branched shadows sharpened across the ceiling. Corners vanished. A flame at its last gasp would run rings round the dish, or dwindle imperceptibly to a blue gleam barely glimpsed in the dark. It could take hours. There was no Christmas ritual like it.

Marina Warner

In southern Italy, where my mother, Ilia, was born, Christmas is bracketed by two far more important feasts: San Nicola on 6 December and la Befana on the Feast of the Three Kings on 6 January. San Nicola's body was stolen from Myra on his native Byzantine coast by 23 brave and pious pirates, and was brought for reburial in the cathedral in Bari, Ilia's home town. His body in the tomb there still exudes a magic elixir, which you can collect in phials from the shrine. In the jargon of hagiography, this makes the original Santa Claus a rare and wonderful "myrrhoblyte": his relics ooze myrrh. (The liquid is colourless, odourless - and tasteless, as I know because I tried it.) More to the point, San Nicola is feted with marzipan sweets in the shape of all kinds of fruit and fairing. My sister and I were never punished with the lump of coal that is left in the shoe of naughty children on his feast day. Not because we were specially good, but because my mother was far too soft-hearted for such discipline. La Befana, whose day closes the Christmas season more than a month later, is a crone, a hag, a wicked witch associated with bogeydom and the underworld, but also, inversely, with storytelling and wickedness as fun. Her name comes from the same word as Epiphany: according to the legend, she was asked the way to the Christ child by the Three Kings, and she failed to follow them to the stable and so missed seeing the newborn saviour.

As my mother consequently knew next to nothing about English Victoriana, about fir trees, yule logs and plum pudding, it seemed to her, especially in the lean Fifties, rather spendthrift to cut down a whole tree. So she used to tussle with cut branches from the garden, which, wearing tough gloves, she'd tie with red ribbons in huge sprays in a tub and then decorate. Like most children, I was desperate to conform, and was embarrassed by this pretend Christmas tree. Now I'm proud of my mother's good sense and ingenuity. Meanwhile, prices for Christmas trees down the North End Road and in Camden Town have been slashed, and my family has graduated to proper Norwegian spruce.

Ned Sherrin

Childhood? That goes from age five to ten, right? (1436-41). My childhood Christmases were spent on my father's farm in Somerset. Christmas Eve was turkey and stuffing time. Christmas morning, stocking and presents. My brother (three years older) kept the Father Christmas secret from me for two years. On Christmas matins, the bird was put in the Aga, and two aunts stayed to watch the veg. Up to 20 adults and three or four kids gathered round the table. My father proudly carved. The meat was cold by the time it got to us. Wine was unknown in the household except at Christmas lunch, when two bottles of sweet S or B arrived. Stand for the anthem. Sit for the King's Speech. Uncle Dick's speech of thanks. Cold cuts for supper. Bed.

John McVicar

I remember, when I was six years old, composing my shopping list to Santa and posting it up the chimney in my parents' bedroom. Some of my classmates spread rumours that Santa was an adult invention, but I still believed. On Christmas morning, I woke to find the cycle that I craved, although none of the other presents that I had earnestly ordered. My Christmas was merry. I forgot about my order form. But, in the spring, I was playing in my parents' bedroom and remembered my crumpled post to Santa that, three months earlier, I had so carefully tucked inside the unused chimney. I decided to test the truth of the rumours. My heart pounded as I fumbled around inside the dusty recesses. When my fingers touched the paper, I felt cold, calm, still, lonely. I looked at it, then cried silently. I never told my parents and, the next Christmas, I pretended that Santa would be coming on his sleigh.

Claus von Bulow

Those in their second childhood never stop comparing and complaining. In my first childhood in cold Lutheran Denmark, I remember the real candles on the real tree. Olfactory memories. There was goose, not turkey. There were bells on the horses pulling the sleigh as my grandfather and I delivered hampers for old people less fortunate than us. There was the visit to the family tombstones of those who had died, and there was the church service celebrating the birth of the babe. Without that babe, and without the look in the eyes of other new children, this time of year can become just a celebration of the fatted calf.

Diane Abbot

I grew up in the suburbs of London in the Fifties. But a Caribbean Christmas, even when you are celebrating it in suburban Harrow, is not a last-minute affair. My mother always baked her own Christmas cake, but to a Caribbean recipe. This involves soaking the dried fruit in wine and rum months in advance. The cake produced is particularly luscious and fruity. The smell of Christmas for me is the smell of a real pine tree. We always had one of those. But the mystery of Christmas remains that, however much I tried to keep my eyes open, I never managed to see Father Christmas depositing his bulging pillowcases of presents.

Steven Berkoff

In the past, Christmas seemed to creep up and attack me like some strange malevolent beast from which one seemed helpless to escape. You saw it coming, but were in some ways frozen to the spot as it engulfed you, pinned you to the ground and smothered you. No matter which way one tried to turn, there was nowhere to run. Visiting my fiancee's parents on Christmas Day did little for either of us. A slow, rising panic welled up during present-giving, and I felt I was suffocating from some indefinable malaise, a kind of alien psychosis. I fled from the house in my selfish, manic obsession, only to fret in anguish when I got home to my cold, empty flat. I promptly took a hideously expensive cab back. At last, some years ago, I solved it and fled the country, and found myself in Tenerife with my then wife. We walked all morning to the beach, then buried a bottle of rose in the sand to cool off. I was never so happy.

Craig Raine

Elm Drive was a treeless road lined with prefabs. By 8am, kids were out in the rain with their adjustable roller skates and new third-hand bikes. I had a cowboy suit my mother had made on her sewing machine. It was sacking, fringed with felt along the seams. Roy Rogers wore a bibbed two-tone shirt. But I wanted to look like Doris Day as Calamity Jane - the trapper look, not the dapper look. I wanted moccasins, snowshoes and a bowie knife. Instead, I had a heavy six-shooter, a hand-me-down. The hammer was pink from old caps. Later, I hit my brother in the face with it - so hard that one of the plastic grips fell off. Christmas.

Richard Eyre

Isn't there some statistic about the frequency of murder at Christmas? Or am I confusing it with the statistic that most murders take place within the family? My mother took Christmas very seriously; it started in late June, long lists, followed by months of buying, wrapping, labelling, posting and hiding presents, even hoarding them for future Christmases. Both my parents were only children, and (except for my father's father who was avoided at all costs) my grandparents had died before I was born. So Christmas meant just my parents, my sister and me, and my mother lavished her love on planning and cooking special meals for us. It might well have been because she had such high expectations of Christmas and my father professed none that those meals were always so charged with tension. It took only a dropped plate or a wrong word for the meal to decline from geniality to savagery and for either one of my parents to leave the house, slamming the large front door, with the sound echoing in my ears for about 50 years.

Jeremy Hardy

My parents rose before dawn to get a 19lb turkey into the oven so that it was ready by 2pm. Like no other family I know, ours waited until after dinner for the presents. Dinner involved a relay system, with my parents dishing up in the kitchen and sending out plates one at a time, with an aunt or older sibling circling the table to cover any bits of plate that were cleared in the eating process. My mum would finally sit down once everyone else had finished. After pudding, we watched the Queen, washed up, made a cup of tea and loaded up small plates with mince pies to sit and wait for my mother to wrap up our presents in paper saved from previous years. I can't remember what I got.

Fiona Shaw

The ritual of Christmas for me still begins with the panic of booking air flights to Cork, weighing up whether to drive to Stanstead or get the train to Heathrow, and the terror of the missing present for the forgotten aunt or great-uncle - though, as the years go by, the list shortens like winter daylight. So it is hard to remember a time when I woke in the damp, blank quiet of Christmas wrapped in permanence. It was often so still on Christmas Day that it seemed the family had eaten each other up, the silence in our house broken only by the sudden crash of one of my brothers letting his Santa Claus gift fall off the bed. Then the sound of my father embracing the day, the water gushing in the bath and the slippered descent of my mother to the kitchen, where she would start a cacophony of pots, kettles and song - usually accompanying Leontyne Price singing "O Holy Night". In my bedroom, halfway up the stairs, I listened to this family music as I stared at my poster of Echo and Narcissus.

Then up and off to Mass. My younger brothers served a priest in the local convent, so we were allowed to attend a rather private, tiny affair, the nuns and their lay workers singing in high-pitched virginal voices at the back, and my brothers' red soutanes swishing. The bored priest charged into the first Liturgy, the nuns bringing the chalice up the aisle - their special moment. I had watched these women age humbly all through my childhood, tinges of grey hair appearing at their wimples' edge. And the feeling of bubbling expectation, not for Christ's birth, but because my eldest brother John and I had permission to leave after the first of three customary Masses on the day to go to the sea.

As soon as the blessing had been given, John and I scampered off and leapt into my mother's car, towel and bathing costume flapping, a spare jersey and, in John's pocket, a flask of whiskey. Empty roads to the coast, and there the few fellow lunatics sitting on rocks or being photographed for the local paper. The glamour of putting on the costume, an underage slug of whiskey, and down the wet, cold sand to the sea. I remember the need for bravery, to show the boys that I was as strong as they; that, like Cuchulan, I was prepared to die in the sea fighting the waves. The feeling of total unpleasantness as the ribcage revolted, and the laughs of my brother and onlookers at my audible gasps of distress. And then I remember the sense of triumph, as the men dashed to the shore after their impressive charges, and I began to settle into numbness. They had to call me in, eventually, and I walked up the dank, blank shore like Venus rising from the waves. And then the punishment hit: as I ran and ran across the beach, I could not get warm, despite more illicit whiskey. My toes were lost to the day. Worse, my brother diminished my triumph by declaring: "Women have blubber, that's why they float longer." I remember the drive home - all wet, and sand in the toes that could not be warmed or dried. I remember hugging the fire for the day, boasting of our achievement until my grandmother and great-aunt and uncle arrived for Christmas dinner in the evening, my granny appalled as she stuck her hatpins carefully into her hat.

Patrick Moore

When I was very young, we used to go for a family gathering at my grandmother's at noon on Christmas Day, leaving our beloved black cat Ptolemy at home, and would have our turkey dinner in the evening. Once, when I was about seven, we did this as usual, leaving dinner to hot up for our return. But when we got back, we found what was left of a turkey and one very full, sleepy and satisfied black cat. We dined off poached eggs. Next Christmas, we were much more careful.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website