I used to say the same bedtime prayer every evening when I
was a little girl:-
“Dear Lord, thank you
for looking after me through the day; please look after me through the night
and look after Mummy and Daddy and Nanna and Grandpa and Aunty Mar and Peter(my
dog) and Wilhelmina and Henrietta and Augusta and Charlotte and Jemima
(my hens). Keep us safe and well and ever in thy
service. And don’t let me have any bad dreams. Amen.”
Then, around early December, at some point, when I was five
or six or seven, I started adding another bit before the ‘Amen’:-
“And please don’t let
me die before Christmas.”
It’s impossible to forget the wonder and excitement of Christmas
to a small child and of Father Christmas in particular. Even though it’s a lie that
we tell our children and even though I shall not forget the deep disappointment
when I found out that he didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have been without the magic of
sending off my Christmas list up the chimney, carefully setting out the mince
pies and sherry in the hearth for his refreshment, (not forgetting the carrots for
the reindeer) and the mystery and excitement of seeing that they had gone,
which was also, to me, hard proof that he existed. Listening for his sleigh bells,
wondering how far across the world he might have travelled from hour to hour, wriggling
my toes to see if the anticipated heaviness and crinkliness of a filled
stocking had been laid across them – it was wonderful.
It didn’t really matter what was in the stocking. There were
never very many things. I most certainly
didn’t get many, if any, of the items wishfully listed and[FL1]
sent up the chimney, but I didn’t really
expect to do so; it was sufficiently exciting if I got just one. I do recall my delight in a baby doll with a
hard, shiny head, ‘real’ eyelashes and painted on hair that I received one year;
I called her Rosebud and she was my pride and joy. There was once a miniature
china tea set. That year on my list I had itemized the plates, bowls etc needed
for a full dolls’ dinner service for twelve, but part of me had known that was
never going to arrive and I wouldn’t have had enough toys to dine at such a
table anyway.
On another occasion there
was a soft pixie toy I called ‘Puck’. I
only got rid of him a few years ago; he held too many memories to be easily discarded.
Once there was a small box containing tiny little metal school desks and miniature
boys and girls. Once there was a wooden monkey which swung between two sticks
and which did a somersault if you twisted them correctly, once a plastic
woodpecker which was supposed to climb up walls, though he never did; he invariably
fell off. Once – and my only deep disappointment this, because I had been hoping
for a doll’s house – a detailed wooden tram. It was a fair size but too small to
carry Rosebud. I tried to stuff Puck
inside so that he could be the conductor, but he wouldn’t fit either. It was difficult
to know what you could do with a tram too small for my dolls apart from push it
up and down, and I very soon got bored with that. I found out many years later that my uncle had
handmade it for me in secret. I’m not sure why he didn’t go for the dolls’ house.
I really would have preferred that.
Then there would always
be a book or two – one of them always an Annual and the other probably
something by Enid Blyton or else something more educational, like an Atlas. Maybe, as well, a tube of bubble mixture, and
some pages of stick-on pictures of flowers or kittens and things and a little plaything
like a yoyo or a handful of marbles or a slim book of paper dolls. Some plasticine,
perhaps, or some glossy crayons, a colouring book or a dot-to-dot… And in the
toe, yes – an apple and an orange and a handful of hard, brown nuts - even, you
never knew, perhaps, a shiny new shilling!
Oh, such joy!
