{"id":1920,"date":"2014-12-22T08:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T08:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=1920"},"modified":"2014-12-22T15:32:56","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T15:32:56","slug":"hands-off-my-christmas-rituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=1920","title":{"rendered":"Hands off my Christmas rituals!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Christmas<\/a>

Christmas presents\/Alan Cleaver\/flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Christmas, eh? Can\u2019t live with it, can\u2019t live without it. (Which is rubbish as millions can and do.)<\/p>\n

But if you have grown up with certain Christmas rituals they can very hard to shed, even when you have reached a stage when no one would care if you spent the whole day in bed watching box sets with a bottle of sherry and several tubes of Pringles (a sporadic fantasy of mine).<\/p>\n

Bear with me now as I move into sepia-tinged Hovis mode here and recall the quaint customs of a Home Counties Christmas of yore with my grandparents:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Stockings, of course, complete with tangerine in the toe and nuts. But my grandmother was sometimes foolish enough to include a couple of carol sheets, so the adults were woken far too early by the unpleasant piping of childish voices.<\/li>\n
  2. More little presents on the breakfast table \u2014 was this our grandmother trying to make it up to the adults for 1. above?<\/li>\n
  3. Church \u2014 we didn\u2019t mind it because we got to sing carols again, this time with no attempt at volume control, and our grandfather was a lay reader and looked very impressive in his cassock , reading the lessons in a sonorous voice.<\/li>\n
  4. Lunch was turkey and the works, as you\u2019d expect, with my grandmother hastily shoving sixpences onto everyone\u2019s pudding plates, as all must have prizes. At 3 p.m. there was\u00a0the Queen\u2019s Speech (preceded by the tail end of Christmas Top of the Pops <\/em>if we were lucky).<\/li>\n
  5. Only after HM had spoken could we open our main presents. And of course we had no truck with this having-your-own-pile-of-presents-next-to-you-and-working-your-way-through-them-silently malarkey. Every present had to be retrieved from under the tree by the youngest member of the family who could read, announced as if it were a guest at an embassy party, delivered, and then the entire gathering watched the recipient open it. I can\u2019t stress enough the importance of knowing how to compose your features at this point . . .<\/li>\n
  6. We usually had Christmas cake, mince pies and an elderly neighbour for tea.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So you see, there is no way I could ever have married a man who didn\u2019t share my deep-seated conviction that it\u2019s actually a sin to open your main presents in the morning. I\u2019m happy to report that Mr Verity is a man of firm principle in these matters.<\/p>\n

    And what of Father Christmas? I can\u2019t remember a time when I actually believed in him. The way our mother logged who had given us what as we unwrapped our presents so that we could write thank-you letters (salutation + thanks for named present and comment on its attractive properties + paragraph of pleasantries\/commentary on current festive season in general + renewed thanks for present + sign-off\u2014just call me Mme de S\u00e9vigny) made it clear that we only came by Christmas presents through the good offices of our relatives. And with the stockings, I was always far too excited to sleep and knew full well who deposited them at the end of the bed.<\/p>\n

    We have of course moved with the times and created our own rituals, though encouraging adult offspring to abandon their stockings is proving problematic. Christmas now involves a lot more wine and a lot less church than it used to, but afternoon presents, distributed according to strict protocol, remain non-negotiable.<\/p>\n

      \n
    • <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      . . . it’s actually a sin to open your presents before lunch . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1920"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1934,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions\/1934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}