Christmas: Youngsters today never had it so good...or?

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TODAY I enjoy Christmas vicariously through my two young sons. This gives me ample opportunity to sit and pontificate about how festivities are too commercialised these days and reminisce about how the true meaning of Christmas was still of paramount importance when I was in short trousers. Or was it?

Presents, the telly, presents, food and presents were the main elements then, just as they are now. But I’m sure it wasn’t just the mince pies that tasted sweeter in the seventies.

I didn’t get up before 4am to tear open the wrapping paper as my little monsters will this coming Sunday.

I’ve always put my Rip Van Winkle abilities down to the fact that we lived in a pub. With the added volume levels coming from the bar, multiplied by the anticipation of Santa’s imminent arrival, sleep never came easy on Christmas Eve.

But my mum would tell you I just wasn’t allowed to get up that early.

Presents back then were similar but not as technologically advanced. Some youngsters, on December 25, will wake up to the new X-Box 360, whereas I was overjoyed with my first black and white Binatone video game and then, a few years later, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum – all state-of-the-art at the time.

I remember receiving the more staple boy’s toys like a fort and a garage, just as my boys have in the past couple of years – although mine were handmade by my father rather than bought from Toys ’R’ Us.

In my memory, stockings contained solely apples and oranges. However, when I mentioned this to my mum, it appears I conveniently forgot all the sweets and chocolate that went with them.

So, although this year I was looking forward to taking a little bit of the yuletide moral high ground and becoming a grumpy old man, telling the kids how they’d never had it so good, it seems that the soap box I’d hoped to climb on is as shaky as some of my recollections.

But if you can’t hurl a few little white ones at your own offspring, then when can you?

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