The Games We Played: A Family’s Christmas (with 2 games for you to play!)
I suspect every family has its own way of doing things and you only realise how odd they are when you share another family’s festivities. For couples, merging customs can be a crucial rite of passage.
My parents’ eccentricity has grown with hindsight. As children, it’s all you know. Looking back, what’s remarkable is that my sisters and I entered adulthood with the outward appearance of normality (at least, we like to think so.)
The chief source of weirdness was my mother. She was a worrier, and some of it was self-inflicted. Christmas was a spectacular example. Somehow, she had absorbed the idea of the “dramatic reveal.” Applied to holiday preparations, this meant that she aimed to create a massive display of decorations and a prodigious array of food. But just to make all this more challenging, almost everything had to be kept off-stage until the very last moment. She could not hide the fact that the Xmas cake was made well ahead of time and allowed to marinate in brandy. There was a cupboard in the kitchen that always smelled like Xmas. But hiding the rest guaranteed difficulties in the run-up to Christmas and a mind-boggling display of energy and stamina both the night before and throughout the day itself. Christmas was not all fun for Mum, and my father was conspicuous by his absence. On the day, he was full of praise and festive cheer, but overall he was more often in the audience than in the cast.
At one point, my mother also ran a small hotel and attempted to combine the above approach to the family Xmas with meeting the festive needs of twenty paying guests. Of this adventure, my abiding memories are her pained expression well before Twelfth Night neared and she repeatedly murmured “Never again.” She got her wish.
When I was very young, her efforts proved utterly magical. I would go to bed and the rooms downstairs would be their normal selves. I would wake the next morning and discover that overnight there were garlands and wreaths, tinsel and mistletoe, sprayed snow on the windows — the works! Soon, I realised that there was a connection between my early bedtime on Christmas Eve and this transformation, and my suspicions grew stronger once I learned that if I left my door ajar, I could hear voices and footsteps as adults carried boxes down from attic rooms. I had two older sisters who were my mother’s chief helpers, holding the ladder as she decked the halls with boughs of holly.
Even without the overload of paying guests, I occasionally complicated my mother’s plans. Having vowed never to open the hotel over Christmas again, she resumed her policy of total concealment of preparations the following year. By this stage, I was about 7 years old with my fair share of natural inquisitiveness. Living in an empty hotel offered a rich environment for foraging, and on a rainy weekend, after the school term ended, curiosity took me on a tour of the vacant bedrooms. I can still recall my delight when I looked behind the door of number 6. On the bed, there were stacks of carefully wrapped presents. One parcel, in particular, held my attention. Judging by the shape, it had to be the cricket bat I had asked Father Christmas for in my recent letter (clearly posting letters up the chimney was faster than airmail).
I raced downstairs to the kitchen, barely able to contain my excitement. “Mum,” I cried. “He’s been! he’s been! Santa’s left all the presents in room 6 upstairs.” My mother rolled her eyes and looked heavenward as if asking a higher power for strength or some other virtue (patience, perhaps). However, she was never lacking in ingenuity. “I know,” she said calmly. “We had a long talk. He is incredibly busy and one of his reindeer has been unwell. So I said he could leave some items in number 6 and then pick them up as he passed by.”
I was amazed. It appeared that my mother was on cordial terms with a genuine legend. Encouraged by my rapidly subdued demeanour, she continued. “Of course, he did ask me if the gifts would be safe. He was particularly worried about just this possibility. His exact words were: “I don’t want the magic of Christmas damaged by some small boy’s nosiness.” My heart sank. “‘Let me know if you have any problems,’ I remember him saying,” my mother said with her eyes firmly on mine. She continued. “‘ I keep a list,’ he said, ‘And anyone who threatens my Christmas magic, gets a present deducted.’ Now we wouldn’t want that to happen to you, would we?” I think she was able to see my dreams of this, my very first, cricket bat evaporating because her face softened. “Tell you what,” she said, “if you promise me not to say a word about what’s in number 6 to anyone, I won’t mention it to Father Christmas when he stops by for the presents.” I nodded solemnly, even though I worried that this diplomatic silence could be construed by Santa as a further offense and he might penalise the entire family with further gift deductions. My mother and I were co-conspirators. We remain unpunished.
Well, partially. I had seen backstage and so the theatrical element changed. Within a few years, I was part of the team creating the surprise for my younger sister who was now its sole consumer. I can still remember the first occasion when my father and I returned from midnight mass and he casually walked over to the table by the Xmas tree. On it, we always placed a glass of sherry and a mince pie for Santa, and a carrot for Rudolph the Reindeer. My father drained the sherry and nibbled the mince pie as I watched. Feeling my gaze, he turned. “I don’t suppose you fancy a raw carrot?” he said. The last threads of myth fell away.
My maternal grandmother had been a baker-confectioner, and her three daughters (my mother included) had been schooled in cake making. Hotel guests were frequently heard extolling the wonders of my mother’s pastry. To the detriment of my dental health, there was always a surfeit of sweet things in the pantry, and Christmas was its ultimate expression. There were six of us in the family and my mother’s calculation was that each of us would eat at least twelve mince pies and that she should ensure that there was a similar supply for guests. I confess I ate more than my share. In fact, once we returned from an early morning mass (early, so that my mother could resume her kitchen duties), much of Christmas Day was devoted to food.
In a calculated effort to delay our race downstairs to unwrap presents, my mother would hang a Christmas stocking at the end of each child’s bed. If we awoke at first light, we were not allowed to leave our room but we could feast on the stocking’s contents, which were almost entirely edible. There was always a chocolate Santa poking out of the top and chocolate coins buried further down. In a gesture towards health, or more likely as a vestige of the rationing that had hung over post-war Britain into the early 1950s, there was always a red apple and a tangerine. In my case, there was also a rolled-up comic in a further attempt to keep me in my room. Soon enough, I could hear my sisters on the stairs and we would enter the large sitting room and discover that the four armchairs were each filled with the gifts for one child
Dinner was the traditional, roast turkey with roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, peas, carrots, and sage and onion stuffing, and lots of gravy, and there was always the richly fruited, home-made pudding to follow. What seems unusual now is that back then I remember it as the only day we had turkey; the rest of the year, it was chicken. We would dine until three o’clock or thereabouts before we moved to the lounge to watch the Queen’s televised address. I have always associated Her Majesty with indigestion as a result. After that, my elder sisters were instructed to take their younger siblings out for a walk so that my mother could wash everything and prepare a buffet table for the evening.
It was at this point that my father made his most direct contribution to the festivities as the game's master. Over the years, we accumulated the usual array of board games, such as Monopoly and Cluedo, but the games we enjoyed the most were word games that tapped my family’s memory and vocabulary. My mother was a voracious reader who made weekly trips to the library, and we were all more or less expected to read at least one book a week. As a result, we were well trained for the games that consumed the Xmas evening.
Consequences required each player to have a long strip of paper. You were instructed to write the name of a man on the top line, fold it over, and pass it to the person on your right. They would write the name of a woman, fold the paper, and pass it on. The next line was to indicate where the two met, followed by a ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ exchange, then a line indicating the result of this encounter, and the final challenge was to write a summary or caption labeled “And the world said.” Thus, we ended up with six lines written successively but with no knowledge of what came before or after. It was a game rooted in the comedy of non-sequitors. The inclusion of family members alongside the rich and famous heightened the humour. Why was Dad meeting actress Gina Lollobrigida at the laundrette around the corner? What potential consequences flowed from my mother’s encounter with Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko in Budapest? However, our amusement also depended on the way in which the story created by the sequence was told, and my father was a master, especially because of his measured delivery of blatant innuendo. With a newscaster’s solemnity, he reported that my sister Mary had met the Prime Minister at a local pub and that the premier had declared: “A man cannot live on oysters alone.” Mary’s riposte was that “there is no fool like an old fool.” The result was a bleak midwinter and the world said: “It serves them right.”
A more pointed test of vocabulary was Desert Island. More paper was distributed and a random letter from the Scrabble tile bag provided the chosen letter. We each were given two minutes to write down every item of clothing we could think of beginning with the letter P. The same challenge was then presented for food — the letter C and for sundries (everything else) — the letter W. Next, each person would read out their list and if anyone else had the same word, it had to be deleted. Once everyone had reported, the fun part began. You had to tell the story of your shipwreck and how when you were escaping your sinking vessel, you were only able to rescue a select number of items. The presence of four females and two males should have meant that many items that came readily to the female mind were subsequently culled due to the rule on exclusivity. This was offset by the fact that in those unenlightened times, men and boys rarely shopped for food or clothing.
My father was particularly adept at relating his ordeal. Typically, he came ashore naked, and on one memorable occasion, he had only managed to rescue from the ship’s galley, a cucumber. All the family knew that he was not a fan of this salad item, but he reported triumphantly that he would brandish it daily in the hope of catching the eye of a passing mariner. His work as a furniture store manager did ensure that his island refuge was more comfortable than anyone else’s. He had effectively arrived on the island by paddling a wardrobe ashore, and friendly currents ensured that he quickly amassed an impressive display of wicker furniture. We did dispute his claim that his wallet had miraculously kept intact not just the wick of a candle but wrapped matches. But we cheered his efforts to plot his position using the wall-clock and eventually his bold efforts to reach out to his rescuers by paddling out on a waterbed. My mother meanwhile bestrode her island modestly dressed in a poncho with petticoats. She had camomile tea to drink and a variety of custards and cheeses. She had even managed to smuggle ashore a lifetime supply of Cornish pasties. Even though we managed to reduce her vegetable collection by choosing carrots and cauliflower and similarly denied her cherries and chocolate, she still had an abundance of spices like cumin and curry, and the island she observed wryly had plentiful coconuts.
That’s my abiding memory of Christmas past and while my food consumption has moderated over the years, my appetite for words is undiminished. Let me know the festive games you played and from where the magic of your childhood Christmas came.
