Haunted by the spirit of Christmases past

I remember having our family dinner, of the traditional type, on Christmas Eve - full plates of roast lamb and gravy or mint sauce, lots of vegies and then the magical Christmas pudding.

I use the term magical because it was also the centre of the dinner table and probably looked forward to more than anything else except checking out our Santa stocking.

It was always made by my Nan, who cooked it in some sort of material bag in our old copper (hopefully there are enough of you out there who will remember what a copper was).

And it was always chockers of thruppence, which were searched for before the pud was consumed.

The only bummer was that we had to hand back the coins so they could be reused.

Of course this tradition came to a close after February 14, 1966 when the government introduced decimal currency and it was found that the coins would have a toxic effect on the pudding.

Then it was off to midnight Mass (a true midnight one) before coming home and going to bed and pretending to be asleep so we could catch “Santa” in the act.

Next morning it was off to Mass again before coming home and unwrapping all of our presents and a lazy lunch of cold meat and salad, before setting out to visit neighbours and relatives.

But Christmas kept going for a few days after that because every morning we would have fried ham and eggs with grilled tomatoes.

Certainly things have changed over the years, especially since the rug rats now have significant others in their lives.

So The Lioness and I spent the morning visiting friends before coming home to prepare a seafood feast for ourselves, D-Mac, Alex the great, The Princess Legend, The Lance, Witchypoo and a couple of pommy mates, Friar Tuck and Lady Marion.

Now it went pretty much to plan except it was all hands on deck afterwards because the dishwasher packed it in a few days before Christmas Day.

But that caused some more reminiscing on my part because that is what my Mum and Nan had to do when I was growing up.

But perhaps the biggest part of Christmas took place a couple of days before when Dad would bundle the whole family into our old Holden and we headed to the Sydney CBD to check out all the wondrous window displays in the major retail stores.

But that also would no longer be possible because retail outlets no longer seem interested in joining the spirit of Christmas.

How many stores did you see in Albury, for example, that had Christmas decorations either in their window, within their store or had their staff wear something to do with Christmas? Not many from my observations.

Now I know it is very fashionable to bag religion these days so why have Christmas Day at all?

It seems it is now nothing more than Christmas parties, getting on the turps, pigging out and going berserk on the credit card.

And with the heat and excess alcohol domestic violence becomes very much a reality, perhaps made even more so by the fact yesterday had a full moon.

It makes me sad, although it is still a great time to get the family together.

But perhaps the destitute, the homeless and the poor will be wondering what I am whingeing about.