A child’s Christmas in South Wales!

When I was a child, Christmas cards in our house usually came through three routes: they were either hand-delivered by friends and relatives who lived nearby; or they came through the letterbox, courtesy of the local postie, or they came home in my schoolbag.

I remember how eagerly we would await the postman’s delivery every morning, and the exciting detective work that went into deciphering the handwriting, peering  at the postmark, trying to work out who the card was from. And then there was the big reveal when opening the envelope and discovering the truth!

My mother was, of course, better at knowing who had sent a particular card than I was, and it took me quite a few Christmases to realise why she asked me to be more careful when opening some cards than others.  It turned out to be that she always correctly identified the cards that would contain either a note, or a postal order!

Once the envelopes were opened, we would tear the stamps from them, being very careful not to tear even the tiniest sliver off the stamp itself. I would collect as complete a set as possible of the current year’s Christmas stamps, and mount them in my Stanley Gibbons stamp album. The rest would go into one of the larger used envelopes to be taken to Brownies in the new year.

After Christmas, when the cards had been taken down, we were careful to put them to good use. Mother would select the best bits from the cards, and cut them out using her pinking shears, before attaching a piece of cotton, or a thin piece of string to each cut out to make Christmas gift tags, to be sold at the village fete, or at the Brownie’s next Christmas bazaar.

I do remember one year though, when I had first pick of the used Christmas cards, to use in a school project on Dickens. I’ve never been much of a writer, so I relished going through all our cards, selecting ones that either showed a Dickensian winter scene, or those that quoted from a famous Dickens’ Christmas story, and sticking them into a large scrapbook. Surprisingly, I always seemed to do quite well in school projects. This was one of the ones I remember quite vividly, along with several others, but those stories are for another day.

Lynne Dyer