Before Christmas recedes even further into distant memory (well apart from the extra weight that most of us will have inevitably gained) and following on from my previous post concerning Christmas decorations, do take time to record your family’s Christmas traditions and memories. I distinctly remember the year when my poor mother, whose cooking ‘skills’, like my own, were minimal, accidentally deposited the roast potatoes, on the floor. She was probably trying to cook for 8 or 10 of us. I don’t think that the ‘3 second rule’ had been invented then but suffice it to say we did eat those potatoes and most of the diners were blissfully ignorant of their contact with the kitchen floor. Then there was Uncle Percy who didn’t eat turkey, except that is when he came to Christmas dinner each year and happily consumed what we told him was chicken. There were games and quizzes. When we acquired a reel to reel tape recorder in 1967 we recorded the voices of the family and then tried to identify them when played at high speed. Those tapes and the machine do still survive although I have not tried to play them for decades. I really should find the correct tape and do this. I was able to participate in another Society for One Place Studies Google+ Hangout on Air about Traditions and Celebrations in communities of the past. There were some very interesting observations – do listen in to the recording.

As part of a group of fifty somethings I have just spent a very pleasant Friday evening (yes we should get out more) reminiscing about our school days, fellow classmates and hapless staff members. This is in the run up to a reunion to mark 40 years since we left school. I was pleased that I could remember almost all the names of my classmates and even where they sat. At the moment our collective memories are on Facebook chat, we really should do something more permanent with them.

I’m in the midst of another one of my four talks in eight days stints. Today is another presentation of my Writing up Your Family History day course. It’s not too late for New Year’s resolutions – do it – now! If you are female, were born in Britain before 1957 and want to record your memories of the years between 1945 and 1970 I need you and you need me. This is part of your family history. More details soon but it will mean that you are encouraged to preserve your past for future generations of your family.

I am afraid posts may be somewhat dominated by home improvements over coming weeks (please not months). I am having various things done including having a conservatory built. I loathe being invaded by workmen so the process is not stress free. So far I have got to day one, it should be day four but that’s another story. The skip will fit up my drive by sadly not the skip delivering lorry so the skip is having to go elsewhere – why did no one realise this sooner? Equally the materials delivering lorry cannot get near enough to do its job. The materials are now on my neighbours’ drive. Said neighbours are clearly destined for sainthood or at least the honours list. So far the old porch is gone – after a delay waiting for protective clothing so that asbestos could be removed safely. My porch has been shown not to contain harmful asbestos so what was that about? I have a muddy heap in what was my garden and the outline of a conservatory painted on the ground. There’s a wall that isn’t quite in the right place and the doors appear to open the wrong way but hey! Yesterday no builders – well that’s not strictly true. There were builders, different builders doing a different job. Oh whoops slight pause as they are due at daybreak, will be outside the bathroom window and I realised I needed to vacate the shower before their arrival. Glutton for punishment me.

I promise I will try not to harp on about hardcore and down pipes but home improvements are part of the history of our homes and families. I can remember having central heating installed in the 1960s, my mother remembered having electricity put in, do our descendants realise how different our lives used to be? Take a look at the My Homes Past website.

What does your Christmas tree reveal about you? Is it beautifully colour co-ordinated, reflecting this year’s home decorating trends? Mine is far from being a work of art but it is full of decorations that tell a story. The oldest decorations are nearly seventy years old and date from when my parents first married.

This rather scary looking choir boy has been on family Christmas trees since 1947. He is actually a cake decoration, which is why he is garrotted by wire in order to be hung on the tree.

Then there are the two plastic birds, one green and one red. They, I believe, were originally my grandmother’s. Although they are not budgerigars, to me they were always representative of the budgies that the family owned over the years. They always have to be hung with a red or green light behind them. Of the same era are the yellow plastic angel and a similar pink star and bell, again always hung by the appropriate coloured light.

They came with a set of stars and snow flakes. These consist of two halves so that they can slot together to form a three dimensional decoration. Over the years, some of the halves have been broken so we can no longer always match the colours but they are still precious.

There are also a set of plastic bells that no one could claim were anything other than decidedly naff. They are special too as my mum and then I, when I took over sole charge of tree decorating at the age of eleven, have hung them on our trees for six decades.

Baubles from the 1940s and 1950s still adorn my tree. My favourites were those with butterflies on and I still have those.

 They did meet with a disaster one year when a particularly resinous tree made them unpleasantly sticky and threatened to remove their paint. I did buy some similar ones from ebay just in case they were lost to me for ever but they were still on the tree this year.

From the 1970s, my fondness for Snoopy shines from my tree. There are decorations from my early married life and from the years since.

My daughters have taken the precious-to-them decorations to add to their own trees now but we frequently add to our collections by decorating parcels with tree ornaments. I have cross stitch decorations worked by my mother and daughters. There are hand knitted decorations and others that have been hand made.

More recently, I have taken to bringing back tree decorations from my foreign travels.

There are the decorations that have not stood the test of time but they live on in memory. There was the set of decorations whose stomachs consisted of concertinared paper and similar large balls and bells. There was the ‘Korky’ balloon, with a red nose, that was carefully inflated and tied with string, to be let down and re-inflated over a period of about eight Christmas seasons. Equally precious were the rainbow painted balloons. There were paper Chinese lanterns, which I do still have but which don’t very often make it to the tree anymore as they are now very fragile. These made the Christmases of my childhood a magical place.

So there you have my family’s history on a Christmas Tree. I do need a very large tree to hold them all but they have to be displayed each year. I am looking forward to sharing the significance of each precious ornament with my grandchildren. The story goes on as I have got my new granddaughter a special Christmas angel that I hope will be on her tree throughout her life.

I have been visiting my offspring and grand offspring. Visiting Martha involved multiple trips up and down stairs emptying four six foot high bookcases that were upstairs and then moving them and their contents downstairs to be reloaded. I would complain except she gets the book acquisition and bookcase moving gene from me. Then a train trip from Martha to Rebecca’s. Oooh free wifi – it is a while since I’ve been on a train. Some mechanical fault with my laptop means that it makes a VERY loud, potentially terminal, whirring sound for about ten minutes when I first turn it on. I look round trying to pretend the noise is coming from elsewhere and hoping the train will start soon so that it is less noticeable. Unfortunately, trains have got a lot quieter lately so it doesn’t help much and my 15 minutes of free wifi only just exceeds the time taken for the laptop to cease whirring.

Whilst with Rebecca, we take Lucy to a Christmas wreath making session. She can’t quite manage to make her own sadly but we wreath make away. I have gone for a non-symmetrical rather expansive design. It is much larger in circumference than anyone else’s. Ah, we have to get these wreaths and Lucy in her sling back on the bus mmmm. I give mine a substantial trim but it still isn’t going to be easy. At the bus stop there is a computerised list of when the next buses might arrive and a button inviting us to press for bus information. Thinking that this will revitalise the list we do so. What actually happens is that the bus stop then ‘reads’ the information in embarrassingly loud tones and at great length. As if I wasn’t conspicuous enough with a wreath balanced in each hand. It is also quite difficult to laugh whilst wreath holding.

Time to leave and bad weather means trains are disrupted. The received wisdom is that one can get no further north than Newcastle. That is ok, if I end up in Newcastle I am seriously lost. I manage to negotiate my way across London. I have for some reason not brought luggage with wheels and I also have the full sized laptop as opposed to the netbook. Why? Sorry I have no idea. I think it is called not thinking things through. It is a fair old hike across what purports to be the same station to get from the overground to the circle line but I am in plenty of time and one of the first on the train for Exeter. I do have a reserved seat just as well as the train is packed. I discover that the downside of being early for the train is that my bag, containing food and drink, is now irretrievably buried under a million other bags. In fact there are so many bags that won’t fit on the luggage rack that they are strewn everywhere, causing the automatic doors, by which I am sitting, to be chillily permanently open. I manage to get the last seat on the equally crowded train to Barnstaple. It is mid afternoon so not even remotely rush hour but still there is no room to move. Here I have to balance both my bags on my lap for the whole journey, cutting off all blood supply to my feet. Oh the joys of travelling.

I have done all my Christmas shopping. In fact I am so enthusiastic I seem to have done some of it twice. At least, Amazon have sent it twice – oh drat it is my fault. I investigate the sending thing back because you are an idiot options. The cheapest option is to take it to a collection point – that’s bound to be a million miles from darkest Devon. Actually no, 3 options within 7 miles hurrah.

It is Christmas Puzzle time again. Be ‘entertained’ and frustrated in equal measure, whilst donating to charity at the same time.

More history soon, I promise.

Christmas preparations time and I have my tree early this year. Ok, so I admit it, it was slightly larger than my house. There is photographic evidence of it being bent round the three foot square that is my ‘hall’ and in to the living room. I debated starting a trend for horizontal Christmas trees but couldn’t face a month of not having any floor space so had to turn the living room into a wood yard. An interesting exercise, trying to saw the bottom off a Christmas tree once it is indoors. In fact I am sure I did mutter something along the lines of ‘why don’t we saw the bottom off it before we take it in?’ but maybe I didn’t mutter quite loudly enough. It is now in place and partly decorated. I do seem to have neglected to find the tinsel during my foray into the loft to unearth the decorations but that can be rectified, providing of course that the pipe lagging eating rodent that has been inhabiting my loft doesn’t fancy tinsel for dessert.

I have been making Christmas cake and puddings, oh and chutney. These are officially the only things that I can cook. Went well except I did keep wondering why the mixer wouldn’t work, only to find that hadn’t plugged it in. In my defence, this may have been after I had consumed the remainder of the can of barley wine, having taken out the small amount required for the pudding. Then there was the strange incident with the kettle. I have had this ‘on the Rayburn’ kettle for a while. It does have a – very stiff – lid but I normally fill it down the spout. Strangely, when I poured water out of it, it was accompanied by bits of paper. Fortunately I was pouring hot water into the sink and not into someone’s tea at the time. Further investigation revealed that I had been using the kettle for some time without having removed the handily provided instructions from its innerds. The first line of said instructions was probably something along the lines of ‘remove these instructions from your kettle’. If they hadn’t been reduced to soggy pieces I could have told you. I remember firing up my first computer only to be greeted by Mr Hewlett Packard telling me how to get my computer out of its box – similar sort of thing really.

Then there was the trip with Martha to Cotehele to see the Christmas garland. This involved putting petrol in the car. Be kind to me, I haven’t had this car all that long. I drove up to the pump and yes I even had the right side of the car nearest the pump. I nonchalantly fiddled with the key to the petrol cap, for a very long time, without success. I looked round furtively and then drove off with no more petrol than when I’d arrived, hoping I wasn’t caught on CCTV and about to be done for driving away. Not that I had driven away with anything of course. Fortunately Martha fixed the problem – just required more brute force than I was using.

Having been on tenterhooks (if any of your think that should be tenderhooks – no, sorry – tenterhooks were used to stretch bleaching linen out on the tenter ground) anticipating the extension of my family tree in the best possible way, I finally got a call on Monday morning – 8 days late – that things might be happening. Had no one told this child that, in its mother’s family at least, everyone one is always early for everything? This was a relief as had it been much later I was about to hit one of my four talks in ten days plus a day at work and fitting in a 600 mile round trip to see the new arrival would have been difficult. Monday dragged on and still no news, by early evening the prospective parents were at the maternity unit. Unsurprisingly I slept not at all on Monday night. Lucy Ruth finally put in an appearance by emergency C-section just before 8am on Tuesday morning.
I had a talk to give on Tuesday afternoon, which, despite being my being asleep and having other things on my mind, went well. Afterwards, we headed north (pretty much everywhere is north from here) in pouring rain, pleased to see how many people were setting off fireworks to celebrate Lucy’s birth.

We arrived too late for Tuesday’s visiting hours and sadly had to wait until 5.00pm on Wednesday before we could breach the security cordon. Chris passed the time strimming the ‘lawn’ for the new parents. Unfortunately this involved the outer glass of their back door being augmented with a particularly attractive crazed glass pattern.

Lucy is, needless to say, the most wonderful baby girl in the world. I explained to her about not wanting to believe all that nonsense about being born on Guy Fawkes Day, when in fact it should be called Robert Catesby Day. She seemed to appreciate this. I can trace Lucy’s direct maternal line back through 8 generations, with another two speculative generations after that but that is for another post.

After all too short a time we had to head back to Dorset, where I was speaking about One Place Studies. We ensconce ourselves on a caravan site. We are near to our favourite fish and chip shop and my insides were just nicely anticipating my chicken and chips when Chris returns through dark and rain to explain that we are locked in and there appears to be no way to get the car out of the site in order to reach the too far away to walk chip shop. I was disconcerted by the locked-inness, worried about what might happen in an emergency and disgruntled by the lack of chicken and chips – obviously a 5.30pm curfew on that site!

Home again and time for the Remembrance Day Service. This involves a certain amount of standing outside in the cold so I look out my Lapland thermal outfit and fleecy boots. It turns out to be the warmest November day on record and I swelter nicely, especially after the service moves in to the church.