h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

First Christmas: I was 11 days old and got a rattle and pink frilly pants for over my nappy - probably the last time I was trendy or wore pink! This story has been trotted out for years til I can believe that I was there (as I was, only too young to remember).

Worst Christmas: 1997 - My beloved, cantankerous, auld sod of a Grandad died at 8.30 Christmas morning. Sitting in a hospice lounge waiting for death certificate and having a Salvation Army choir gimp saying 'Cheer up, it's Christmas, it might never happen'. Yeah, I normally spend Christmas morning in a hospice lounge, you insensitive git!

Best Christmas: 1997 - The peace and whole pulling together of a whole family as Grandad died was amazing - none of the petty arguments mattered and we still managed a lovely day with everyone for all the little kids mainly, but it was so harmonious, peaceful and so loving. Obviously, never to be repeated, but for that one day...

Last Christmas - too many to cook for, not enough wine and complete stress, this year it's my sister's turn!

First Christmas - I have a really terrible memory and most of my childhood blurs into a series of snapshots. I remember waking up in the back of the car and watching the lights of London pass as we drove through en route from Kent to Derbyshire to spend Christmas with my dad's family. I associate Christmas with happiness, but can't back that up with hard memories.

Last Christmas - up there with the worst one, actually, although not quite in the top spot. Mum was going through chemo for breast cancer. She'd had her latest dose just a few days before and based on previous doses we assumed she'd be in bed all day feeling sick and weak. But she was well enough to spend the day at my brother's with all of us, although she did have to spend a lot of time going for a lie down. The fact she was there and not feeling ill so she could eat dinner with us was wonderful.

Best - Lots of pressure, I know, but I'm banking on this one. Mum's well again and is going all out. But to be honest most of my Christmases have been good. I don't go into it with the expectation it'll be "the best one! Eva!" so don't suffer that crushing disappointment when it's only nice. I like being with my family. Which brings me to...

Worst Christmas - the first year I moved away from home. My famly were in Orkney, I moved to work at a hotel in Hertfordshire. Because I was working up to late on the 23rd there wasn't time to make the trek home so I ended up going to Derby to stay with my nan. We ate roast chicken and watched telly all day. It wasn't the fact I was there, more the fact I wasn't with my mum and the rest of the family. I'd been missing them so badly since I moved and this was my first Christmas ever when I wasn't with them. New Year was worse though. My nan went to bed at 10pm and at midnight I remember sitting up in my bed with radio one on, crying. On the bright side, that Christmas took on new meaning when my nan died in the late January - I really appreciated the fact I'd kept her company on her last Christmas.

Deb

I have to say, deb, I'm actually jealous of your worst Christmas. I've had at least a dozen I'd trade you for that one.

And people ask me why I haven't put up a tree...

humbug

I had this discussion with a waitress in a café the other day. She was astonished that I hadn't put up a tree. I was astonished that anyone would expect me to. I'm living alone (house sitting again, but not for my parents this time).

TRiG.

I'm often asked about decorations: apart from a Christmas tree made out of my Christmas cards (which I'm very fond of) I don't put any decorations up. I just don't see the point - I don't care about them and I generally don't have visitors at this time of year.

"And people ask me why I haven't put up a tree." [Hoovooloo]

That's their problem, not yours. You can do as much or as little as you like. I've lived alone for more than thirty years, and have never bothered with a real tree. A wreath, perhaps, or some sleigh bells hung from a porch railing [which the wasps made nests in this past summer ].

I have some small ceramic tree figurines, which I display on my table because they are beautiful.

First Christmas would have to be when I was 7 weeks old, so a bit young to remember it and, to be honest, I cannot remember the first Christmas I can remember because the photographs I've seen warp the memory but one of the earliest I can remember is also the strangest.

My Paternal Uncle lived in Chesham, and we were visiting. He lived in a cul-de-sac on a windy hill. The house was split level, with the front of the house being the ground floor, at the front, while the bedrooms were the first floor at the front, and ground floor at the back. Very weird for a young sprog.

This particular year the weather was evil. Really Bad. The was really thick and blizzard conditions during most of the lead up to Christmas.

On Christmas Day I had been given an electric train set, but had little opportunity to play with it. Now the memory plays tricks. I believe it was Christmas day, but don't believe it could have been. But an Encyclopedia Brittanica salesman turned up, and the Folks invited him in, because the weather was awful. We 4 children had gone to bed and the adults were in the lounge, eating the mince pies and drinking. Then, I found out the next day, they'd been up unti 4am playing with the train set, and the EB salesman ended up sleeping on the couch that evening and the following, before the road was clear enough for him to leave. I think it was a year before I'd had the same use out of it.

Last Christmas was just Mum and I, as it was the year before and will be this year, and is chilled.

So historically We wake up and I provide salmon and quails on lightly browned toast for breakfast. Mum has preprepared the veg, then, wearing our 'Sunday Best' we'll head to the local which Mum used to work in around 12:30. About 13:30 she'll leave, as she doesn't drink, while I'll stay until closing time, officially 14:00,but often at least 30 minutes later.

Dinner will be served about 16:00. There may or may not be additional guests depending on if there are any waifs and strays with nowhere else to go. It is open house for us. I'm not a supporter of Christmas, but would hate for anyone having nowhere to go, after all, all pubs are closed. It'll consist of a joint of meat and around five veg, both boiled and roasted. A glorified Sunday roast with additional trimmings, plus .

Mum will have a sleep watching a film, while I'm either playing games with the guest, with music on, or on the computer. Around 19:00 wlll be Christmas Pud, or mince pies, then Mum will retire, the guest will go and I'll continue on the computer, with until 02:00 then crash!

Best Christmas. Tough. The absent friends Christmas in November 1990 I invited my friends from Ramsgate in Thanet, Kent, to come to London for the weekend. Mum had defrosted her freezer and had some meat for me that was, allegedly, venison, so I bought three 'joints' to London. I'd never cooked venison so two weeks prior I defrosted one to try out. It was Ox Liver!!! The friends duly arrived and the joints had been thawed, and the veg purchased. I'd also made and iced my own christmas cake, costing £18:00, which contained 1/4 ltr of brandy in it, and a 2 pint pud at £7 which contained 1/4 ltr of Wood's navy rum. My sep Mum was a District Nurse and gave me some hypodermics so I could directly inject them with no loss. On Saturday the meat was put in the oven and I took my friends around the West End and Carnaby Street, ostensibly to do Christmas shopping although I think it involved more pubs than shops. Around 16:00 we headed for home and started cooking. I set everyone to a task, either on veg watch or sorting dessert. The biggest problem was the rum sauce, as the saucepan handle was broken, so everyone who picked it up, found it would rotate causing spillage. The answer was to slop more rum in it, this being Woods at 80%. The meal sat 13 (we'd gained two 'guests' en route) sitting to a 7 course meal, of toasted goat's cheese on toast, followed by grilled ementhal on aubergine, then the venison. The two joints turned out to be two different meats. One was venison, the other being rabbit. But no complaints served with load of veg. This was followed by pud with burning Rum Sauce, with more rum than sauce, then mince pies and cake, and lastly cheese and biscuits. This was followed by 13 bloated 'slugs' drinking watching the Star Wars trilogy, I think, or Mad Max,unable to move. It has forever been known as the Bambi and Thumper Christmas Dinner.

Worst Christmas. My Parents had separated, with Mum living with a new boyfriend in St. Peters, Thanet. Dad was living in a shared house in Ramsgate. It made Christmasses very fragmented and spending time between one and the other. No fun, and is one of the main reasons for disliking Christmas ever since, as it ruined the sense of Christmas and the Ho-Ho-Ho.
This particular year, Dad had been invited to spend Christmas in a pub in Broadstairs. This pub had a very large upstairs room that could seat 20, so Dad invited me. Unfortunately I made the 13th person, so another had to be invited to break the , which was managed on the 24th.Come Christmas day, Da picked me up and ran me over to Broadstairs and met all assembled. A few were consumed until chucking out time. Then we all decamped, carrying various drinks to a table groaning under food. There was beef, ham, turkey, nutroast etc. and a multitude of veg, preceded by soup, and followed by assorted desserts, all washed down by by the flagon from the bar, all free.
So how, you are thinking, is this the worst Christmas? Because I had to be at my Mum's for 18:00, so could only drink sparingly. After eating, and everyone else was , one so badly he'd been 'made up' by the women. There were a few games played, then time for me to leave. I'd ordered a cab, which used up the balance of my money, but got to Mum's by 18:00. The next four hours passed slowly, with Mum, the boyfriend, my two sisters and their two partners. There were a few nibbles handed around. Oh! And a drink. A shot of Bacardi.
Come 22:00 and time to leave. I expected a lift from one of the family, or at the worst, the offer of paying for a taxi. Nothing.

So I left and walked the four miles back to Ramsgate and my cold, damp flat, half a mile outside Ramsgate on the seafront. The next day I had to be at work for 13:30, the only one with a clear head

I vowed never to repeat that experience, and now prefer to celebrate at home, quietly, with my own food and supplies then I can't be disappointed.

But to those that do, Have a one, and those that don't, have a fantastic 2013.





MMF

I've just remembered a "Best Christmas".

It wasn't Christmas. It was the last weekend of university before Christmas. I lived in Bradford in a house with seven other people, and we all stayed past the official end of term for a proper Christmas dinner. A sixteen pound turkey was roasted, the world's supply of vegetables was peeled and roasted or boiled or whatever, and we all sat round and ate heartily, threw all the remaining washing up (we'd done a fair bit as we went along) into the sink and pushed off to a nightclub, with the intention of dancing the night away. Whereas in fact we all basically sat down around a table and flobbed out, almost unable to move because of the heroic amount of really excellent food we'd eaten.

A particular highlight was one of my housemates had made, from scratch, a Christmas pudding the like of which I have never tasted before or since. It was, quite simply, incredible. Rich, moist, not to heavy, nutty, alcoholic, dense and absolutely delicious. It was like the Platonic ideal of Christmas puds, of which all merely real Christmas puds are a pale reflection, a dancing shadow cast upon the wall. He was (and is) a pudding specialist, and has, in my opinion, entirely missed his calling, working as he does as a highly paid project manager in telecoms when he could be a chef that Heston Blumenthal would go to for tips.

Ha! One of my favourite Christmas meals was one my uni housemates and I cooked for a few friends. Ours, however, was remarkable for being a festival of ineptitude. Starting with us running our of electricity on the morning of the meal while also realising that turkeys take a lot longer to thaw out than we had budgeted for, and ending (many many hours after we had invited people round for) with me discovering the plastic bag with the turkey giblets in the bird I was about to carve, which was just before we melted the vodka jelly by adding hot custard.

It was fun though.

First Christmasses:
My sister and I would wake up and find a trail of boiled sweets at the end of our beds leading downstairs to the Christmas tree, where our presents would be kept within pillow cases. After opening them we'd go to church for an hour and after that we'd walk to my Nana and Grandad's, who lived around the corner, for a family Christmas meal, games etc.

Last Christmas
Today I'm up in Leeds at the inlaws, and I was last year. It still doesn't feel right being at someone else's house rather than having our own Christmas, but my wife and kids seem to like it.

Best Christmas
Probably one of the first ones

Worst Christmas
No, not the one where my parents divorced - I didn't know what was going on and quite enjoyed spending a month living with my Nana and Grandad as they spoilt us rotten.
Instead, the first year I was at Uni I went home a couple of days before Christmas. I'd spoke to my Mum and stepdad earlier that day, telling them what ferry I'd be on so I could get a lift back home, was on that ferry and on my arrival on the Island I expected a car to take me back home. But no, they weren't there. After waiting over an hour I went to a neary phonebox (that was before mobiles were common) and left a message on the answer phone, but they'd forgotten all about me and had gone out. After a couple of hours my stepdad finally turned up, said I should have caught a train home (but East Cowes has never had a train station) and then went off to a Christmas do, so I didn't see my Mum for 2 days. I wrote about it over here: F11007?thread=232732

<BB<

I was reminded (as I declared champagne o'clock at 12.20 today) of one Christmas past - the kids must've been about 3 and 5 - where I was in the bath with a Baileys at 8. And yes, that is am, not pm.

My kids will be 3 and 5 next Christmas - I'll have to fill a bath tub full of Baileys...

<BB<

Wouldn't that be expensive? The closest I can come is to sing, "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?"

First Christmas: I have been having definite flashbacks to my infant nativity plays after seeing my son in his first effort. < fondparentsquee > My son, the angel! < /fondparentsquee > I can picture the hall with it's exceptionally inconveniently placed (for the audience) pillars even now. This is not surprising when you think that the kids put in multiple performances each year for a good three or four years. I confidently expect my son to wake up in the middle of the night shouting 'little donkey!' and twitching a year or two from now.

I also remember lying in bed, rigid with excitement, eyes very tightly shut, listening to the door veeeery slowly and veeeery stealthily opening one Christmas eve, back when I at least half believed in the big red man himself. Opening my eyes would have confirmed it one way or the other. I kept them shut.

Best Christmas: Probably Christmases don't get much better than that, but other than that I have some very fond memories of being at my Grandparents'. Any year really. Especially the ones with my cousins and aunts and uncle there too. Welsh village. Only five other houses. Regularly got snowed in. Nothing like going to sleep on a living room floor in front of a dying fire on Christmas eve and waking up being able to toboggan on Christmas day, although those experiences may not have been the exact same year. Plus they have a really olde worlde church. And the village put on a panto, often written mainly by Grandad. The first year they lived there it was Robinson Crusoe. An early and best memory, that.

Of course, the year with snow was also the year that we rammed another car after sliding down the very long hill on the exit from the valley. No harm was done to any living beings. Even the gerbil survived being catapulted in his cage across the interior (sawdust everywhere). And we got to go 500 miles in a big flashing AA recovery truck, which was WAY COOL, so hey.

Most of my 'worst' Christmases are more like that. Mildly inconvenient/ embarrassing/ memorable/ odd incidents. Let me see: the time when Grandad didn't turn the heating on for three days in minus conditions and I froze so badly I shook all the way home in an overheated car rather than mention this to him. The time Christmas dinner was pizza in Pizza Hut, following a session of feeding the homeless with Mother Theresa nuns. The many disastrous presents my Mum has given me over the years (last year was a reed room scent kit. Basically, an air freshener. Oh yes. This year she bought my son a scooter he already has. Despite the fact I sent her a link to the page with the right scooter on, a page which had a big red button saying ‘Buy Me’ on it.). The time my parents came to visit me in Moscow and I carefully looked up the city's Anglican church's service times for my Mum, only to find, when we arrived, that the proper Anglican service was a few hours later and this was an evangelical American fundie group who had hired the space for the afternoon (my revenge for the presents, clearly). The many many years we had to load our groaningly full selves into a car to go and have Christmas tea with Granny (the slightly agoraphobic one, who refused to ever leave her village in her later years), who I adored, but who would always provide a salad whose main components were iceburg lettuce and satsumas in, which I always felt obliged to eat. The years when we no longer went to Granny's and my mother started doing the same. The other time I cooked Christmas dinner and we also ended up eating what was supposed to be lunch in the evening due to my continuing inability to cook roast dinners. The sprouts were very soggy by then. The dinner when the caviar was very very very off. The year my junior school burnt down right before I was to play the lead in a production called ‘Trig Trog and the Christmas Children’. Actually, perhaps that wasn;t such a bad thing.

This year's nomination is the moment when my daughter decided to play run away from Mama during the crib service and ended up dancing round the alter and hugging the vicar round the knees. This was marginally more embarrassing than the year my son dove onto the organ foot pedal keys during the sermon.

My husband would say, Christmas dinner. Full stop. He hates British celebration roasts. Not enough food on the table and a conspicuous absence of salads. Actually, his complete failure to ever let this lie is actually my worst thing about a number of Christmases. We even had a big argument about it one Christmas day, in vicious not quite whispers during our traditional post dinner walk. Complete with being greeted by loudly ironic Merry Christmases from a passer by. That was a definite low point, actually. We now get through this difficult time of year by dint of me threatening to stick a fork in his eye if he breathes a word on the Big Day itself and letting him go home on Boxing Day before my Mum makes the turkey soup and brings out the Boxing Day pie.

But by far the worst Christmas memory I have was when my brother, husband and I spent Christmas afternoon visiting my Granny at her nursing home, the year she had the heart attack which didn't quite kill her. She hated that last year with a bitter and unrelenting passion and was wandering and miserable the whole time we were there that day. She didn't actually die until much later the following year, unfortunately. This completely outshadows the Christmas period my Grandad was hospitalised unexpectedly with the hitherto undiagnosed cancer that killed him a few weeks later. His passing was swift and, thanks to the drugs, relatively painless, and the only thing I regret is that I didn't tell him I was pregnant with my son as soon as I could, after the miscarriage he did know about.

Last Christmas: I spent it mostly asleep. Small baby, donchaknow.

Don't think I can top that

My first Christmases were quite similar, waking up with stockings (one of my dad's socks) at the end of the bed with a satsuma and nuts in the end. Being over excited and in awe at the appearance of presents.

Best Christmases were when my grandmother came to ours for the day which involved picking her up on 24th and dropping her back Christmas night (4 journeys of over an hour for my dad) so she could prepare for everyone going to hers on Boxing day. Her house was so cold in winter with small open fires, she wore a coat indoors some of the time I loved all the old fashionedness of it though, always a real tree with candles clipped to the branches which were only lit once a year, piano in the corner, playing charades and consequences

"Let me see: the time when Grandad didn't turn the heating on for three days in minus conditions"

Funnily enough the only day on which my father would turn the heating on was Christmas day - I have childhood memories of the family watching television sat in sleeping bags and scratching pictures in the ice on the inside of my bedroom window.

Sorry, got carried away. I like Christmas...

It's funny, I grew up without central heating, hot water bottles in bed as standard and accounting it a great luxury to have the electric fan heater on for ten minutes in my room after a bath and such. But I have lost the trick of that these days. I don't think it ever got as bad s ice on the windows, mind.

It made great reading Solnushka

In our second house while I was growing we had heating downstairs only so the bedroom windows did ice up