Advent Day Five

Hello Friends!

When I was a child, the only thing that I knew about Christmas was that we celebrated the birth of someone called Baby Jesus, something that was enacted out at our school Nativity and in church at Sunday School, that I got lots of presents, we ate lots of treats, and that along with all my friends we would become sick with excitement in anticipation waiting for a jolly old man dressed in a red suit to come down our chimney after travelling across the sky in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to leave presents under a decorated tree in the front room.  That probably sums up the opinion of most children in western civilization where Christmas is celebrated.

However, since I began to write the Blogmass five days ago, I've already discovered that I remember more than I realise.  This was not what I had planned to do with this Blogmas, but those child's eyes of mine must have been drinking in the images going before them and lodging them somewhere deep inside me., so I am running with it.  I am remembering far more detail than I am recording here and perhaps I'll skirt around the time pine needles from our Christmas tree ended up in the rice pudding.  That was the last year we had a real tree!

Today I'm going to reminisce about Christmas cards, which we all know what they are.  I'm going to talk about them in a personal context not historical, but in case anyone is interested, the first recorded evidence of a Christmas card is from the 1600's sent by a German physicist Michael Maier to King James I of England.  The first commercial ones became available some two hundred years later, and the rest is history, although it must be asked, will the current increases in postage rates see the demise of the Christmas card?

There was so much love, and yes there was much excess  too with all the eating and indulging, but historically there has always been excess at Christmas.  I remember Christmas cards in particular flooding into the house day after day.  Everyone sent and received more than I now care to imagine.  My mother spent many nights in early December writing out and addressing the two hundred or more cards she would send.  The Post Office {we had our own wee sorting office at the back of the Beehive Grocery Shop} took on extra delivery personnel.  I recall my friend's mother was one of them, and she had to walk around the village pushing a large, weatherproof, supermarket style trolley that was compartmentalised by street to push handfuls of cards through hungry letterboxes.  When full, it must have weighed a ton!   Often she was wet and cold by the time she reached our house and was more than happy to be invited in for a cup of tea and a mince pie sitting by the fire in the kitchen for a warm before setting out again.  

I do wish we'd been the sort of family who took pictures, but we weren't, so you will have to put up with me painting the pictures with words instead.

Bundles of cards arrived each day.  We probably received two hundred or more between family, friends, tradespeople, and school.  The long mantel in the front room was filled from end to end, while the bookshelves on each end had cards popped in between the covers of books so that the pictures showed to the front.  Cards were placed on the sideboard, only to need rearranging ever time the door to the room was opened and they blew over in the draft!  There was a big, deep windowsill, big enough to take our Christmas tree, and the space all around that was filled with cards.  They overflowed, and many were stuck to the back of the door!  I remember one year my mother bought these little sets of Baker's Twine and tiny gypsy style pegs.  The twine was draped across the walls and the cards were pegged to the twine., like garlands around the room.  A few years ago, I found the remains of twine and pegs in the attic.  

On January 6th, on Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, everything Christmas, including the cards, was taken down.  Ornaments were dusted and cleaned, then carefully wrapped up in tissue paper and put back in their box before being taken back up into the attic.  The Christmas cards were all put in a box, and we decamped from our sojourn the front room, where we had spent the last two or three weeks, back into the living room, television on it's trolley and all!

Over the coming evenings, my poor mother spent hours going through the box of spent Christmas cards, carefully recording who had sent them and making her list of names and addresses as an aide memoir from which the Christmas card list for the following year would be prepared.  The cards, now discarded, were cut up and any large, unprinted section of white card was put in the "messy drawer" to be used over the coming months for notes written to the milkman, shopping lists, and other such tasks where a small piece of paper was needed.  I was given the fronts off the cards with all the pretty pictures.  Using a child's safety scissors, I cut them up and played with them.  I stuck some in my scrap book, used some to make collaged pictures, and I cut shapes out that were then punched with a hole and had string added to make gift tags for the following Christmas.  The unusable pieces that had printing or writing on them were burned in the kitchen fire.  This was how we recycled in the 1960's!  

In later years, we passed our cards on to Care in the Community where they were used in the weekly craft sessions of the residents bringing them joy as they created new things from them.

Here are some photos of Christmas in Iceland where they make tree ornaments and baskets from the used Christmas cards.  Shapes are cut which are then stitched together using brightly coloured yarn.

The basket at the front of the table in the third picture is made from recycled Christmas cards sewn together patchwork style.  Nothing wasted!  Making new things from old is not only good for the environment, but also a lot of fun too!

Until tomorrow . . .