Things Aint What They Used To Be

At the risk of sounding like my mother (for example: “All this modern music! It’s just NOISE! There's no TUNE! It all sounds THE SAME! I can’t tell when one song ENDS and the next one BEGINS!”), things just aint what they used to be. This is made very clear to me every year at Halloween. For a start, my children want their costume bought ready to wear, rather than creating a ghost’s outfit from a sheet, my Dad’s army spats, a variety of empty cardboard junk, and a big pot of glue made from flour and water (which coincidentally was the exact recipe you used to make your hair stand on end as well). Secondly, they go out armed with a pumpkin-shaped plastic bucket in which to contain the loot that they expect every single house to provide. Thirdly, they grudgingly come up with one solitary (and almost always a bit rude and inappropriate) joke which is supposed to count as their “treat”. No thought is ever given to doing a dance or singing a song (unless it’s a rude one of course: “Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me something nice to eat…..” etc). And they normally need help with the punch line until they have visited the 20^th house, at which point they finally manage to remember it through the fug of sugar-related bad behaviour.

When you are the Trick-or-treatee, there is much scrutiny and ultimately often voiced disappointment with the loot you have provided. “I don’t like these” said one child this year. “Can I have the money instead?” Seriously. I was flabbergasted. Is that acceptable?? And although every year I always stoically put monkey nuts and satsumas in amongst the loot on offer, I have yet to see a child actually select either of those items. I am pretty sure that satsumas in my day were considered to be a pretty good treat…

And let’s not forget the arrival of the pumpkin into our lives. I had never seen a pumpkin until a few years ago, except in a Charlie Brown cartoon, and I had certainly never smelt one. Because nothing smells quite like the stinking, stringy, soggy entrails of a pumpkin. Even pumpkin seeds are somehow creepy. How can the feel of a seed make you gag and shudder? Of course, in the old days, we made our lanterns out of neeps. It was a hard shift, hollowing out a neep. You ended up with several bent spoons and broken knives, as well as various blisters and callouses. But it was worth it, because you could make soup or bashed neeps with the remnants, and the burning candle inside the lantern filled the house with a pleasant smell of cooking neeps. Let’s face it, these days it’s you or the pumpkin. The unspeakable stench will kill you in the end, so you have to put the lantern on your doorstep and hope for a kindly prevailing wind.

Halloween is a timely reminder for me that Christmas is coming. This year I am hell bent on doing something about the mountains of gifts which Boxer and Judge receive (which last year took them a week to finish opening. Not their choice, I hasten to add). These mountains of gifts cause them to completely forget about what Christmas is really about, much like distracting someone with something shiny: “Yes yes Jesus and Mary and Joseph, I get it, now then, that’s another one for me isn’t it?” So this year, I am a woman possessed. One main present each. One stocking each containing a variety of smaller gifts, each one worth less than or equal to £5, and a Satsuma, obviously. With careful forward planning and management of lovely and generous friends, any other presents will be from family or god-parents. Nothing else.

This year we will be enjoying experiences rather than things. Children remember experiences. They rarely remember things (except my beautiful green bike which I got for Christmas in 1976, and which was stolen 2 weeks after I got it. I have never got over it.) Mine have never been allowed to ask for a whole lot for Christmas, so when they write their letter to Santa, it is to ask for one thing only. And then I let myself down by starting to do my shopping so early in the year, in order to spread the cost, that I forget what I have already bought and end up with an enormous pile of gifts, exactly what I was determined to avoid.

Not this year. This year, things are going to be much more like they used to be.