Christmas at Palmers Channel was always a happy family time. One of my life's regrets is that my children have never had the childhood Christmas experience the I grew up with.
I can’t remember Mum cooking the pudding but she always did. She has often reminded me that her mother boiled the pudding in the copper and she probably did the same - at least for as long as we had one. We still use Nana Skinners recipe today. This was in the pre-decimal currency days and one of the thrills of Christmas day was finding a threepence or sixpence - or if we were really lucky, a shilling - in the pudding. Unless, of course, you swallowed one. I don’t recall that I ever tried to recover a swallowed coin.
The pig was prepared early. Once selected, the unfortunate beast was unceremoniously slaughtered with a bullet through the head from Pa Marsh’s single shot 22 calibre rifle. We used a 44 gallon (200 litre) drum with part of the side opened to boil the carcase over an open fire. In latter years I recall the pig then being sent to the butcher for salting but I think that was all done on the farm earlier on. Nana Marsh’s favorite part of the pig was the trotters.
We had our own chooks on the farm as well and one or more of these would always make the supreme sacrifice for our festivities. I remember the year Mum raised some chickens to sell for Christmas, hoping to raise a little extra. Just before sale time a fox broke into the chicken shed and killed them all.
Each year Pa Marsh would make ginger beer. This was lethal. I don’t know how much he made but some of the bottles would explode before the day. And we didn’t get much a great deal from those that survived. The standard procedure was to point the bottle into a bucket as it was opened to catch the very foamy contents. There was so much froth that eventually if we got a couple of mouth fulls out of a bottle we were lucky.
Money was always scarce. I remember Dad making toys for for Christmas gifts. Dad was quite good with his hands and while some of the gifts were simple - such as the shape of a dog cut out of plywood and fitted with wheels - there were more complex things, such as a model garage with petrol bowsers out the front. I may have been the lucky recipient, but then again memories are vague.
On Christmas eve David and I would go to bed early - before the sun set at times. But we were so excited we hardly slept. I remember being warned - probably by Nana Marsh - that if we saw Santa he would throw pepper in our eyes. But that didn’t mean we couldn't get up every hour or so and see if he had been. We would sneak from our room into the lounge where the tree was placed and we had left our stockings only to be met with a rather abrupt ‘Get back to bed’. Eventually, around six o’clock, Mum and Dad would relent and we could open our stockings before Dad went to milk the cows. The other presents had to wait till later.
Like many families, Christmas dinner (the mid day meal on the farm) was held with Pa and Nana Marsh one year and Pa and Nana Skinner the following, with the evening meal likewise rotated. The years the Lamonds came up from Sydney have a special memory for me. Aunty Aileen was Dad’s only sister and we didn’t see her all that often, whereas we saw quite a lot of Mum’s side of the family - especially the Ryans - throughout the year.
I also felt closer to my Father’s parents, simply because they lived so close and I spent so much time with them. So Christmas on the side veranda of Nana and Pa’s place with Granny Carter and Aunty Ethel (Nana’s mother and sister), my grandparents, parents and the Lamonds was in deed a special time.
25 Dec 2010
