NORTH-EAST writer and lecturer Paul Magrs looks back at snow days, ‘council van Santa’, family and fighting over the festive telly schedule at Christmas as a boy in Newton Aycliffe.

SOME Christmases were so snowy that it felt like our little town was going to be cut off from all the main roads.

Our school often closed because pipes burst and parquet floors flooded and froze over like ice rinks and ceilings fell in with the weight of snow.

Snow days meant being able to work from home, using sheets printed in purple ink. We did the shapes of trees and birds. Nature meant going out down the Burn and ploughing through drifts of snow until it grew dark.

Schoolwork mostly seemed to be about writing stories in the extra days of holiday at home.

 

We stocked up our cupboards at home with Swiss rolls and corned beef and custard and tomato soup.

Mam would put in an order for extra fruit and veg. A van would pull up and we would have a small wooden crate to unpack.

The satsumas still had green leaves attached and their scent filled the whole house.

The silver nutcrackers would come out of the wall unit drawer. We would take agonizing, effortful, hilarious turns cracking Brazils, walnuts and hazelnuts. Little bits of nutty shrapnel shooting everywhere.

Much of our shopping we would fetch on Friday night and Christmas was no exception. We didn’t have a car just then, but what we did have was our very own shopping trolley. Someone had nicked it from the Fine Fare superstore down town and sent it rolling down the steep hill of Burn Lane into the stream.

It had been a little project: cleaning up that shopping trolley, yanking out tatters of mouldy lichen and slimy weed. It took some doing.

We would push it through the futuristic, automated doors of Fine Fare, quite brazenly. We’d fill it up to the very top, pay for all our stuff and not even bother with carrier bags or boxes. We left all our shopping in the trolley and simply pushed it back home again.

In 1979 the whole of Christmas was exciting. Mam loved to buy us presents. Christmas Day would begin with the lights out and the door closed on the living room, and we’d assemble outside in the hall while she counted down.

Then she would open the door and quickly put the lights on and then we would see in a flash: Santa had been! The room was filled – completely filled – with brightly-coloured wrapping paper.

We sat on the settee with a continental quilt over our laps because it could get quite chilly. We’d work our way through long nights of viewing, circling our choices in the Radio Times and the TV Times Christmas issues, cross-referencing and squabbling in the days before Betamax. Every quiz show, every sit-com and every serial drama.

The tree would have been up for a month by the time Christmas came. Artificial and silver, glass baubles and a fairy that had been bought the year I was born. In 1979 it was ten and the gauzy lace was turning yellowish. Yards of tinsel were swagged on every wall, displaying all our Christmas cards. We’d sprayed everything with this sticky fake snow out of a can.

The smell was as essentially festive as those oranges in the crate, or the pine fresh scent of the cleaning stuff Mam used in the bathroom and on all the floors. She set to work cleaning every corner of our house, because we had to be shipshape and sparkling for when Santa came.

In Aycliffe we did actually have a real Santa. He was the ‘council van Santa’ and his lorry was an old dust cart; his elves were all dust men. There was a wooden house on the back of his van, all strung with fairy lights.

The list of ETAs was printed in the Newton News and his van would roll around promptly from street to street. We’d hear his handbell ringing and we’d wait for him to come round the corner and throw sweets at us.

People held up new babies for him to hold, and everyone asked questions about the busy night he had ahead of him.

Older kids would chuck snowballs at his little house, trying to knock his fairy lights out. We all loved the council Santa, though, even the older ones – the Goths and the hard girls.

It was the only time in the whole year – unless there was a fire – that you’d see the inhabitants of the street all out together, saying hello and Season’s Greetings to each other.

It was Mam who ceremonially began Christmas each year. On Christmas Eve she’d put a certain record on.

From that futuristic stereo system would come the squeaky voices of two pigs singing ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town.’ It wasn’t really Christmas until we’d all sung along with Pinky and Perky.

It was the one night of the year an early bedtime seemed preferable. I would sit up in bed reading last year’s annuals by torchlight. Very nearly sick with minty chocolates, satsumas and ginger wine.

It was all about egging time on to go faster and faster and for all the hours and the days to go flashing past.

That seems the craziest and most marvellous thing of all when I look back now: that there was ever a time when I wished the time away.

For more information about Mr Magrs visit lifeonmagrs.blogspot.com

To hear him talk about his favourite Christmas telly listen to Neil Perryman’s podcast Perfect Night In at perfectnightin.tv/podcast/christmas-special

His new book, The Novel Inside You - Writing, Reading and Creativity, will be released in April from Snow Books.