An Apple, An Orange and A Shiny New Penny!

Christmas is a time when Alfreton family generations get together to chat, exchange gifts, enjoy a special meal and sit glued to the telly?

For the older generations of our families, Christmas was very different. I've been looking at the memories of a few local people whose childhood Christmases are still vivid.

Young Hilda Whittle enjoyed her family's Christmases in the late 1920s-30s. Times were hard then and presents were few, with nine children to provide for on Jack Whittle's miner's wages, Christmas stockings contained very little by today's standards but Hilda was assured of an apple, an orange and usually, a shiny new penny. One year there was a jigsaw puzzle entitled 'The Lambeth Walk' and it provided a welcome challenge. (Photograph by kind permission of Mrs Hilda Sharratt).

Hilda recalls that Christmas Cards didn't appear in the shops until around two weeks beforehand and the festival itself simply consisted of Christmas Day and Boxing Day: decorations going up on Christmas Eve or a day or so earlier. In the Whittle household, these consisted of coloured paper chains made by the children and hung up by their father. A tree was out of the question since the Whittles lived in such a tiny cottage, two rooms downstairs and two upstairs: with eleven people in such a small space, there was no room for a tree.

Hilda's family were stalwart members of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and Christmas Day was very much centred round the Christmas services. Jack Whittle went down to the chapel early on Christmas morning to light the fires in the iron stoves to warm the congregation. Then, just as they did each Sunday, the Whittle children took the lead in preparing vegetables for Christmas lunch and laying the table before they went, wearing their Sunday finest, to church on Christmas morning. Sundays and Christmas Day were very much Alice Whittle's 'days off' from an exhausting week of housework.

Apart from the meat and vegetables, everything on the table was home-made: mince pies, Christmas cakes, bread, preserves and the Christmas pudding boiled in the kitchen copper. All of it, the results of Alice's baking prowess from September onwards. Many presents were home-made too for money didn't run to shop-bought gifts but they were treasured all the more for the time and effort put into them.

Going back still further, young Ruth Barber loved Christmas. Born in 1899, she recalled in the notes she left behind at her death how most toys were very primitive: a chunk of wood with wooden spindles and wheels attached and fashioned by a local handyman. One Christmas, Ruth received a new doll, pretty doll's clothes and a pram. Many little girls would have been thrilled but not Ruth for she was a tomboy like her brother and frilly doll's clothes held no appeal.

Perhaps that is why she looks so glum in this photograph taken around Christmas 1903, dressed in a fur-trimmed velvet coat and bonnet. The toy soldiers and bottle imps given to her brother were more to Ruth's liking. (Photograph by kind permission of R J Kuchnowski)

Ruth's Christmas Day also revolved very much around churchgoing, for her grandfather was the Vicar of All Saints' Church in South Wingfield. A family meal on Christmas Day was, again, the seasonal highlight but, as Ruth's household was comparatively wealthy, extended family came to stay and the fare included game (which had been hanging in the larder for weeks), pies and wines. The household employed paid staff but even so, Ruth's mother was kept busy from September onwards, planning and making food for their guests on 25th December, using a hand-written recipe book containing tried and tested 'receipts' from previous generations of females and made in her own kitchen.

These were the days when one could expect to hear 'the waits' at the door on Christmas Eve, singing the old carols by lanternlight, secretly hoping for the reward of a mince pie and a glass of steaming punch or maybe an innocent kiss under the 'kissing bunch' of mistletoe and holly!

The overwhelming impression of those far-off days is not the quantity or cost of presents but the importance of the family and of giving your hospitality, your time and effort. A time when 'less' was definitely 'more'!

Article Written and Researched by Jill Sparrow - Senior Editor, Alfreton History Website