Remembering Christmas by the beach

I was lucky enough to be born into a family of four girls. Well, there were in fact five girls, but the littlest arrived 9 years after me, so my childhood memories don’t include her.

My father was a lawyer, both solicitor and barrister as was the general case in Perth in the ’40s and ’50s, and later on my mother went back to teaching her honours degree subject, languages. This return to the workforce was prompted by there being an echoing hollowness in the piggybank, which was caused by our house being one that ate money. Dadda had inherited it from his father, so it was OLD (like me, now), and there was never a time when it didn’t make endless demands on him for propping up in one area or another. We never lacked for anything we needed, our family, but it was, I realise all these years later, a constant struggle for my parents.

Oh, how I LOVED that house… I really don’t have the words to describe the attachment I have to it, and this is in spite of the fact that it has long since gone the way of all houses that stand in the way of wealthy people with no taste. I could draw without trouble a floor plan of it and still can I remember the sound of every door, every window, and every footfall made in every hallway. I loved that house absolutely.

We lived on a long narrow block that ran down to the banks of the Swan, in a suburb called Dalkeith (maybe this is where I got my passion for the Scots? – kidding), and I spent a very large part of my childhood down there on White Beach, swimming in the areas that some kind souls had (only the gods know when) cleared of seaweed and made entirely suitable for swimming, paddling, water-fighting and crabbing at night. Unhappily, the crabs also came out in the daytime, and many was the occasion of loud indignant screams and a small fat child dashing from the calm waters with blue swimmers appended to digits.

So Christmas for this large, casual family was always associated with the beach. I can clearly remember that our presents ALWAYS involved at least something to do with our beach activities. I have the smell of a pale blue rubber swimming tyre with a shark’s head sticking up from one side in my nostrils even now… That new rubber smell! There were snorkels, swimming masks (I have no idea what to call these, but they were simply oval, all the one ‘pane’, you know?), beach towels, little things to sit on to scrape sand off the feet, and all manner of beachy items. We loved them all, and nothing was ever boring or repetitive or not received with shrieks of joy.

Dadda would bring home a Christmas tree a few days before. It was nothing like what you get today, no wimpy, bendy thing but a fine, straight branch with firm sub-branches all over. Everyone would ‘help’ decorate it, I think to my mother’s despair, as she was the original obsessive compulsive (I’m a poor copy) and liked it to be NEAT. In the end we’d lose interest through having our hangings moved constantly, and slope off to do other things. Mother could be neat to her heart’s content and to give her due, the tree always ended up looking fabulous!

We were sent to bed, firmly, on Christmas Eve, having laid our presents about the foot of the tree. Dadda and Mother would get to work so that next morning at some ungodly hour when all four of us leapt out of our respective beds/bedrooms and rushed in to the loungeroom, there would be a huge pile of gifts, spreading around the tree and out onto the lounge room carpet. And then everyone would get to work for a bit, unwrapping and squealing and kissing loudly, before we all got showered and dressed and off to 8 o’clock Mass. Then home again to continue with the excitement, interspersed with breakfast, and eventually clearing up all the wrappings and stuffing them somewhere out of sight. This had to be done by 10, because at that point people started arriving to visit. They weren’t invited, you understand, they simply came for drinks and to wish us Happy Christmas. It was a standing event in our house. We had a list of who we did NOT want to stay to lunch, and every year a different person was given the task of getting rid of these unwanteds. Hysterical! We always ended laughing weakly, and, it must be admitted, pretty often with the unwanted being seated at our Christmas lunch.

It was always cold lunch. Christmas in Perth, anyone serving a hot lunch would possibly kark from heat exhaustion. Cold chicken, turkey, ham, pork, and many, many salads of vastly different kinds. The dining room table was always groaning, and there was never, ever a person who walked away from it without having eaten too much. We kids would sit around for ages when the grownups had gone, throwing cherries up in the air and catching them in our mouths. Many a cherry-stain did the lace tablecloth suffer. And then before the guests went home, numbers 2, 3 and 4 would sing for them. We were very practiced at part-singing, and we loved it – almost as much as the listeners did. Number 3 was the cleverest at this. She could devise a third harmony for 2-part harmonies, and we sang some truly beautiful songs; “At the mid hour of night”, “Who would go to Egypt?” and many of the more melodic and less well-known carols.

Christmas night saw everyone flat, in more ways than one. We couldn’t possibly eat another scrap! And yet, somehow we managed… 🙂

And Boxing Day? Why, down to the beach, of course! Even Mother would join us at that time of year, as the alternative of cleaning up everything was too ghastly to contemplate. We would drag her into the water, and I would clutch her round the waist while the others pretend to try to stretch her legs – for her legs were a wee bit on the short side (she was 5’0½” at her tallest). You can imagine the indignation with which this performance was viewed by the pullee, while the pullers yelled and tugged, without success. Everyone ended up in the water, laughing fit to bust – even she.

Yes, it was a marvelous time, Christmas, when I was a child…

Growing up were your Christmases bush or beach or somewhere in between? Do you have similar memories to Margaret’s?