Christmas Dodos: The festive traditions dying out before our eyes

From Parker pens to carol singers, ‘Beezer’ annuals to Chocolate Toffee Cups, Steve Stack looks back at 12 festive traditions facing extinction

(Alamy)

Food and drink

Coffee Creams

We all know Coffee Creams were the worst chocolate in the tin [ducks as thousands of Coffee Cream fans hurl empty Caramel Barrel wrappers at him], so it was great news when they were discontinued [ducks again as a Caramel Velvet whizzes past his ear]. They join a long line of fillings and flavours that have been dumped, often after sitting happily in our Christmas tin of chocolates for many years. Here are just a few examples:

Cadbury’s Roses: Lime Barrel, Praline Moment, Coffee Creme, Montelimar, Almond Charm, Chocolate Bite, Chunky Truffle, Bournville, Orange Crisp.

Quality Street: Apricot Delight, Chocolate Toffee Cup, Montelimar Nougat, Gooseberry Cream, Toffee Square, Milk Chocolate Round, Chocolate Strawberry Cream, Coffee Cream, Peanut Cracknell, Hazelnut Cracknell, Chocolate Truffle, Chocolate Nut Toffee Cream, Malt Toffee, Hazelnut Eclair; they even used to have mini-boxes of Smarties at one point.

Milk Tray: Apricot, Marzipan, Violet, Rosewater.

And then there are the selection boxes that are no longer with us either. Do you remember Week-End (chocolates and candies)? How about Terry’s Moonlight?

Dodo rating: 5

The Chocolate Junior Smoker’s Kit

Even though there is not one shred of evidence that candy cigarettes, liquorice pipes or sweet tobacco encouraged anyone to start smoking the hard stuff when they were older, they are now as hard to buy in a local newsagent as Spangles.

I was unaware, until it was mentioned to me by the author Jonathan Pinnock, that there was a remarkable Christmas variety pack of such delights known as the Chocolate Junior Smoker’s Kit. It came in selection box-style packaging and consisted of five cigarettes, two cigars, a pipe, a box of matches and an ashtray, all of which were made of chocolate! Its existence has almost been completely forgotten. Try Googling it and you’ll see how few entries come up, and most of these are just passing references.

There is, however, one rather grainy photograph of an original box with its contents intact, which may well prompt a sudden wave of nostalgia from fake smokers in their forties and fifties. It appears to be the only image of the kit anywhere on the internet.

Dodo rating: 5

Yule log

The chances are that when you think of a Yule log, the picture in your head will be of a chocolate cake fashioned to look like a tree trunk. However, these are a recent invention, first made to replicate the real wooden logs to which most Western cultures attached great significance at Christmas time.

Although the specifics of the Yule log tradition differs from country to country, the basic principles are the same: someone brings a massive log, or even a whole tree, into the house and it is burnt to bring luck to the family. Here are some of the variations…

UK: An entire tree is brought in and stuck into the fire, trunk first. The name differs from region to region: Yule Clog, Yule Block, Y Bloccyn Gwylian in Wales meaning the Festive Block, and, my favourite, Yeel Carline in Scotland, which means “the Christmas Old Wife”.

Serbia: A young oak tree is felled on Christmas Eve and a log taken from it. This log, called a badnjak, is burnt all through Christmas Day. The first visitor to the house on that day has to hit it with a poker and wish the family good luck.

Bulgaria: Here hosts one of the most convoluted Yule Log rituals. A young man dresses in his best clothes and goes out on Christmas Eve to chop down a pear, elm or oak tree; this is known as the budnik. He must then carry the tree home without it touching the ground. Once he reaches the door of his house, he engages in a call-and-response with the family inside: “Do you glorify the young god?” he asks three times; on each occasion the family responds, “We glorify him, welcome.” A hole is then drilled into the log and filled with a blend of incense, before being burnt in the fireplace. In the morning, the fire is extinguished with wine and the ash and charred wood are used to bless the harvest for the coming year.

Catalonia: My favourite: a log is wrapped in a blanket and fed grass for several days. On Christmas Eve it is spanked over and over again to make it poo presents.

Dodo rating: 4

Traditions

Watching the Queen’s speech

Lots of people still watch the Queen’s Christmas Message when it is broadcast across the major terrestrial channels at 3pm on Christmas Day. In 2012, it was seen by 8.3 million. However, that was a Jubilee year. The general trend is actually one of decline.

It used to be that the nation stood still (some quite literally) to watch the Queen, but today the programme is suffering from the same issue as all television: too many channels, too little time.

That 2012 figure was the largest for some years; only 5.6 million tuned in in 2009 and by 2010 the speech had dropped out of the top 10 most viewed completely. Even the 2012 figures are a huge drop on the 28 million who watched in 1987, the 12.8 million in 1997 and 9.3 million at the turn of the 21st century.

Clearly, it’ll be around for years yet, but I doubt the downward trend will be arrested for some time.

Dodo rating: 1

Carol singers

As a youth, I distinctly remember that in the run-up to Christmas there would be several knocks upon our door. Opening up we would be greeted by a variety of carol singers, from members of the church choir, all in good voice and collecting for the roof fund or the local poor, to a bunch of scruffy oiks trying to scrape together enough money for a packet of JPS or a bottle of shandy with a dodgy and unenthusiastic rendition of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”.

If we had actually had any figgy pudding I am sure we would have brought some out to them. Instead, I think we handed over loose change and went back to watching Ask the Family.

Today you are more likely to stumble over a group of carol singers in the concourse of your train station or outside Marks & Spencer than you are on your doorstep. I live on a residential street in the middle of a town and I have not had a single bunch of carol singers knock on my door in the past decade.

I assume this decline is partly down to the reticence of parents when it comes to allowing their kids to go knocking on strangers’ doors during the hours of darkness. This I can understand, but it is a shame that a harmless, if not always tuneful, tradition is dying out because of our often-misplaced fears concerning the kindness of others.

Dodo rating: 3

Christmas presents

Parker pens

No Christmas in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s would have been complete without a Parker, at that point the height of writing luxury.

The pen you unwrapped on Christmas morning, housed in its distinctive box – transparent lid, pen resting in a velvet-effect base – was almost certainly purchased by an elderly relative at the pen counter of their local WH Smith. Yes, so popular were Parkers that they were displayed beneath a glass counter in a separate section of the shop, often alongside an array of scientific calculators and some posh compass-and-protractor sets.

I had always assumed Parker pens were an ancient British institution, and it is true that they were produced in Newhaven in Sussex for many years, but the original Parker was actually an American.

George Safford Parker founded the Parker Pen Company in 1888 in Janesville, Wisconsin. He had been working as a sales agent for another pen company before founding his own. He patented his first fountain pen in 1889 and went on to introduce a number of innovations, including a type of quick-drying ink that removed the need for blotting paper. This is the product we now know as Quink. The Parker 51, introduced in 1941, became the bestselling fountain pen in history. The Parker Pen Company itself was one of the top two in its field from the 1920s right up to the end of the 1960s, when the invention of the disposable ballpoint changed the face of writing instruments forever. Nonetheless, Parker pens remained the gift of choice for grandmothers and great aunts doing their Christmas shopping every year.

Following a number of acquisitions of other companies, the Parker Pen Company was itself bought by Gillette in the 1990s and then sold on to Newell Rubbermaid in 2000 where it now resides alongside fellow writing brands such as Sharpie, PaperMate and Waterman.

In 2009, Newell Rubbermaid announced the closure of operations in Janesville after more than 125 years. The Parker brand lives on, however, and if you are very lucky you might receive one of its pens in your stocking this year.

Dodo rating: 3

Games compendiums

Or is it compendia?

Whatever the plural, we all remember these: dozens of popular board and card games condensed into one box. Endless hours of family fun, surely?

Compendiums were often at the very budget end of budget games – made of flimsy cardboard, they required multiple use of the same boards and counters.

You’d have a chequered board, which served for both chess and draughts – the flat chess pieces sometimes needing to be pushed out of perforated cardboard. On the reverse might be a Snakes and Ladders board or Backgammon or perhaps Ludo. There would also be smaller boards for Tic-tac-toe (using the black and white plastic draught pieces as counters) and perhaps a pot for Tiddlywinks.

A pack of cards could increase the number of possible combinations considerably, and there would often be rules for peculiar games that no one had ever heard of before. Or since.

It was a neat idea, but the reality was that it was only a temporary distraction. A few lost pieces or a spilt glass of weak lemon squash and the whole thing was ruined.

I’ve not seen one of these on sale for donkey’s years. I suspect they still exist, but they are, I am sure, worthy of inclusion here.

Dodo rating: 3

Annuals

Alongside the nostalgia market, annuals have kept alive a number of comics of yesteryear whose weekly editions have long since gone off to the great newsagent in the sky – The Dandy being the latest casualty.

However, there are also many annuals that lots of us received during Christmases past that have not seen the light of day for decades.

How many can you remember? Tiger Tim, Rainbow, Radio Fun, Rover, Hotspur, Wizard, Playbox, School Friend, Film Fun, Girls’ Crystal, Jackie, Tammy, Mandy, June, Jinty, Princess, Boys’ Own, Lion, Playhour, Look-in, Bunty, Look and Learn, Cheeky, Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Twinkle, Sparky, Jack and Jill, and Beezer.

If you still have any lying around you might want to dig them out. They are worth a small fortune.

Dodo rating: 5

Cards and decorations

Tinsel

Controversial stuff, tinsel. For some the festive season hasn’t officially started until miles of it is strung up around their tree, or over their mantelpiece and any other available surface. For others, it is a tacky symbol of Christmas past, out of date and out of fashion.

It is also worth remembering that it used to kill kids.

OK, that might be taking it a bit far, but during the 1950s and 1960s, tinsel was often made from lead foil, a substance now known to be more than a little poisonous.

It didn’t start out that way. When tinsel originated in the early 17th century, it was made of thin strands of silver, and was thus an expensive decoration used only by the rich. It was – and this seems to have been largely forgotten – designed to look like icicles. Modern tinsel comes in many bright colours, is made from PVC and is about as far away from an icicle as it is possible to get.

Dodo rating: 3

Candles on trees

Before the days of fairy lights, people used to put candles on their trees. Actual candles. With flames and everything.

Can you imagine the conniptions this would cause for the Health and Safety Brigade today?

Almost tempting to bring them back, isn’t it? Just to annoy them.

Dodo rating: 5

Festive fun

Christmas singles

Do you know when we last had a Christmas number-one single that had any sort of Christmas theme? Go on, have a guess – and don’t scan down the page to see the answer! I suspect you’ll be surprised; perhaps a little horrified.

In a world where digital downloads have seen the near-death of the physical single as a format, you’d be forgiven for thinking that getting the Christmas top spot isn’t such a big deal any more. But it is a big deal. The Christmas number one is still the biggest-selling song of the year, and it can make a hell of a lot of money, which is why Simon Cowell works his Svengali backside off every year to try to secure it. And, since he began his domination of the Christmas charts, most other artists have stopped bothering to challenge him, with the only serious competition being a protest involving a Rage Against the Machine song and the occasional charity record. Worst of all, Cowell insists the winning X Factor artist schlocks out a cover that has nothing to do with the festive season whatsoever.

Today, no one of any note bothers to write and record Christmassy singles. Don’t believe me? Pick up any Christmas compilation on sale this year and count the number of songs written in this century. If it’s more than five, I’ll eat my hat.

Before the days of reality talent shows, many credible, and admittedly many not-so-credible, artists were eager to record something festive; the very best of them have now become part of the fabric of Christmas itself. You’d be hard-pressed to recognise Jona Lewie if you passed him in the street, or name any of his albums, but I bet you can hum along to “Stop the Cavalry”. Like me, you might cringe at the vocal gymnastics of Mariah Carey, but I’d wager you also, like me, know all the words to “All I Want for Christmas is You”. “Merry Christmas Everybody”, “I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day”, “Last Christmas” – the classic festive tunes are many, but none of them are recent.

Will this change? It is hard to say for sure, but there do seem to be some fairy lights at the end of the tunnel. Viewers appear to be tiring of Cowell’s stage-managed search for a star, especially as most of them sink without a trace after a year. So perhaps some artists may be tempted to give him a run for his money in the years ahead. Who knows, if you’re reading this in a few years’ time, there may be no X Factor whatsoever. I can think of no finer Christmas present to the nation.

Oh, and the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this entry? “Saviour’s Day” by Cliff Richard in 1990. Unless you want to count the re-recording of “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid 20 in 2004, something most of us would rather forget.

Dodo rating: 4

White Christmases

If you speak to anyone over the age of 40, they will probably rattle on about how there were lots of white Christmases when they were young but you hardly get them any more. I know I do if the subject ever comes up.

This is utter balderdash.

There were only seven white Christmases in England during the entire 20th century (Scotland had quite a few more. Congratulations, Scottish readers!). And, though we’ve had two in the 21st, they remain quite rare, happening much less frequently than in the past (from the 16th to the 19th century, they were extremely common).

Perhaps the reason for our false memory is that for a white Christmas to be declared, there has to be snowfall on Christmas Day. If you are standing in 10ft drifts from the day before, but no snowflakes appear on the 25th, it isn’t a white Christmas. Thus, we probably do recall a fair few festive periods with snow on the ground, but many wouldn’t have counted.

Global warming seems to be playing havoc with our weather of late, so who knows if the instances of snow on Christmas Day are going to go up or down. But for now, they are pretty scarce.

Dodo rating: 3

This is an edited extract from ‘Christmas Dodos’ by Steve Stack (£5.99, The Friday Project, also available as an ebook)