Category Archives: celebrations

Happy St David’s Day or Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus

Happy Saint David’s Day on this cold, rainy March 1st! I’ve posted about St David’s Day before so I’ll keep it fairly short. I have worn a daffodil on March 1st all my life and I have worn one proudly today. Here are some of my memories of St David’s Day when I was a child in the 50s and 60s.

There was always a St David’s Day eisteddfod (a Welsh word for a concert with instrumental music, drama, poetry and lots of singing) in our school to celebrate St David’s Day. Pupils would have been practising their performances for weeks. I was terribly shy and lacking in confidence and one year I had been put down on the list to play the piano by a prefect who somehow new that I was having piano lessons. I was terrified but, for some reason, didn’t want to admit to my parents just how much I didn’t want to do it. On the morning of the eisteddfod I feigned illness and my poor believing mum phoned the school to say that I had a terrible sore throat and headache and couldn’t go attend that day. I told my mum and dad later and, of course, they said that if I’d spoken to them about my fears they would have helped to sort it out.

Everyone would be wearing a daffodil on the day or, if the daffs were late, a leek. Imagine the smell in the school hall during the eisteddfod!! I remember that a lot of the boys in school actually preferred wearing a leek to a daffodil and would nibble at them throughout the day.

I have shown this one before . It’s my mum picking daffodils in our garden in the early 1960s.

In our village there was always a St David’s Day party in the village school, which was also used as a village hall. It was on the nearest Saturday to March 1st and consisted of a supper, party games for the children then recitals. People would just go forward in turn, not to a timetable, and either sing, recite a poem or play a musical instrument. The evening finished with everyone singing together and we would go from one song to another.

The standard hot meal on St David’s day is the traditional lamb and root vegetable stew called cawl – pronounced to rhyme with owl. A favourite sweet treat in Wales all the year round, but particularly on St David’s Day, is the Welsh cake. These are similar to scones but thinner and flatter, lightly spiced, containing dried fruit and cooked on a bakestone or griddle pan.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

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Happy New Year! Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

Those of you who have read this blog before will know that I from Wales and will realise that the second greeting is in Welsh.

Thank you to all readers. This humble blog has just topped 250 000 hits worldwide since I started it about five years ago. This covers everything from my signed up followers to the people who stumble on it by accident when searching for something on Google. But I’m happy that it’s being read and maybe even enjoyed by people all over the world.

When I was a child there was often a New Year’s Eve Party in the village school which doubled up as a village hall. The event started late afternoon/ early evening with tea and party games for the children. Then any children who had a song to sing or a poem to recite could stand up and perform to the audience of mums and dads. As young children were taken home the evening morphed into an adult’s party/ concert. There was a lot of singing by everyone and solo performances by some of the better singers in the village. One farmer had a beautiful tenor voice and always finished his singing slot with a wonderful rendition of Jerusalem. My favourite song was one called Oes Gafr Eto? which involves one singer leading each verse and the audience singing the chorus – which gets longer and faster and is huge fun!

We got our first television in 1962. TV viewing was so new and exciting then. We only had one channel for the first few years but that didn’t matter. The whole viewing thing was simply amazing! The years when there wasn’t a village party the whole family would watch the New Year’s Eve edition of a programme called The White Heather Club which was Scottish and was all singing and dancing. The compere was called Andy Stewart and regular guests on the programme were singers Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar, a duo called Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor and a group of dancers dancing traditional Scottish reels and jigs. The men all wore kilts and the women long white dresses with tartan sashes. Looking it up today I see that the programme finished in 1968. To quote Wikipedia ‘It put forward a ‘tartanised’ view of Scotland that was becoming very dated by the late 1960s’. But for a few years, The White Heather Club was a big part of many people’s New Year’s Eve.

Singers Kenneth McKellar and Moira Anderson and the duo Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor who all regularly sang on the programme The White Heather Club in the 1960s.

On New Year’s Day (which wasn’t made a UK Bank Holiday until 1974) we children loved starting the new diaries we’d been given as Christmas presents. Oh, the joy of all those empty pages, the brand new number on the front and the titbits of information and pictures which were always printed in children’s diaries. After filling in all your personal details at the front you entered all the family birthdays then turned to the back where there were blank pages for notes. Here we made two lists. One list was of the presents we’d received and who had given them so that we could write our all-important thank-you letters before starting back at school. The second list was our New Year Resolutions. I still have several of my old diaries. I’ve shown them on here before so no pictures this time. One of my resolutions lists had the amusing commitment to be nicer to my sister! I love her to bits now but as children we often bickered and annoyed each other.

As an older person now I don’t relish the passing of the years but I try to think positively and I’ve enjoyed looking back at New Year’s Eves from years ago.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

Christmas Memories

First of all, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers and especially to my regular followers. Since starting this blog a few years ago it has been viewed a total of 164 500 times world wide. That makes me very happy and is way beyond what I was expecting when I started it. Also, I thought I would run out of ideas after the first year or so but every so often something strikes a chord and I think ‘I could do a blog post on that!’ Sometimes somebody suggests a topic I hadn’t thought of.

What follows is a brief summary of some thoughts and memories of Christmases when I was young. I’ve done similar ones before at Christmas but I didn’t want Christmas to pass without a mention.

The 1950s Christmas

History of the Christmas Broadcast | The Royal Family
Image 1 - Vintage Spear's Ludo Board Game
A 1960s Christmas - Historic UK

The war had only finished in 1945 and rationing was still in place in the early fifties. People weren’t well off and there wasn’t the same choice of consumer goods as there is now. I remember the Christmases of my childhood so clearly and every one was magical. Turkey wasn’t yet the UK’s main Christmas meat. Chicken was still quite a luxury at that time, before the days of mass produced chicken, so that was often what people ate. Everyone made paper chains and paper lanterns. I remember making them at school and at home in the 50s and early 60s. Gifts were mostly things you needed and were often home made. Board games were hugely popular in homes and were often given as gifts. Children were given art and craft sets too. I don’t remember any of our toys needing batteries or cables. Moving toys were mostly wind-up and, when I was little, often made of tin. Bigger dolls and baby dolls like mine were still made of pottery. Plastic ones arrived soon after. I still have the one I was given for Christmas when I was about eight years old. It’s amazing she has survived because she wasn’t a shelf doll, she was payed with for many years.

Here she is!

There was always a circus on TV on Christmas Day in the afternoon. And everything stopped for the Queen’s speech! In the fifties, in our house, this was listened to on the radio. It was first televised in 1957 but we didn’t have a TV until 1962 when I was 10.

The 1960s Christmas

1960s Christmas - BBC Archive

Image 1 - Sindy Doll 1960s New Look Side Part
BEATLES 1960`S NEMS Jigsaw No 4 + Box Walt Howarth Complete Puzzle Ex Box VGC- - £120.00 | PicClick UK

The Sindy doll was launched in the early 60s followed by Action Man in the late 60s. There was also a short-lived doll which was popular in the UK called Tressy. In the first half of the 60s, the Beatles arrived on the music scene. My sister and I were nuts about them. My sister was given a Beatles wig one Christmas which she loved. It was moulded plastic, hurt her head and made her frown but she didn’t mind. She was about eight or nine years old. She also had a Beatles jigsaw. The second half of the sixties were my teenage years and I remember the joy of being given records as presents. Perhaps the latest Beatles or Stones single (on a 45 vinyl) or a new album from my parents. One year I really wanted a Beatles sweater for Christmas and was bought one by my mum and dad. A Beatles jumper was just a black polo-neck. Bath cubes were very common presents when I was young. Grannies, aunts, mums and teenaged girls all loved using them. You never see them now!

Many, many thanks to all of you! Have a great time.

Church was massively important at Christmas when I was young. It was so exciting to we three children to walk to the other side of the village to the Christmas morning service, sing carols, celebrate the Christmas story, see the extra decorations in the church and greet all our neighbours.

Credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. If anyone objects to the use of any image in my posts, please contact me and I will remove it.

Easter – back in the day

Back in the 1950s and 60s, when I was a child and lived in the depths of rural mid-Wales, Easter was always such an exciting time for us. We had never heard of the Easter Bunny. Perhaps he couldn’t find his way into the heart of the countryside back then! The three of us always received one carefully chosen Easter egg each from our parents. There was a very small choice available in the 50s and they were much simpler than now but we loved to see whether we had a Cadbury’s, a Rowntree’s or a Fry’s. I’ve done a bit of research and discovered that it wasn’t until around the 1950s, when there were developments in production and packaging, that costs lowered and the masses could enjoy Easter eggs. Branded eggs, such as Buttons, first appeared in the 1960s and increased in the 1970s, with attractive, child-friendly packaging.

Easter egg production inside a Cadbury factory (Image: courtesy of Cadbury)

Easter Egg Packing in March 1953
Easter Egg Wrapping Bournville, BWM March 1953
Inside the Bournville factory 1953. Credit: Cadbury

But the excitement wasn’t just about chocolate and certainly not the unheard of Easter Bunny. It was a season I just loved so much. A combination of the sound of lambs bleating in all the fields, the sight of daffodils, catkins and Pussy Willow, the feeling of warmer, lengthening days giving us more playing out time, the thrill of something new to wear to church (or if not new, something we hadn’t worn since last summer). We were off school for the Easter holidays and we usually had the same family coming to stay with us who were from my mum’s old home town a couple of hours away. They were a joy to have visiting. The three of us got on well with their three boys and the parents were really lovely people.

In Sunday school the week before Easter we used to make miniature Easter gardens. We used moss for grass, built up small hills, laid out paths with small stones and made flowers, trees and three crosses on one of the hills. We were always so proud to see our little gardens on display at the back of the church on Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday being the end of Lent, I could eat biscuits again, my sister could eat sweets and my mum could have sugar in her tea.

Breakfast on Good Friday was always the traditional hot cross buns. Now you can buy them throughout the year but it was really exciting to have something special to eat on just one day of the year. Chocolate eggs can now be bought through most of the year too.

My mum picking daffodils in the garden Easter 1961. Photo taken by me age 10 with my first camera – a Kodak Brownie 127.

Easter Sunday breakfast was always boiled eggs which my mum used to paint faces on. One year she had made us all little hats for our boiled eggs as a surprise. Then we would walk to church together. In the usual way of childhood memories I can picture we three children, with the three visiting ones, playing out all day long in the woods and by streams and picking wild flowers. We lived in one of the wettest parts of Britain so the truth of it is that we probably had as many wet Easters as fine ones, if not more. But that’s not how I remember it .

Happy Easter to all my readers, regular and occasional. Or, in Welsh – Pasg Hapus.

Every effort is made to use images which do not offend or infringe copyright. If anyone objects to the use of any information or image in this blog please contact me so that I can remove it.

Greeting Cards

It was my birthday last week and I was lucky enough to get a lot of lovely birthday cards. It got me thinking about how greetings cards have changed in my lifetime. They have changed not only in appearance but also in the range of events we can now send cards for and in the way we send them – there are many ways of sending cards electronically including e-cards and the ones which are ordered and designed electronically but send as paper cards in the post. I will explore all of this in this post.

First, here are some examples of the sort of cards which were around when I was a child. I don’t remember ever seeing ‘arty’ cards in the shops or even many funny ones. They were either pretty and floral like most of the ones shown or they were more manly and had cars, footballs or garden spades on them. Children’s cards might have images of children, toys,puppies, kittens or cartoons on them. They all had a certain look which was no doubt dictated by the processes available at the time. Photographic images were used more for picture postcards sent from holidays. Another difference I notice is that there was always a greeting printed on the front whereas now there is often no writing at all on the front, especially on the arty cards. One of the main differences, however, was inside. They always had verses in them.  You can still get cards with verses in them, and some people prefer them, but not every card has a verse. In fact, the ‘Blank for your own message’ style of card has become more common in the last few decades – something which was never, ever seen in the 1950s and 60s! Do any of you remember the dawn of the scented card in the 1950s? What a novelty! One of my grandmothers loved to send cards which had been carefully chosen for the verse and the scent. Fortunately, scented cards are no longer with us.

 

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Image result for 1950's greetings cards uk   Image result for 1950's greetings cards uk

 

Image result for 1950's greetings cards uk

Next, the range of occasions acknowledge with cards today. There were always wedding cards, get well cards, sympathy and congratulations cards and a few more. Also, the 21st birthday was a big milestone. Now we have cards for every decade and sometimes even for half decades like 65 and 75. Below is a selection of current cards – and if you wanted to send one to someone whose cat was going to have an operation, or a friend who’d been made redundant or whose relationship had just broken up, then you buy a ‘Blank for your own message’ card or one saying ‘Just to Say’ or ‘Thinking of You’.

Image result for thank you card for house sitting   Image result for happy 30th birthday card

 

Image result for happy 75th birthday images    Image result for good luck in your new adventure card

Then, we move on to the different ways we can send cards. The good old postal service is still the main one. But, as well as paper cards we now have e-cards. I subscribe to one and I really rate it. It’s jacquielawson.com and the art work is brilliant. There are many more websites doing them. I find it great if I want to send a fun card to the grandchildren as they are animated. Also, if I am away on holiday and it’s a friend’s birthday or some other occasion, I can log in and choose one and send it on my phone. Amazing, isn’t it? There are also companies like Moon Pig where you choose your card on a laptop or phone, using your own photographs if you like, add your message in a style of your choosing then the card is sent as a paper one through normal post. They are somewhere in between ‘normal’ cards and e-cards, a sort of hybrid.

Finally, here are some of the cards I received on my birthday, including a Welsh one. There is a Moon Pig one with a photograph of me on it which one of my daughters had made up for me. Also in there is a hand-made card from a friend who loves making her own cards – a style of card I nearly forgot to mention!

Cards 1    Cards 2

Cards 3