Tag 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.

Happy New Year!

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On New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d take a brief trip back to the New Year’s Eves of my childhood. As regular readers know, I grew up in a tiny village in a very quiet part of rural mid-Wales. There were around 28 children in our village school aged 4 to 11. Some, like me, lived within walking distance of the school, others had a walk of half to three-quarters of a mile and many of them lived on outlying hill farms and were brought in by cars on regular hire through the education authority from the garage in out nearest town.

Our school was also used as a village hall and on New Year’s Eve there was always a big village party held there. It started in the afternoon with a tea party and games for the children. The women of the village made and served sandwiches and cakes, jugs of squash and enormous pots of tea. Whole families attended. After the tea, seats were placed in a circle at one end of the main room and the games began. The main ones I remember are spin the plate and musical chairs. There were songs and recitations from the children brave enough to stand up and perform – not me! There would be older children there as well who were now at the ‘big school’ in the town and who always seemed frightfully grown up and sophisticated to me.

As afternoon turned into evening, the party morphed (even though there was no such word then!) into an adults evening and younger children would be taken home and put to bed. Slightly older children would stay longer. The evening took the form of a concert. It was informally arranged, with people just stepping forward to sing, recite, play the piano etc. I remember first being old enough to stay for some of it then, eventually to stay to the end. One local farmer had a beautiful tenor voice and always sang ‘Jerusalem’. I think he sang other songs too but the one he was known for was that one – and he sang it beautifully. Tea was served all evening and the night would finish with everyone in a circle linking arms and singing Auld Lang Syne. It was so exciting when you were twelve or thirteen and considered old enough to stay to the end and see the new year in!

 

Happy New Year to all my readers and followers and thank you for continuing to read my blog and to comment.

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.

 

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

 

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