A merry first memory, nearly eight decades old

December 2010

Seventy-eight-year-old Joan Jackson chortles at the size of the camera phone taking her picture.

As she sits hand-in-hand with her husband of fifty-three years, Peter, while the couple holiday in Bournemouth, she reflects on how much things have changed in their lifetime.

Her three-year-old great-granddaughter draws doodles on the computer, while Joan – an ex-Book Keeper – remembers the very first calculators, the ones on wheels.

But her earliest memory is not so incomparable to childhood today. It is of her first Christmas at school when Santa paid a visit. 

Joan was just five years old and in a year group of around thirty boys and girls.

She recalls their anticipation on the morning of his arrival in Albury, near Birmingham. "We all knew he was coming, we were so excited." 

"In assembly," she explains "our headmistress told us to watch for him while she popped outside. Of course, while she was gone, Father Christmas appeared!”

She smiles at her own innocence, something she remembers fondly about her own children and their children in the many Christmases that have passed since that one.

"We ran up to the headmistress afterwards gushing about Father Christmas and how she'd missed him by just a minute!" she laughs.

Joan doesn't remember the gift she was given on that morning back in 1932, but she recalls that it would accompany the lone orange she was so happy to receive in her stocking Christmas morning.

She shakes her head nostaligically.

Times have changed – and so have stockings - but children at Christmas never will.