Packing away family history.

I should have posted this the other day but got into doing something else instead.

One of the few things I inherited from my Mum was the box of Christmas decorations. They're nothing special, just common or garden wassailing balls. I think I'd better explain the difference. Christmas decorations were things like tinsel, holly and strings of Christmas cards. The decorations hanging on the tree were always known as wassailing balls.

Anyway, they lived in a tin which, itself, lived on top of the wardrobe in the spare room [and the wardrobe was called the "Tallboy" and the spare room was "the box room". The tallboy was a very small short wardrobe and the only box that the box room contained was the box of wassailing balls. All very confusing, I know]. I'd never thought about it until recently, but the contents of the box and the box itself were quite a chunk of family history.

All the balls in the tin are exactly the same as I always remember them. I don't recall any new ones ever being bought to replace the occasional broken ones. Bearing in mind that they are glass, and very delicate, and that fact that there are so many of them, is a bit of a miracle [the picture shows only a very few of them]. There are lots of different shapes, bells [that actually tinkle] trumpets, horns, fruits and many other shapes. The box also contains a couple of rolls of ribbon on which the Christmas cards were hung and a matchbox [itself very old, and bearing a design which I don't ever recall seeing, other than in the tin] which holds the minute clothes peg type things for fastening the Christmas cards to the ribbons.

Typical of Mam, the bottom of the box is lined with a folded sheet of newspaper. Now, I'm sure that I've seen this piece of paper lots of times, well, since I was old enough to decorate the Christmas tree, but I'd never taken it out of the tin until last Sunday night.

It's a page from the Yorkshire Evening Post, January 5th 1966. That's about a year and three weeks after I was born.

So, the sheet of paper is the only thing that I can date with any certainty. My eldest brother says that he can only ever remember the same wassailing balls in the same tin and he's well into his fifties. Mam and Dad aren't here anymore so I cant ask them. I'm beginning to wonder if they did buy the wassailing balls new or if the got them from somewhere else [grandma Phillips had very similar one's but had very few of them, so possibly, Mam got them from her mother]. I know that they didn't get the tin from new. Mam & Dad were never very big on potato crisps and there is no way they would have bought them in bulk, and before bags of crisps came in [cardboard] boxes of 48, they seem to have come in tins of 18. Now, I'll never know anything about the contents of the tin other than that when they were packed away in the new year of 1966, Mam, and it would have been Mam, lined, or maybe even relined, the tin with a page from the evening paper. I can be certain though that in 1966, the Yorkshire Evening Post still printed the same rubbish that it does to this very day.

Addendum; In a break with tradition,I've added something new to the box. The Santa Claus Russian doll. I bought it in a junk fair [I collect Russian dolls] and this one will, from now on, live in the tin with the wassailing balls. As it's not new, and it's not a replacement, it's not that much of a break with any tradition.