Christmas on the Home Front by Mike Brown

Author:Mike Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Every year the Railway Executive Committee issued its appeals to try to keep rail transport free for vital war supplies – without much success.

There were still cigars – if you could get them. If not, there was always a National Savings gift token!

Mike Owen clearly remembers that ‘About a week before Christmas we would make paper chains by joining gummed strips of paper together to form links. If we were very lucky we might have a paper bell that opened and was hung from the centre of the room. Holly would be placed upon the top of the pictures.’ Many others, such as Roy Proctor, ‘made our own decorations using flour and water paste’, while Margaret Spencer recalled: ‘The other children and I made paper chains to decorate the room and small cardboard boxes to decorate the tree.’

Real trees had by now become very difficult to obtain, especially in the towns. In Mike Owen’s family ‘a very small Christmas tree would be put into a bucket of earth, which was covered in crépe paper.’ Some people, like Doreen Isom, had their own tree: ‘We had a Christmas tree dug up out of the garden and put back each year.’ Others resorted to artificial trees; goose-feather trees, many of them made in Germany, had been popular before the war, while others were made from tinsel on a wire frame. These would now be brought out annually, becoming increasingly threadbare as the war dragged on. Tree decorations were also makeshift; pipe cleaners provided a useful source of handmade decorations, shaped into stars, animals and so on.

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