Selection box
In the post Christmas analysis years ago, as you listened to your mates listing off what they got, you could be guaranteed that embedded richly in the list was a Cadbury’s Selection Box, or two. Embedded richly indeed because the long slim box of chocolate bars and sweets punched well above its’ weight in those days. No Butlers or Lir chocolates (with real Irish cream) to compete with then and you could be sure that the Selection box wouldn’t outlive the Queens speech.
Nowadays sadly, it lies unattended to, at least until the tree begins to lose its’ pines and the bills start arriving back on the hall floor beneath the letterbox. The three we bought for our kids (term loosely used) are still unopened and it will probably be my nostalgic yearning, rather than their chocolate addiction, which will eventually lead to the ripping open of the familiar cardboard box.
Oh, Selection Box - some of us love you still.
RTE Guide
There was no doubt about it but the promise of the “Christmas Day movies” was something that would fill us with hope and expectation in the lead in to the big day. In our three channel world (RTE BBC and ITV) we actually planned what to watch over the holiday period and the RTE Guide played a major role in this planning. With pictures of Bunny Carr or Maurenn Potter on the front (the TV Times would have some piece of totty dressed up as Santa with a red cloak and white boots – hence it never got past our doorway) the RTE was in a word, indispensable. I bought it before Christmas this year (it now has totty on the cover) but it lay unopened on the magazine rack for the whole holiday season, a sad lament to the demise of the age of innocence and the domination of the techno era with channel hopping and average channel stays of seven minutes.
Oh RTE Guide – some of us love you still.
And finally, I started abruptly last night as I realised that in the rush leading up to Christmas, I had forgotten to attend to one of the customary obligations. I had totally forgotten to “look after the binmen”. And strangely enough they had failed to knock on my door to tell ne that they were about to empty my bins on December 21st or whatever date it was. They no longer come knocking and I no longer wish them a Happy Christmas. And why? Because the Celtic Tiger has come and gone, the health and safety rules means they don’t actually empty the bins, a machine does, and the environmental rules means I’m never really going to need them because they’re not allowed take away the old fridge away in the first instance.
Oh how it’s changed.
