MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL,

Of course Christmas is going to be different from the usual run of Christmases for many of us this year, so I thought you might like to hear a story about a Christmas I had when I was quite young, when I was six.

My family were moving from the west coast of Scotland to the east for my father's work, and we were between houses. We'd been staying in a hotel (which I guess work had been paying for?) but took a short term rental in a house in the Edinburgh suburb of Barnton over the festive season itself.

When you're a little kid, pretty much everything is exciting and this house that we would live in for a month was no exception. In my and my brother's room, there was an ancient book of fairy tales with all the scary stuff left in. The master bedroom was obsessively decorated in lilac, like Cildo Meireles' Red Shift but for the suburbs and also the 1980s*. One of the most immediately awesome things about this house was that after only a short time of playing in any of the rooms, you could do very good hand prints anywhere you wanted. (This feature went away faster than I would have liked; I later found out that my parents had the carpets steam cleaned at their own expense).

That year, my folks went all out for Christmas. The way I remember it, pretty much every day in that house was a day of feasting and revelry. There were gifts under the tree in the morning – diminishing in volume, but still things to unwrap – from Christmas Day until the new year. In a move that dates this story pretty precisely, my parents rented a VCR and let me and my brother watch the things we liked again and again and again and that is how I engage with culture to this very day.

This Christmas is, for my brother and me, perfect. Whenever we describe to one another a Christmas we've enjoyed, the question will always be "but was it as good as the Barnton Christmas?" and the answer will always be "Barnton was the best Christmas".

Weird Christmases are the best Christmases, mega love to everyone. Last time I did a childhood memories Fem Fri I also included a recipe, let's do that again. Staying with the 1980s, here's a recipe for a gingerbread house from a book that was a huge part of my childhood. My mum had this book and made cakes from it, presumably I reminisced about it at some point because a friend's mum went through a lot of charity shops until she found it and gave it to me as a gift. In this season of unprompted kindness, I hope you enjoy it:

Look it's so good it's on the cover:

Much love,

Alex.

*I don't want to overplay this in the main text but the extent of this was genuinely weird even for a six year old. It's not just that the walls and lampshades were lilac; every detail was lilac. The book by the bedside was Maeve Binchy's The Lilac Bus. I had to have it explained to me, not once but several times, that Maeve was the name and mauve was the colour and they weren't at all the same thing.