When you were kids, did you do ' Christmas activities'?

[Bigearringsbigsmile]

It just was NOT a thing in my childhood.
We made cards in school and did a play and had a party.
But outside school? There were no light trails, movie nights, biscuit baking, hot chocolate making etc
Nobody used to decorate the outside of their houses.

🤔🤔
I remember going to see the department store windows which were fabulous and going to the grotto inside.
My dad's work used to have a kids Christmas party for their employees children.

Once Christmas came it was absolutely lovely but December was not a month full of activities...🤔

Gosh yes the carol singing in the old peoples home near our primary school, and the Christingle service at church, although I don’t think either of my parents came to watch as they both worked. It wasn’t really expected of them back then.

Yes but it was different and more low key. So there would usually be a school fair (with santa) as well as the nativity/crafts at school itself. At our church there would be a Sunday school nativity and a Christmas fancy dress party for the kids.

My parents would have a party at home for their friends and we'd be allowed to join in and have some food but it was very much for adults. Parents sometimes took us to the panto but not every year. Lots of Christmas visits to relatives to exchange presents.

But no Winter Wonderland or Lapland UK, no light trails or mum and dad watching Christmas movies with us. They were busy doing their own thing. Actually one year my mum took us to the cinema to see Santa Claus The Movie (I think mainly because she liked Dudley Moore!) and I remember it really clearly because it was the only time we did something like that.

I was just as excited about Christmas as my kids are now. But it was just a different time. Kids fitted in with parents lives more, rather than having dedicated entertainment.

To be fair I do book a light trail and panto these days but partly because I want to do that stuff too and because it's nice to get out of the house a bit when it's dark and cold and I've eaten lots of food that needs walking off!

Always had a school nativity and a Christingles service at the local church (hot waxing for the under-8s, anyone?). There was usually some kind of jumble sale or similar at the village hall and someone would dress up as Santa and do a lucky dip for little sliding puzzles or packs of colouring pencils. Mum or nan would usually have me making paper chains or snowflakes at some point, or gluing glitter to pinecones (and everything else in the kitchen). None of it was 'Christmas Activities' though. If we baked something it was because we wanted the something we were baking, not because it was The Thing To Do. And going for a walk was exercise for the dog, not an Instagrammable lifestyle moment...

1989 baby here. I remember:

• baking mince pies,
• watching Christmas movies (Miracle on 34th Street),
• making Christmas cards, and Christmas tags from last year's cards,
• going for a drive in Dad's car to look after lights,
• going to the school fair and taking part in the school nativity,
• Seeing Father Christmas in the local grotto at the shopping centre,
• and, waiting for the Christmas sleigh to visit and hand out sweeties (a Sleigh on the back of a truck bed...)

I love hearing about everyone's Christmas 🥰

We would get the bus up to Trafalgar Square and have a walk round the Xmas lights.
Sometimes if mum got given tickets or could find a deal we’d go to a musical - I particularly remember Annie and 42nd Street.
light trails were unheard of, panto was for poshies, most of our out of school socialising took place at home or at relatives and centred around card games and telly.

Yes but only during g the couple of days before Christmas, making paper chains, etc. certainly not from the beginning of November!

I'm late thirties and no, we didn't do loads of Christmas activities (I am one of 3 children).

We made cards at school and went to the school Christmas fair. Christingle/Carol service at church as we went to a C of E school.

Dad was a police officer then and at that time, the station organised a Christmas party for officers kids so we went to that.

Maybe saw Father Christmas at a garden centre.

So, we did free/cheap things but no breakfasts with santa/light trails/santa train rides etc.

Christmas was spending time at home/with family - I have very fond memories of Christmas despite not doing lots of extra activities.

We are going to my Nephews Christmas fair where he is singing carols in the school choir which will be nice. I was going to book a candlelight festive Classical Music concert at the local cathedral but the tickets are £50 each! So I'll probably give that a miss.

70’s child here

we used to bake a lot in the run up

i remember making paper chains and angels out of toilet roll tubes and doilies

play group Christmas party on the last day - my mum ran the playgroup /- they had a huge tree donated every year which, when they closed till January we would drag up the lane and saw in half to fit our living room.

we did pantomime- often cheap tickets for single parent families

Church for midnight mass and Christmas Day

carol singing and house parties

Oh yes and the church Christmas fate

Probably from Trumpland.

Probably the biggest shift is social media. People see others doing things and it becomes standard.

I’ve booked quite a lot, none of it until December though. I like autumn and I don’t like November being sucked into Christmas!

I'm 40, grew up in England. I remember school nativity play, carol concert, school Xmas 'bazaar' which was an indoor fete, seeing the shop windows on Oxford Street some years, went to the panto twice.

my mum said lights outside houses were 'common' and we'd drive through the council estate to see them 😬

I usually had a Dairy Milk advent calendar. apart from presents on Xmas Day and Christingle at Church on Xmas Eve, that was it. ooh sometimes a new bauble from the Xmas shop at the garden centre!

im in Australia now and the build up isn't anything like it is in the Uk. However trees seem to go up early here. In our city there's a big Christmas pageant early November and many families watch that in person or on tv, then decorate their tree that day.

I was born in the mid 70s and we lived rurally but still had a range of activities. It just wasn’t as commercial as it is now
School Christmas party - remarkably unchanged to what my kids do now
Brownies Christmas party - again, very similar to now
Music lesson concert with mince pies - again, very similar.
School carol service - slightly more religious affair to the one at my DC’s school
Christingle service - my DC haven’t been to one as we don’t go to church
Going to local outdoors carol singalong thing - much improved these days as the one we go to has mulled wine
Going to a local NT property - more H&S in action these days!
Going to meet Father Christmas - it would only be done once, probably at the NT property
Going to the panto - remarkably similar (except now I only have to travel 10 mins rather than 90 mins!)
Christmas baking - my mum used to do a lot more than I do
Christmas decoration making - my mum used to make a lot of things each year. I don’t
Endless visiting of elderly relatives - live hundreds of miles form where I grew up so this isn’t an option.
Light trails - didn’t exist. We tend to go to a different one each year
Ice skating - didn’t exist. We did it once and none of us saw the point so haven’t bothered again
Christmas markets - didn’t exist. Again, don’t see the point!
The biggest change has been advent calendars. My brother & I shared a paper one. My DC each have a chocolate one and an other one.
One of the reasons I try and do a lot with my DC is that I enjoyed doing all of these things so much as a child myself.
Oh! Shopping has also changed. I don’t need to spend hours dragging the DC around the shops with me.

For me keeping it low key is the opposite of making hot chocolate stations and trying to make a something perfectly nice and normal into a big special thing.

I make hot chocolate with hot milk, cocoa powder, and sugar , occasionally put some marshmallows in for a bit of a change. A drink doesn’t need to be part of a hot chocolate station to be nice or enjoyable. It’s nice enough.

We’d go to the church Christmas Fayre and see Santa. And all the other church advent stuff, Christingle, 9 lessons and carols, crib service, midnight mass once old enough.
Get taken to woolies or Poundland to buy gifts.

Some years mum would get into some sort of crafting and we’d be assistants making endless decorations for the church fayre.

And there would be stuff with brownies, a trip to panto or gang show. My dance school would have a show in the lead up and we’d be farmed out to dance at various events, same with choir.

So I did loads, it was always super busy, usually ended the year exhausted.

You’ve reminded me of Carol concerts at the local ‘old people’s home’. We had to donate gifts too, and it couldn’t be the same old tin of broad beans/prunes/other horrible thing from the back of the cupboard that we had donated for Harvest Festival. My mum used to buy an extra pack of mince pies especially.

Also remember the excitement starting in about October of my mum adding one or two Christmas things to the weekly shop. She worked full time so the only time she had was ‘late night shopping’ on Thursday when Safeways was open until 7pm (in the days when shops closed at 5-ish!) and we went with her. A jar of mincemeat one week, cranberry sauce the next, until we got closer to Christmas and the crackers, Quality Street, fizzy drinks and other really exciting stuff was added.

Our village was known for the Christmas lights and they went big on the switch on so we would sometimes go for a walk around the village after dark. If the guides were doing a bran tin or sometime at the switch on then we might be there.

Otherwise no. I do fondly remember going to buy the tree locally and walking home with it.

I don't get all the fuss with elves, seventeen trips to see Father Christmas, a hot chocolate station, a box with Christmas bedding, pjs, films, more presents than mine get on Christmas day and more hot chocolate on 1st December and then another one on Christmas Eve and all the rest of it.

Thank goodness I have teenagers and they were old enough when all that stuff started catching on thatvot passed us by.

There's a photo of me in a sled being pulled by a reindeer in 1989/1990 so Christmas 'activities' aren't a recent invention as far as I'm concerned.

My sibling and I were kids in the 1950s/60s. Our parents could not afford much in the way of "activities" and there was little official available then. We decorated the tree and the house. We decorated the house with old fashioned paper chains which we made from crepe paper. We didnt have electric lights for the tree. We decorated it with somethig called "lamenta" which were long strings of silver foil (supposed to represent frost) which we threw on for best effect. It went everywhere and was found in corners long after the tree came down. We also wrote christmas cards and hand delivered the ones to relatives and neighbours.

We were taken to "the grotto" a few weeks before if my mother could afford it. If she couldnt my grandmother took us. Otherwise it was just family activities. My parents hosted my aunts and cousins on christmas day and they reciprocated on boxing day. There men went off to the pub after the meal. The rest of us payed board games - usually monopoly or a quizz game.

Once I got into my teens it stopped being fun. From 16 onwards I would go out with my friends instead.

My two siblings and I (all in our late 50s now) often reminisce about us having one advent calendar which was re-used every year. My mum just closed all the doors back up, I suppose. Not only that, we had to take turns opening the doors.

It took a few years before I realised that, being the eldest, meant my brother always got to open the "big door" (actually about the size of an old stamp) on the 24th.

That, the tree, Santa in a department store, and the panto - those were the extent of our activities.

Carol service, see the lights in Oxford and regent streets, see Father Christmas at selfridges when young, but Christmas wasn’t as commercial, and in general we hadn’t moneterised all fun then. We did bake a Christmas cake in November and make various biscuits, mince pies, cakes and savouries for Christmas (less than as available off the shelf) but we didn’t make a song and dance about it, no photos! As for movies, you watched what was on tv, they hadn’t invented videos! Hot chocolate making, since when was that other than a drink? See making a fuss over something mundane!

70's childhood - We were lucky if the Christmas decorations were up by the last day of school term. Sometimes they went up as late as Christmas Eve.

I never even went to a pantomime as a kid.

My DC are 20 and 17 and their Xmas traditions were the School Xmas fair with Santa's Grotto.

My DM would take them to the Panto. DH's very religious parents took them to the Christingle service on Xmas Eve every year until they grew out of it.

When DD asked why we don't have an Elf on the Shelf I told her it was for naughty children so we didn't need one!

It's mad now how many new "traditions" there are.

Yes but they were mainly in the home and focussed on crafts/cooking.

My DM's culture is famous for Christmas so every year we would be making traditional homemade decorations. Plus there are a lot of foods that are only eaten at Christmas - the tradition was that you had to make enough to last until Easter. So there would be vast quantities of various types of biscuits made.
We would also make a UK style Christmas cake and Christmas pudding - Delia, obvs. I got to decorate the cake, badly, every year with the same plastic figures saved in a tin.

Other than that we'd go to a carol service at church. I'd go carol singing at the hospital my mum worked at. The Rotary Club Santa would drive by. There would be a Christmas event at Girls' Brigade and at my dad's job. Nativity play and carol service at school. Salvation Army band would play at weekends outside WHSmith.

We went to a panto once and I hated it, so that was that. And while there were Santas in local department stores, I announced very early that they were men in fake beards so we didn't do that either. Big highlight would be going into London to see The Nutcracker. My DMs particular skill was taking me to Harvey Nicks to 'look at the toys'. Somehow I loved it and knew we were definitely not buying!

So very little that was commercial except the show, a lot of free events and an awful lot of home entertainment making things.