00:00 It doesn't matter if you've got a lot or if you've got a little, you share what you've got at Christmas.
00:05 You collect and share other people's memories.
00:08 So what are some of the more poignant anecdotes that you've heard about Glasgow Christmas?
00:14 Well, you get the sort of absolutely heartbreaking tales of folk who literally,
00:22 you really didn't have two sticks to rub together and you're almost getting broken toys for Christmas
00:30 because that's all their parents could afford to give them.
00:33 I mean, our parents used to do it to us as well.
00:36 I mean, we'd, myself and my brother, count ourselves lucky.
00:40 If we were lucky at Christmas, you'd get one big present and lots of wee things.
00:45 And the big present would usually come in a pillowcase.
00:50 At the foot of the bed when you woke up in the morning, there would be the classic,
00:54 there'd be the stocking hanging up, one of my dad's big, probably a kilt sock or something.
00:59 And it would be, it would be, yeah, a ten ball piece.
01:03 It would be a bag of nuts.
01:05 It would be an orange or some tangerines.
01:08 It'd be those sort of very basic things.
01:10 And practically every kid in Glasgow got those sort of very basic things.
01:14 Because something as simple as a nice bit of fruit, an apple or something.
01:19 And I think they sort of almost go back to the spirit of Christmas.
01:24 It's that you're sharing what you've got.
01:27 It doesn't matter if you've got a lot or if you've got a little.
01:30 You share what you've got at Christmas.
01:32 And of course, used to myself and my brother, we'd end up throwing the apple at each other
01:35 or stoning it off each other's heads or making fangs out of the orange peel and scaring each other.
01:41 Or the Godfather film, turn the peel inside out.
01:44 But it was, it's all these little things.
01:46 And then of course, there's the food.
01:48 Most folk in Glasgow ate pretty simply.
01:51 But yeah, come Christmas Day, come New Year's Day, come Hogmanay.
01:57 And even though we now think of Christmas as turkey and all the rest of it and all the trimmings.
02:02 Most folk back then were not having a turkey.
02:05 A good Christmas day would be steak pie and all the trimmings.
02:09 A much more traditional sort of Scottish high day holiday.
02:13 And of course, you'd go to the butcher literally months in advance
02:18 and order your Christmas or your New Year's steak pie.
02:20 And you'd go on the butcher's list.
02:22 And then you'd go along each week and you'd pay up a bit towards your steak pie.
02:27 So that come a couple of days before Christmas, the butcher would say,
02:31 "The steak pies have arrived."
02:33 And everyone would go and get their steak pie.
02:35 And of course, at that point, again, a few families had a deep freeze
02:40 and a few families even probably had a proper fridge.
02:43 So you'd be into the cold larder or wrapped up and put out in the...
02:48 You'd hope for cold weather.
02:50 You'd wrap it up and put it out in the windowsill just to keep it cold and fresh before it went in the oven.
02:55 As kids, the other great thing in Glasgow was what was called ginger wine.
03:00 And it wasn't alcoholic.
03:02 It wasn't Crabby's Green ginger wine, which you'd use to make a mix with whiskey to make a whiskey mac.
03:08 And your mum and dad would go to Boots and you can still get it.
03:12 And it was basically a sort of concentrate that you'd mix up with sugar and water and stir up.
03:19 And it would make this spectacularly hot, fierce ginger-flavoured wine,
03:24 which everyone would drink at Christmas and New Year.
03:28 And, God, if you'd a cough or a cold, it would certainly clear your tubes.
03:33 And that's what you'd get. And you went to other folks' houses as well.
03:36 And the adults would all be getting a wee bit of a bevy, a whiskey or a larder or a brandy.
03:43 The ladies a snowball, an Advokan, lemonade, or a baby sham if you were feeling flush.
03:50 But the kids would all get ginger wine and talk about putting a glow in your cheeks.
03:56 But it's also the fact that we talk about climate change.
04:00 Christmases aren't that cold as they used to be.
04:04 The thing that every kid wanted for Christmas was a white Christmas.
04:08 You wanted snow at Christmas.
04:10 Even if your parents went, "Oh, God, it's snowing," because it made it a nightmare to get anywhere.
04:16 Of course, as kids, you were desperate for a white Christmas,
04:19 because that's the Christmas you saw on Christmas cards.
04:22 It's the Christmas you saw in old films.
04:25 Every man wanted a white Christmas.
04:27 So if you were lucky, you could get your sledge out or a beer tray from the bar
04:31 and skip down the nearest hill or have a snowball fight.
04:34 Of course, quite often you'd be out doing that in your shorts, your shorts and your wellies.
04:39 Did you often have a white Christmas when you were young?
04:42 It's probably wishful thinking.
04:44 You think back, "Oh, it was a white Christmas, it was a white Christmas."
04:48 But I'm sure if I went back and checked the actual calendars,
04:52 Christmas and New Year's, certainly the last 15, 20 years, seems a lot milder than they were when I was growing up.
05:02 It's also probably to do with the fact that growing up, we didn't have central heating,
05:07 so you'd have to get up in the morning and make the coal fire.
05:10 Particularly when you were going to school,
05:15 it was always a fight between myself and my brother in the morning to get down the stairs
05:18 and hang your school trousers closest to the electric radiator so you could put on warm trousers in the morning.
05:24 Because the house was like a bloody iceberg in the morning.
05:27 But the central heating comes on in the morning, so by the time you get up, the chill is off the house.
05:33 Usually you've got to look out the window or look at your phone to see what the weather's like
05:37 before you stick your head out in the morning and you need a jacket today.
05:41 Back in the '60s and '70s, you woke up in the morning,
05:44 you knew before you got out of your bed that you were going to need a jacket that day
05:48 because your nose would be frozen.
05:50 There'd be frost on the inside of the windows.
05:52 Oh, really? Oh, fantastic.
05:54 Well, thank you very much for coming and chatting to us.
05:56 Not a problem. Not a problem.
05:58 And I hope you've been a good girl, and I hope Santa is very good to you this Christmas.
06:03 I hope so, too.
06:04 I don't know.
06:05 We'll see.
06:07 Well, thank you very much.
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