Alan Bell takes a look at our Christmas dinner traditions

For me, I think of twinkling Christmas lights, a toasty warm log fire, the air filled with the smell of cinnamon and mulled wine, the taste of roasted chestnuts – but hang on a minute, none of those memories are real for me.

I don’t have a log fire. I can’t remember a time where I walked down a street and smelled mulled wine and cinnamon. And, having tried them once, I’m not particularly keen on roasted chestnuts. So where does all this imagery come from?

The answer is simple: books, movies and, since the 1950s, televisions in every household blasting out advertisements which obviously have a big impact on our perception of Christmas.

Songs on the radio tell us it is a time for mistletoe and holly, feasting and merry drinking. But my childhood Christmas was very different to those images – actually, it was very different from a modern-day Christmas.

I was brought up in Clydebank in the 1960s and 1970s, and our family was very poor.

Policeman Alan (Image: The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety)

One year, I got a bright blue dressing gown for Christmas and my parents got me a policeman’s helmet to wear with it, saying it was a police uniform. In reality, it was their way of encouraging me to wear the dressing gown and keep warm, as we had ice on the inside of the bedroom windows, icicles on the outside of every window, and no central heating.

Christmas meant visitors who stayed until late at night, and their coats were put on top of our beds to keep us warm as we slept. It wasn’t exactly Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim, but it was close.

We did, however, always have turkey with sage and onion stuffing for Christmas. And that got me wondering: when was our traditional Christmas dinner actually invented?

Well, turkey first came to England around 1573, and mini cabbages appeared in Holland and Belgium in 1587. But even though Queen Victoria first had a turkey for Christmas dinner in 1851, neither of these items became a household favourite at Christmas in the UK until after the Second World War, when farming became more efficient.

Mini cabbages, as they were initially shipped from Brussels, became known as Brussels sprouts, and turkey became the preferred choice as a cheap alternative to goose, lamb or beef.

The addition of cranberry sauce with turkey also came about in the 1940s from the USA.

But when I was a kid, we didn’t have such a thing as ‘pigs in blankets’.

These little sausages wrapped in bacon apparently originated in the USA in the 1950s, so I’m not sure if we just couldn’t afford to make them in my household in the 1970s or if they didn’t become popular over here until much later. Either way, I didn’t have them on my Christmas plate until the 1980s.

The choice of Christmas dessert seems to vary from household to household, with Christmas pudding being the obvious choice.

Variations of Christmas, plum or figgy pudding have been around since the 1500s, with the latter featuring in the famous carol We Wish You a Merry Christmas, which was written in the 1830s.

A special pudding at Christmas also featured in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, written in 1843. But it wasn’t until Eliza Acton’s Christmas pudding recipe was published in 1845 that this dessert became standardised to the Christmas pudding that we know today.

Obviously, it was a big hit, but not in our 1970s household. We had the cheaper Christmas dessert of trifle. 

A trifle isn’t a trifle, in my opinion, unless it includes jelly. So, although the history books will tell you that trifle has been around since the 1500s, it only included jelly from 1760.

Sponge fingers were added in 1855 (although again, we could never afford this addition), and the dish seemed to be at its height of popularity in 1970s Clydebank, as everyone I knew had trifle for Christmas.

More recently, a Walls Viennetta has become a traditional Christmas dessert. It is a frozen dessert, so no fussing with recipes, and consists of layers of rippled ice cream and thin, dark chocolate. It was introduced by Walls for Christmas 1982 and has been a staple on my mother’s Christmas table ever since.

So whatever is on your Christmas table this year, and whatever presents are in your stocking, on behalf of everyone at The Scottish Centre for Personal Safety on Princes Street, Ardrossan, I hope you all have a very merry Christmas.