Ghosts of Christmas Past
Melancholy is an inherent quality of Christmas memory. Most often, it constitutes formative and beloved childhood recollections, of times less turbulent than most, when reality was a simpler place to negotiate. The pleasure of those recollections is, speaking personally, always tinged with a note of wistful sadness, not merely for the loss of more innocent times, but of the ghosts that inhabit them.
Leaving aside, for the moment, those relatives and loved ones who are no longer with us in a traditional sense, the children we remember being are also little more than echoes and shades, now. They haunt our heads as sincerely as a gothic spectre might its ancestral manor or graveyard. Whilst we might presume some delusion of continuity from them to what we are now, the truth is, they and the snow-swept, candle-lit, tinsel-draped worlds to which they belonged are long, long gone. We stand in their places, for better or ill, and temper our own celebrations in comparison to those distorted dreams and impressions.
In my memory, Christmas sings with sensation: it is the quiet, bow-string tautness of Christmas Eve, the most breathless day of the year, in which our parents scrabbled and struggled to find ways of occupying us. It is the tossing, turning struggle to sleep on Christmas
night, not knowing how to set my chattering mind at rest. It is holiday cartoons and Christmas specials, chocolates and treats and those wakings which were surely the most immediate and agitated of our brief lives.
Trying to capture that sensation, the soul-deep fizz and flare of excitement that had no bounds or ambiguity, is almost impossible. In memory, it feels like being host to a storm; like lightning in my brain and belly. I recall rising so early every Christmas morning, hurtling out of bed with weightless abandon, seeming to float down the stairs like a ghost, physics no impediment to a child intent on that day and its ecstasies.
Not being religious in any particular way, our family’s Christmases were sacred in the most secular fashion; meticulously decorated trees, stockings hung beside the fireplace, Christmas ornaments that only materialised once per year, and thereby acted as visual reminders of years past, freighted with all the emotion and passion of the event.
As for presents…
I was and remain a great lover of toys, particularly those that can be invested with imagination; made foci for fantasies that were never still or settled in my head. A dreamer by nature, I needed that in my childhood (much as I do now); something into which I might pour my inspirations, use as instruments of expression for the dramas and scenarios that swirled every waking and sleeping moment behind my eyes.
Being a child of the mid-1980s and early 1990s, I was spoiled for choice in that regard:
Toylines of every stripe and species littered store shelves, many of them boasting imagery and mythologies of just the kind that excited and intrigued me. From the classically mythological stylings of He-Man and The Masters of the Universe to the epic, science fiction narrative of Manta Force, there was always more than enough to obsess my developing imagination, and become its material focus for the following months.
Christmas, for me, is thus also a memory of losing myself: of becoming a crew member on some immense, plastic space ship exploring unknown stars or a participant in alien wars amongst peoples of other dimensions. Whilst the rest of my family played games, ate, drank and gathered around the TV, I was often lost in some remote space of the house, entirely oblivious to the indulgences occurring around me, not to mention the world that hosted them. These were, in a very real sense, the earliest stories I crafted and expressed beyond the realms of my own dreaming; often elaborate, private realities where no one was allowed to intrude. More than anything, I recall their elaboration and sensory detail. To my child’s mind, the distinction between waking reality and imagination wasn’t yet quite so clear cut, meaning that they often intruded upon one another with the vivid detail of hallucinations. I recall spending hours upon hours lost in those realities, exploring them with as much fervour and engagement as the characters that inhabited them before reality once again intervened.
Most often, those interventions took the form of Christmas day meals I would reluctantly emerge to partake in, engaging with the communal world of light and song only as much as I had to before retreating once again.
The Christmas holidays were always periods of feverish, imaginative excess when I was a boy; periods whose time seemed elastic and malleable, the spans between waking and the inevitable hour I’d be plucked from my self-authored realities often passing in what felt like a span of minutes, whilst, within those realities, days, months, even years would pass. I vividly recall voyages through space, to other worlds and dimensions with my Manta Force ships; British-made toys of immense size and incidental detail, filled with complements of crew and various vehicles. I recall descents into ancient temples, populated with all manner of demons and entities derived from a whole host of conflicting toylines. I recall battles of incredible scope and scale fought between alien robots at war on our planet, those conflicts deciding the fates of entire galaxies.
Often all occurring before Christmas dinner.
Whilst it becomes necessary to remove ourselves from those utterly immersive descents into fantasy as we grow and become more part of the world, it is also essential to the health of our abstract selves that we recall and allow ourselves the benefit of them.
As we grow, we are shamed out of imaginative pursuits; the enthusiasms and inspirations that so compel us as children. More often than not, this leads to a stunting and suppression of the capacity, such that our ability to engage in that arena dissolves entirely, and much to our detriment.
Whilst it might be tinged with melancholy; sorrow for those who are no longer with us, regret for the ghost-children who are long, long lost, memory of Christmas past is, for me, always a descent into those old games, those other worlds and realities that existed within the shadows of single rooms, beneath the myriad-coloured lights of Christmas trees. It is there we meet and reconcile with the ghosts of Christmas past, in all their joy and sorrow, all their enthusiasm and regret. And it is in their eyes we see how far we’ve come, how deeply we’ve changed, over intervening years.
Whether or not the stories those reflections tell are happy ones inevitably varies, but that in no way absolves us from the obligation of engaging with them, and seeing truth in the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we spin from the past.
A very merry Christmas to you all, my loves, and may it be a source of the most transcendent revelation for you.
George Daniel Lea
Further Links;
Born in Blood: Volume 2:
https://perpetualpublishing.com/produ…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B…
Born in Blood: Bundle Pack:
https://perpetualpublishing.com/produ…
Strange Playgrounds:
Rebbie Reviews 
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