What do you get.....

...if you cross Santa with a duck?

 

Today is Christmas Eve, and by now most of us are thoroughly fed up with the whole holiday thing, having been suffering it in the shops since early November.

But it wasn't always like this.. I have a series of school books about the Chalet School, they were written by a lady called Elinor M Brent-Dyer, about a pair of English sisters, one much younger than the other, who moved out to Tyrol and started a school. The first one was written in 1925, and she kept banging them out at a rate of more than one a year,  right through the war (which had quite an impact on the school), through rock and roll (which bypassed it altogether) and right up into the 70s. They are utterly fascinating as a social history of private girls' education, continent-based but still very "English".

The parts of the earlier books that always caught my interest - quite apart from the fact that having their hair washed was something they were taken to a hairdresser for - were the descriptions of Christmas, which didn't start until late on Christmas Eve. That was the day when the servants - servants!! - were given the afternoon off to go and do their shopping for gifts, and was the day when the tree arrived and was decorated ready for Christmas day.

So different now....

They didn't do a lot of gardening when they were based in Austria...

 

 

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