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The changing face of Christmas

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2014-12-26 09:34:29 - Graham Ellis

Christmas day was spend queitly at home - or, rather, mostly at home. A couple of brief trips of 6 miles each way to Devizes to pick up dad and bring him around for a Christmas Dinner, there being no bus service to use either one way or the other, which is what we do for most visits. I cooked most of the standard Christmas fayre, with Lisa doing the stuffing and mash. We watched TV into the mid afternoon, and had an early evening.

So far, conventional. But.

We didn't watch "The Queen" at 3, preferring the end of a movie and in the full knowledge that we could catch up with Her Majesty (and The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury) in the evening news or at another repeat.

Presents back and forth between us, and between Dad and us, are more muted these years. Rather, the gifts are of time together, both over the Christmas period and scheduled for other dates. I look forward to taking Dad and Lisa to Liverpool as the days get longer, and to Kingswear in the late spring - just day trips, but quality time. And I'll admit to enjoying (in a negative sort of way) reading about "Dr Beeching's Axe, 50 years on" - "Illustrated memories of Britain's lost railways".

A controversy that raises its head every year on our Coffee Shop Railway Forum is the argument as to whether public transport should run on Boxing day. In my youth, such a service was offered, and there were even a few trains on Christmas day ... though four an hour from Orprington to London dropped to just a service every 2 hours, starting later and finishing earlier. Over recent years, no service at all has been offered on either Christmas Day or Boxing day, citing the need for engineering works to be done, and the strong requirement for operational rail staff to have a break too, and the likely lack of passengers and so the cost of subsidy or need to charge high fares. Taking an opposite view, there's sports fixtures, sales (being advertised on the radio before 7 a.m. this morning, Boxing Day), people wanting to visit which suggests to me that people might, perhaps, use a service. A few trains are indeed running - not our First Great Western ones but pockets such as Ashford (Kent) to St. Pancras, Bicester to Marylebone, and Brighton to Victoria. It will be interesting to hear how busy they are, although the lack of network connnections to / from them will supress traffic to some extent.

One thing I have noted in past years is that forum traffic has been sparse on Christmas Day - just on Christmas day, mind you, not on other days around 25th December. This year, not so ... traffic levels are up to 59 posts during the day, which is almost exactly the daily average of around 60 per day. Is this a blip? I don't know - I've used Phplot to draw a quick graph (and the source for that graph is [here].



Anyway - now 09:30, and breakfast completed at the hotel; I'm off to clear the breakfast room and service the kitchen. The folks checking out today have just settled their bill, and I have key cards cut and waiting for the checkins, all of whom have said they'll be arriving between 3 and 5 p.m.

The one difference to a normal day? No phone calls looking to sell us anything, so far!