XMAS 100 YEARS AGO

Taranaki Daily News, 16 December 1932, Page 9 (Supplement)

XMAS 100 YEARS AGO

FAMILY GATHERINGS No time of the year is associated with; the past so much as Chrismas. We love to fancy the old fashioned times, but should we like'to live them? It is a time of family gathering. If you had wished to join the family party one hundred years ago, however, you would have been compelled to travel by coacn, and might probably have experienced the delightful pastime of being stuck in & snow drift, or, at least, the mud, for roads were not quite as good then as we known them to-day. If you were adventurous enough to think of water travel you were “in for” a rough time indeed,, as the saying is. Writing even ten years later Charles Dickens describing his quarters on the ship for America, which were described as luxurious by the company, writes of the "utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box.” The box was his private stateroom. The discomfort of sea travel in 1832 was something that cannot be fully understood to-day. When you eventually reached your relatives, begrimed and tired by the stupendous task of travelling, you might have desired a bath. This, too, would have to have been a rough affair. Few houses boasted a bathroom one hundred years ago. Downstairs in the dining room luminant was furnished by oil or, perhaps,

candles. The first gas mains were .not laid • even in London until 1806. The first £as meter was not invented until nine years later. One hundred years ago people were only just beginning to lose their dread of it. Even in London if yoii desired a theatre or any other form of public entertainment, you had to get to it the best way you could, and get home early, for the streets were not terribly safe. The new police had only been formed three years then. But people did enjoy Christmas for al) the drawbacks. They have left us tales of jolly times on the coaches, jolly times in the inns and the homes. Perhaps it was so because they had to make their own amusement. Somehow we are more and more inclined to look back upon those days as the time when Christmas really was Christmas. Possibly in a hundred years’ time our day will be regarded in much the same way. Who knows!