Real fur slippers and plastic flowers are among contributors’ Christmas present suggestions

G iven the cover image of the Observer Magazine of 6 December 1964 (‘The Christmas Predicament’), I foresaw some hand-wringing about the ethics of buying animal fur, but, of course, this was the 60s and instead we had present suggestions of fur-lined ‘trapper’ slippers and a rabbit-fur bedspread.

But before we got to the contributors’ choices of presents for ‘husbands, wives, children, parents and others’, we had a brilliantly baroque takedown of Christmas from Robert Robinson, of Call My Bluff fame. ‘Christmas a predicament?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It’s more like a jail sentence – in a jail, moreover, where the prisoners are supposed to like it.

For three days, sometimes four, life closes down. Whole families withdraw into frosty and unnatural proximity… the human race hides behind its separate front doors, celebrating the Feast of St Salesman by eating birds.’

Jane Bown suggested a magazine subscription for children – ‘the one thing they wouldn’t break by Boxing Day’ – and a ‘multi-purpose penknife. Will open bottles and take grit from a horse’s eye’. Can’t see any potential problems there.

Caroline Glyn chose 12 umbrellas for her ‘absent-minded mother’ (one for each month) and a Beatles wig for her balding father, ‘to make him feel young and vital’.

For the man at the top, Tony Ellis chose, ‘Jamaican cigars, not Cuban, to suggest a profitable sprinkling of transatlantic visitors, who are sensitive about Cuba’. And ‘for the woman colleague: plastic flowers. That tells her she’s brave enough to defy prejudice against artificial flowers.’ Good luck with that.

Back to Robinson and ‘the disagreeable business of deciding which useless article may be most colourably donated to placate what ritual idol’. Christmas for him was ‘for watching the children start the day fresh – grow dull – end feverish, for feeling the domestic process soar ruthlessly into the ascendant so that in the end the meals seem to be eating you, and you die with the dying fire’. Merry Christmas!