Yours, Siobhan

Christmas selection boxes don’t seem to be so much of a thing any more – but as I sit here eating the world’s smallest Curly Wurly (nicked from The Dark Lord’s sweetie stash), I wonder why they’ve gone out of fashion.

Back in the early 1980s, my granny used to buy me a selection box every Christmas, either Cadbury’s or Mars, usually in a big box but sometimes a net stocking.

Most of the brands are still around today, but they don’t taste the same. I suspect there’s been some value engineering going on since then to replace cocoa beans with brown crayons.

There was also none of these Scandi-style minimalist decorations like now. I remember our house covered in those huge gold foil concertinastyle decorations draped across the ceiling, which were stuck precariously to the corners of the walls and would come down on your head just as you sat down to eat tea.

We also used to be on paper-chain duty from November onwards, until we’d made so many chains we’d run out of lick. These were then criss-crossed around the rest of the house and were a permanent fire risk.

At the centre of it all was the plastic Christmas tree, which had seen better days even when it was new from Woolies in 1975. The whole look was finished with a string of multicoloured lights, which never worked and you had to go through each bulb to see which one had blown. The magic of Christmas back then was successfully managing not to electrocute yourself.

Tell me your tinsel tales of a bygone Christmas. Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

I’ve been ready for hours!