CHRISTMAS DAY IN BRIGG - PAST AND PRESENT

 

Many Christmas Day prayers will be offered up in Brigg today for an end to the Coronavirus emergency and a return to normality in the months ahead.
The older you are, the more Happy Christmases you will remember.
One old practice is seeing an obvious resurgence this Christmas and will continue until January 1 - home consumption of beer, wine and spirits.
There has been a rising trend over recent decades for people to visit Brigg pubs and licensed clubs over the festive period - some only doing so at this time of year.
That can't happen currently with all hostelries closed, so scores of folk are switching to supplies bought in from supermarkets and shops. Sadly, Brigg no longer has a dedicated off-licence - the last to go being Bargain Booze, on Springs Parade, in January 2019. And it was known to open on Christmas Day!
Advances in technology means that most Brigg homes today are centrally heated. But at Christmas time is there anything to beat sitting beside the glow of a coal-fired grate, toasting crumpets (pikelets) on a fork and placing chestnuts in the embers?
Clearly, burning coal as a fuel is frowned upon in today's modern 'green' era, and no-one now enjoying time-controlled central heating misses getting out of bed in a cold property on Christmas morning to rake out and dispose of the previous night's ashes, make and apply the folded newspaper fire-lighters, lay a framework of sticks, and carefully place lumps of coal once the wood had caught light.
Very few Brigg homes had freezers in the 1960s and 1970s, so the Christmas Day bird was bought fresh and picked up or delivered to the door just prior to December 25. Chicken was the major choice back then - being cheaper and more readily available than turkey.
Brigg kids 50 or 60 years ago kept an eye on the street in the hope of seeing what neighbouring children had been given for Christmas. New bikes from Bennett's (Wrawby Street) or Sherwood's, on Bridge Street, would be ridden with pride on the big day and their mandatory bells (to comply with the Highway Code) rung at will. Even on Christmas Day, kids were wary of riding on pavements in case a Brigg police officer came round the corner on patrol.
Mentioning town police reminds that, long ago, some Brigg youths - perhaps fortified by a little too much Christmas spirit - used to compete by shinning up the Christmas tree in the Market Place when the showpiece was much larger. There were no CCTV cameras in the town centre but there were many more police officers based in the town than there are today. So the tree-climbers were running the risk of arrest, if PCs happened to be on patrol.
When we were reporting for the Brigg-based Lincolnshire & South Humberside Times half a century ago, the first visit to the police station post-Christmas usually produced some newsworthy items from the Yuletide crime log.