Category: Personal

Someone on HN asked: What are some of your favorite memories from Christmas? Many comments were about video games or consoles or first PCs. Here’s what I wrote, lightly expanded and edited.

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I was born in the late 60s, so none of my earlier childhood Christmas memories involve digital technology. But one that stands out was the year that I got a telescope for Christmas.

I was maybe about ten. It was fairly average, cheap refractor on a wooden tripod. But growing up in an environment where things like that weren’t the norm, I didn’t understand that at the time. This was the era of Viking and Voyager and the Grand Tour, so I was very pleased.

On Christmas day my family, my aunts and uncles and cousins, would all cram themselves into my grandparent’s small council house for Christmas dinner. Then the kids would play with their toys and try not to get stood on by the slighly tipsy adults. There were too many people in too small a space, I realise now, but I have happy memories of those days.

When it got dark, that year, I took my new scope out into my grandparent’s small front garden to look at the moon and to try (unsuccessfully because, as I later realised, it lacked the resolving power) to locate a planet or two. The moon looked coldly beautiful, and I remember seeing craters and features in much more detail than I ever had before. I was hooked.

It was very cold that day, in a way that it doesn’t ever seem to be at Christmas anymore. People wandering past, walking dogs or maybe going to visit friends or to the pub, kept asking me what I was doing. I could hear everyone indoors, talking and laughing. Eventually it started to snow very lightly, so I packed up my gear and stood watching the thin snowfall for a while – drifting over the unlit space above the land drain that their house faced onto – and then went back indoors.

That was more than forty years ago. My grandparents are long dead and their house no longer exists. Many of the other adults who were there then have also died. But I still remember how my universe suddenly got vastly bigger that Christmas day. And I remember the snowflakes drifting down in the dark.

A few years ago I passed that telescope on to a five year old friend. I don’t know what, if anything, she makes of it though. We live in a different age of wonders, with images from the Hubble and James Webb available on any screen. Different times, as it should be.

Merry Christmas everyone.