Among all the Christmas memories I half have, among the crinkled paper tinsel and the fat plastic snowmen on pedestals, among the silvikrin cocktail onions shoved into half a grapefruit, among the black and white sci-fi serials like Flash shown on TV, amidst the crib on the monk's seat and among the multi-coloured fairy lights plugged into a lamp I still see a toilet roll snowman.
The toilet roll snowman was a school classic when I was a kid at Sacred Heart Primary School in the Sixties. Much toilet activity went on in the school's parents' homes in order to supply every kid with a loo roll tube.
The creation of the snowman was ludicrously simple; the roll was glued to a circle of card to act as its base and then the roll was blathered with paper glue, onto which we stuck tons of cotton wool. The roll was then filled with the sweets of the day; maybe smarties, maybe dolly mixtures, maybe liquorice allsorts. The sweets probably should have had wrappers inside a loo roll tube but I don't think hygiene was at the top of the Christmas list back then.
Certain sweets had to be avoided like sherbert and kali as these would have been hard to to handle in a toilet roll and you would have needed a whole Ilb of them.
The whole cottony column was then topped off with yet more cotton wool to create a head. For that finishing touch eyes could be added and maybe a paper scarf and hat. And that was that!
Our names were scrawled underneath in crayon and we took them home at the end of the day usually for the first of advent.
I can still see that woolly pillar stood proudly next to the portable black and white telly in the breakfast room.
Did you make a toilet roll snowman readers or something else for Christmas?
I remember making a papier mache penguin around a glass ketchup bottle that I then couldn't extract. He weighed a ton and would've been an effective weapon!
ReplyDeleteha ha, a ketchup warmer! That sounds more technical than a loo roll snowman Kev. I made some papier mache craters for my moonscape 10 years ago. It is fun isn't it slopping around with paper and glue.
DeleteSilver'skin' cocktail onions, surely !
ReplyDeleteSilver'krin' ones would have tasted far too soapy.
Mish.
Blimey, silvikrin onions! ha ha. They'll always stay in position!
DeleteHmmmmm a toilet roll snowman! First time I've heard of this. I don't know why, but except for my mom who enjoyed crafting, my sisters and I never got into the craft side of Christmas. Looking back I know we missed something :-( BTW, speaking of snowmen, the grandbaby has got me finding kiddie jokes on the Net: What do you call an old snowman? Water! sorry couldn't resist :-)
ReplyDeleteha ha, water! I like that Ed. One for Christmas after dinner jokes that!
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