Sometimes, there's an excitement you just can't truly explain, a feeling of joy and ecstasy that can only truly be explained with a whiff of nostalgia, a thought or a feeling, or even seeing a picture that transports you back to when you were a kid. Christmas does that to me, I love everything about Christmas, and Christmas in the 70s and 80s in particular.
One of the things I loved about Christmas back then was the lack of what you'd consider "good taste"; all of that went out of the window for a few weeks at the back end of the year, in favour of tinsel, coloured fairy lights (with the plastic collars around them to make them look like flowers, natch) and far too many sparkly things to list here.
One of the other things I loved were the selection boxes that the various confectionary companies would produce every year. It's something I'm pretty sure that, like annuals of our favourite TV and film franchises (and I'll get to them another time, trust me) was limited pretty much to the UK. But every year, companies like Rowntrees, Cadburys and so on would put all of your favourite sweeties in a festive box, and offer them up as tribute to Old St Nick and dentists around the country. They tended to look like this:
Of course, you could still buy all of the separate choccies in the shops, but for some reason, bunging them in a box and sticking a bit of holly on it seemed to do the trick for me and millions of other kids, and every year we'd all get that twang of excitement when Chrimblemas rolled around, wondering which of our faves that Rowntrees would be putting in their box this year, and even what form that would take. (Just for clarity, I always favoured Mars' habit of putting them in stockings, as seen at the bottom of this page.)
Do you remember selection boxes? Which were your favourites? And are you still getting them to this day? Let us know!
