A CHRISTMAS TALE

A lot of restaurants and shops are having their annual Christmas in July celebrations. And that gives me an excuse to segue into a real Christmas story from fifty years ago.

Like most Christmas stories there is a meaning in the tail of the tale.

I was ten years old. It wasn’t the usual Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day format where you left out some cake and cordial for Santa on the night before Christmas, excitedly went to bed for a few hours of restless anticipation trying to sleep and then raced for the living room to plunder the tree.

This year was different. My Dad had bought a gruelling milk run in the days when the milko slaved through the night, hefting crates, collecting the empty bottles and leaving cold, fresh, cream-topped milk for the awakening neighbourhoods.

During the week, before school, I helped him from 7a.m to 8 a.m. to make the “ town deliveries” in the tiny so-called CBD but at weekends I had a treat. I’d (voluntarily) get up around 11p.m. and work through the night alongside my Dad.

Down at the dairy. Loading the crates of milk and cream. A Thermos of tea to warm us up before we started the run.

Christmas for this ten-year-old fell on a weekend so I missed the usual Christmas morn excited wakeup. At dawn we were still chugging home in the old milk truck.

But I’ll never forget that Christmas.

I had worked so hard for my Dad that year I had a Hinch Hunch (the first) that I might have a wish come true. I might be rewarded with my first two-wheeler bike.

My brother and sisters had been ordered not to plunder the tree until Dad and I got home. We raced into the living room with visions of wheels in my head. No such luck. The siblings were tearing bright red and green Yuletide paper off gift after gift.

All I received was an envelope with instructions not to open it until the others had finished. Remember, I had been working all night at Christmas. Not happy, Jan.

Attached to the envelope was a piece of string. A note inside, written by my Mum, instructed me to follow it.

We trooped out the backdoor, down the side path, past the chook run and the tree tomatoes. The white string snaked around the lemon tree and on to the front lawn. It was wrapped twice around the giant copper beech tree in the centre and headed back towards the basement.

A second envelope with a new instruction was taped to the basement door. It ordered me to negotiate the basement steps in the dank and the dark with the light off.

At the bottom, when my feet touched the hard brown dirt of the basement floor, Dad flicked the lights on.

There, gleaming in the basement dust and junk was my Christmas present: a two-wheeler bike.

I looked at it and I cried.

I did not give a tinker’s cuss (to use an expression from the times) that it was a second-hand bike. Didn’t care that the shiny silver handlebars had been gussied up with that silver paint they used to smear thickly on the old coal range.

Didn’t even care that it was a girl’s bike! It was MY bike.

My first two-wheeler.

Over my teen years I had other bikes including a home-made “ stunt bike” which I would race over sand hills and scrub and which gave me a broken hand and dislocated elbow after a nasty spill.

But I’ll never forget that Christmas morning when I got my first bike. I was so keen to get out on the street to ride it, show it to my mates, that I ignored the traditional stocking of chocolate, nuts and fruit pinned to the fireplace.

Flash forward nearly fifty years:

On a Saturday December morning last year – a couple of weeks before Christmas Day 2002 – I stood in the vast courtyard at Federation Square which was filled with 268 spanking new bicycles.

They were the result of one of the best charity campaigns I have ever been involved in. And typically it involved Variety – The Children’s Charity.

The aim: To get Victorians to pledge $200 to buy a bike (with a donated helmet) to be given to worthy kids in needy families.

What appealed to me was that community and sporting and school groups put forward a list of children’s names. A list of disadvantaged kids who had tried.

What also appealed to me was that families who gave $200 were invited to be there at Federation Square to personally hand over their two-wheeled present. And to be photographed with the kids.

It was a brilliant concept. The first time it had been tried in Australia.

As I have said in some community service announcements that will generously be aired by Channel Nine “ Christmas and kids go together. Kids and Christmas and present go together”.

And I point out that some Aussie families can’t afford much for their kids and Christmas is a cruel reminder of that fact.

This year on July 30 on my radio station we are staging the 2003 3AW-Variety Radiothon.

For $200 you will be able to buy a bike for a kid who would never have a chance of getting one otherwise. And you can present it yourself. Or let your child present it and you explain what it is all about-- that all kids are not automatically feted at Christmas. The stocking is not always filled.

And unlike me, these 10-year-olds won’t be getting second-hand girl’s bikes!

Sunday 20th July 2003

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003