Christmas, as we know, is a time for reflection: a chance to recall years gone by, and to wallow for a few precious hours in our own remembrances of things past. But were the Christmases of our childhood really as wonderful as we recall, or are we merely reaching for those overused rose-tinted spectacles? Well I, for one, already know the answer. “You grew up in a sweetshop?” My revelation to friends and colleagues that I spent my childhood during the 1960s living above my parent’s confectionery business in Brighton still has the ability to provoke open-mouthed wonder. “What was it like?” they inevitably enquire. “Was it as fabulous as it sounds?” Well, since you ask, it was. Perhaps even better. For a young boy with a sweet tooth and parents too overstretched to monitor my calorie intake, living in a sweetshop was pretty special whatever the season. But at Christmas it became even more magical, for our family-run business sold myriad seasonal treats we didn’t stock the rest of the year, including selection boxes, tins of toffees and cartons of soft-centred fruit jellies. My own favourite was the Sooty and Sweep festive smokers set, consisting of a mesh stocking backed by cardboard, and containing candy cigarettes, a chocolate pipe, licorice pipe cleaners, and even an edible lighter with hundreds-and-thousands to depict the flame. Goodness knows what today’s Health and Safety Executive would have made of it, but it doesn’t seem to have had any discernible effect on my physical or moral wellbeing. Yet if the run-up to Christmas was fun for me, it was arduous for my beleaguered parents. Throughout early December Dad would be found on his hands and knees in our shop window, carefully constructing a Nativity scene with which to attract passing customers, complete with tiny lead figurines in biblical costume, and adorned with sufficient cotton wool to furnish the NHS for a week. Dad was never the most agile of individuals, and inevitably one of the shepherds or an unwary donkey would find its neck snapped in half as he blundered about. The expletives he uttered whenever this occurred would have done little credit to the Church. The whole commercial fandango would climax on Christmas Eve when, with dusk falling and the streets rapidly emptying, customers would make their final foray into our shop for their Christmas edition of the Radio Times or a carton of Quality Street. At about 7pm Mum and Dad could finally turn the sign on the door from “Open, Especially For Wall’s Ice Cream” to “Closed, Even For Wall’s Ice Cream”, and settle down to commence our own family shindig. But it was never as simple as that. There would inevitably be some poor straggler turning up a few minutes later, pleading for us to open up to sell them some last-minute gift wrap or a Christmas card. Indeed, the frenzied tapping on the shop window just as we were sitting down to eat was as familiar a sound as Bing Crosby singing White Christmas.