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Features

The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

Seances, trikes and the miracle of tinfoil

19 December 2020

9:00 AM

19 December 2020

9:00 AM

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun.

Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys.

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