Memories of Christmas Past - The Dolls House

This Christmas I have clubbed together with my mum and dad to buy littl'un a much desired doll's house.  We've plumped for a very modern modular one from Hape.

One very similar in fact to one my mum ordered from The Guardian newspaper in Christmas 1971 for my elder sister.  Along with it seems most other Guardian reading mums, for just a few days before Christmas it still hadn't arrived and mum got a letter to say that the supplier had run out of stock. Panic!

Dad was dispatched to the famous Gamages department store in his lunch hour to get a doll's house.  Any doll's house! Which was how we ended up with the sort of Swiss Chalet affair that I played with for hours and hours throughout my childhood as my sister was busy outside playing football.  And which littl'un has delighted in on trips to Grandma and Grandma oblivious to the mostly broken furniture and worryingly protruding nails.

I don't remember Gamages which closed in 1972 after trading for almost 100 years - my own memories like many west Midlanders are of Rackhams and the Christmas tableaux made of Sindys and Action Men - but my dad has very vivid memories of Gamages from his own childhood.  It was tucked away in Holborn, a long way from the other department stores on Oxford Street, Regent Street and Knightsbridge and was apparently a complete warren of different buildings that had been knocked together as it expanded.

My dad remembers the excitement when Gamages famous Christmas toy catalogue arrived and then the wonder when you actually got there of what seemed like acres and acres of model railway and Mecano.  This wonderful blog post from Bibulous Bibliophiles who I guess is about the same age as my dad captures the already in the 1950s wonderfully old fashioned atmosphere of this much missed Christmas emporium.

What memories do you have as Christmas shopping as a child? And what about your parents, what memories do they have?

This post is part of a series in which I am trying to capture my family's memories and stories of Christmas past so that I can pass these on to my daughter.  If you'd like to share your family's memories of Christmas past please visit the linky on my family history blog We Came From.