Don'T Cry At Christmas Poem by Deborah White

I wonder have you ever wanted something so badly every inch
of your body ached. I did when I was fifteen years old. The
eldest of six not much money in the house, I tried so hard not
to want or to ask for anything at all. But I just couldn’t stop
myself.My teenage heart hurt for weeks and weeks before,
I fretted so very badly I might even have sold my very soul.
All those Christmasses ago special presents were scarce.
We took it in turns for a big gift, everyone else just got some
thing small. But I don’t remember being sad at all. Excited
and happy at what the day would bring. And especially
glad we were doing the Christmas stocking and turkey thing.

But my thoughts were lost in my one small gift. And I just
couldn’t shift the longing. I didn’t actually ask but I thought
my parents knew, what I wanted most in the whole wide world
was my own cassette tape recorder. I wasn’t bothered about
the style or the model or the colour anything would do. When
I was fifteen Top of the Pops and the charts on a Sunday
was my life. Every lunch time at school we huddled together
in the classroom in a crowd. Listening to a radio until the
teachers found out. Then confiscated it was until the next
day. The charts was our fixation and we just had to know
what was the new number one, before the lunchtime gong.

What I wanted more a radio more than anything was to tape
my favourite songs. The Real Thing, Tavares, T Rex, Slade
David Bowie the Drifters, even Chuck Berry, my ding a ling.
I had to just wait and see what Christmas morning would bring.
The disappointment that day has never really faded from me.
When I opened my present, it was the right shaped box. I had
to stop myself from crying out loud. My parents had spent
their precious money on a lovely hair dryer pink and cream
How did I manage to lift a smile and stifle a horrible scream.
I gave my mam and dad a huge hug and I thanked them from
the very bottom of my heart. My present was lovely but it was
not what I had hoped, longed for, it was not the present for me.

When I went to bed Christmas night I cried myself to sleep.
How selfish how foolish how silly a fifteen year old should.
weep, for something that was not so very important after all.
I should have been grateful living in Newcastle and having
three younger brothers it wasn’t a black and white football.
The memory of the disappointment that Christmas morning
lives with me still to this very day. And I know now through
my own life experiences. it takes a long, long while for dis-
appointment and heartache to fade and eventually go away.