welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Saturday, December 29, 2012

CONFUSION WITH THE CHRISTMAS TREE



Today I’ll do something I don’t normally do on this blog and volunteer a few personal details. Some of my readers may know that I live in Lithuania. When I was a kid it was still part of the mighty old Soviet Union, a country where they tried to do away with Christmas. Why? Because it is a religious holiday and stern builders of Communism weren’t supposed to be religious or celebrate Christian holidays. They celebrated New Year big time instead. I’m not saying us kids didn’t enjoy ourselves back then – New Year festivities and Father Frost was always a highlight of the season at home, at the kindergarten and at school. 

That's my three-year-old self at a New Year's
party in the kindergarten some 40+ years ago.

There was this cute little rhyme that every boy and girl of my generation knew and still knows by heart. Here is my English translation (a word-by-word one but you’ll have to trust me that it does sound sweet in Lithuanian): Branchy fir-tree / Green fir-tree / Shaggy bear visits her in the woods / Woodpeckers pecker at her slender trunk / Pupils dress her on New Year’s eve. Not a word about Christmas, see?
 
The reason I am writing this is because the other day I came across a short article about the rhyme. It turns out that it no longer goes down well with the kids of today because they dress their Christmas trees on Christmas and not the New Year’s eve. In order for the rhyme to make sense to kids, some kindergarten teachers changed the last line by dropping New Year and replacing it with Christmas. Word-by-word, the line now goes like this:  Pupils dress her on the night before Christmas.’ The teachers had to use the wording ‘the night before Christmas’ rather than ‘Christmas eve’ to make it rhyme in Lithuanian, but created another problem – kids still find it illogical because normally they don’t decorate their Christmas trees at night…   Of course, children have their own ways of explaining things. The article quotes a little boy who has memorized the ‘new’ version of the rhyme and knows from his parents and teachers that Christmas was sort of banned back in the day. Here is what he had to say: ‘Folks weren’t allowed to celebrate Christmas in the old days, but now its OK, as long as we do it at night and the Russians can’t see us’. I am not sure if my English readers will grasp the humour of this comment but it had me laughing out loud when I read it.

While I am on the subject of the old days, I might also reveal that many Christmases ago I used to be a freelance cartoonist and my comics appeared regularly in the national humour magazine for three years or so. Below are proof-prints of a New Year tale that I drew to a short story of a famous Lithuanian writer who wrote in the age when there was no Christmas. The strip was drawn and printed in 1991. I drew the original on A4 size paper in ink and water colours and lettered it too. I won’t bother with translation but here is a brief synopsis of the plot: village kindergarten teacher asks the janitor to dress as Santa and hide in the old closet to surprise the kids. The troubles begin on New Year’s Eve when a new closet is delivered to the kindergarten and the old one with the janitor dozing inside is loaded onto a truck to be taken to the dump. Having travelled some distance out of the village, the truck runs out of fuel and the poor janitor breaks free. He tries to ask his acquaintance for help but she doesn’t recognize him. The janitor can’t take off his beard because it is glued. Embarrassed by the silly looks he shuns people but runs into his nephew who takes him to the nearby village where the locals are gathered in the club to see in the New Year. The janitor wishes the villagers a Happy New Year on behalf of his village and gives presents to the local kids. Grateful and impressed by the neighbors’ initiative, villagers drive him back to his village in the morning… 




9 comments:

  1. Happy Christmas and Happy New year...

    Very interesting reading your life...also seeing your comic cartoon work...I thought it was very good..

    Being a Christian I'm glad your country is a lot better..
    also funny the childs version of the lyrics..

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    1. Thanks for the greetings, Peter!
      I am glad you apprecaiate the humour of the little anecdote :)

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  2. Nice artwork. Had you already begun collecting British humour comics at the time you drew it?

    Happy New Year!

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    1. Happy New Year to you too!
      At that time I had only seen one issue of Whoopee. I started collecting five years ago in 2007.

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  3. Nice art. Pity you weren't drawing for The Dandy a couple of years back - who knows how things might've turned out. What's your view on how Christmas is celebrated in your country these days? Do you prefer how it was in your day, or do you see modern trends as an 'improvement'? Or does it make no difference to you one way or the other?

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    1. Thanks for complimenting my art, Kid. As for Christmas, it has always been sort of a private family holiday even in the old days and very few people didn’t celebrate it. Now that it is reinstated as an official holiday, it’s nice to have a couple of days off, so yes – I much prefer things as they are now. The downside is that nowadays Christmas has become commercialized and that’s the aspect of the holiday that I am not so thrilled about.

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  4. VERY nice drawings there - they look familiar too, have you been published anywhere else? I'm fairly well-read when it comes to comics from other parts of the world (not intended as a boast!).

    Must be interesting knowing about two different versions of Christmas (and the child's version of events had me laughing too!). I've only ever known the commercialized version, so don't really have a problem with that side of it (there's nothing better than finding exactly the right gift for someone, and their reactions to it).

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    1. I am completely with you on giving the right gifts and joy to people. It’s the pressure to get everybody something that I don’t like. Also congested streets of the city for a week or so before Christmas when everybody is out shopping for presents. Otherwise it’s a great holiday!

      Thanks for the compliment to my drawings! To the best of my knowledge they were not published anywhere else except the national humour magazine that I mentioned in the post. You may have seen some of my art online in the website compiled by enthusiasts of Lithuanian comics here: http://www.komiksai.com/lietuviski/galerija.php?autID=8

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  5. Nice to see your artwork! If you ever get the time one day in the future maybe you could translate it into English for us?

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