Christmas memories: questions to ask your grandparents

Ask an eighty-year-old to tell you about their life and you'll get a shrug. Ask what they got in their stocking in 1952 and you'll get the orange, the handful of nuts, the one toy, who else was in the house that year, and why. Christmas is full of that kind of detail, because it happened once a year and was different from every other day.

It's also the easiest time to ask. Everyone is round the table with nowhere to be, and the questions are about Christmas, so nobody feels interviewed. Remembering old Christmases is simply what people do at Christmas.

The questions

If one of those answers is a recipe nobody's ever written down properly, how to preserve a family recipe before it's lost covers getting it out of someone's head while you still can.

Some background that helps the wireless-and-television question along: the monarch's Christmas broadcast began in 1932, when King George V spoke on the wireless, and it was first shown on television in 1957. There was no broadcast at all in 1969. Someone in their eighties will remember the switch from listening to watching, and probably whose television it was watched on.

“Who had the first television you remember, and what did everybody crowd in to watch?”

Two things that make it easier

• Bring something to look at. An old Christmas photograph, a decoration that's been in the family for decades, a card from the loft. Objects bring back more than questions do. Ask who's in the photograph and what happened just after it was taken.
• Ask the children to ask. A grandchild asking "what did you get for Christmas when you were eight?" gets a better answer than an adult asking the same question, and it's a conversation between the two of them that the rest of the table gets to hear.

If someone at the table has dementia, Christmas memories from childhood are often the easiest ones to reach, and the approach is a bit different: fewer questions, no correcting, and more looking at things together. Reminiscence questions for dementia covers that properly.

After Christmas

The trouble with the Christmas conversation is that it happens once a year and is gone by Boxing Day. One way to keep it going is a question a week for the rest of the year, sent by email, with the answers kept in one place. That's what StoryPrompt does: 52 weekly questions written for British lives, answered in their own words and collected into a book you download as a PDF. £25 once for a 365-day pass, and the book stays downloadable afterwards. It isn't a subscription.

“What's a family tradition you hope carries on after you?”

Or skip the product entirely. Print this page, take it to Christmas dinner and ask two questions. For the rest of the year, 100 questions to ask your grandparents is the same idea, for any visit.