“Every Christmas Eve, ever hopeful, I hung up a pillowcase, stayed awake as long as I could and next day woke up frighteningly early. In the morning my pillowcase would be filled with parcels which in those days were wrapped with stiff brown paper (probably the lining of animal feed sacks) and tied up with string - or stuck with stamp paper or sealing wax.

“I remember one year when I was about four, or possibly younger, I longed for a doll’s tea set and my mother got one for me, I think by advertising in the local paper. but when it arrived I was terribly disappointed because it was brown and there weren’t enough cups for the saucers. It was made of china and was stamped ‘foreign made’ on the back - which for years I thought was pronounced forgon.

“I think it was that same Christmas that I had a present which really pleased me. Dolls’ prams seemed to be unfindable in the war when I was little, so my father made me a wonderful wooden cart. It was rather primitive, just a box on wheels really, about 18in long and 9in high, unpainted but polished with Mansion polish. The wheels didn’t function too well, but I loved it and rushed around with it on string and filled it with pinecones and acorns and leaves.

“I was an only child and Christmas Day was a grown-ups day, though I saw plenty of children at church. I was always dressed in my best and my mother usually invited two or three people, who would otherwise have been on their own, to join us for Christmas dinner. Occasionally my grandmother came from Sheffield. ”

DIANE MODAHL Athlete “I am the youngest of seven children - I have four sisters and two brothers - and Christmases at home in Manchester when I was a child always followed a similar pattern.

“On Christmas morning we would all dash downstairs to see what presents were waiting for us under the tree. We were allowed to open a couple before breakfast and then we moved into the kitchen for a traditional West Indian spread: green bananas, ackee (which tastes a bit like scrambled egg), saltfish, yams and avocado, and home-made hot chocolate. There would be music blaring, usually reggae or calypso.

“Then we showered or bathed (in shifts because there were so many of us) and put on our best clothes and shiny shoes for the serious present-opening, followed by watching television and dinner in the early evening.

“As children our only taste of alcohol was at Christmas when we were allowed to have a Snowball or a Babycham, one between two for the younger children.

“The childhood Christmas that sticks out most in my memory is the year I was given a nurse’s outfit. I was about seven or eight. My mother was a nurse and I loved her uniform, especially her starched white hat. When I was given my own with a hat and my own stethoscope, it was the perfect present. I wore it for days and days after Christmas and cherished it for years.”

GABY ROSLIN TV Presenter “The Real Holiday Show”, Channel 4 “One year my parents, my brother, Timothy, and I went out to my grandparents in Zimbabwe for Christmas. It seemed really strange to me as a child to be spending Christmas in the scorching African sun.

“We had a hot roast dinner like we would have had at home and I remember being amused that my Gran had decorated the table with a log sprinkled with icing sugar to look like snow. Instead of watching a lot of telly and taking the dogs for a walk, as I usually did in London on Christmas Day, we went swimming.

“I was about eight - or maybe 10 - and it was the first time I had spent Christmas away from home. I particularly remember one family who joined us for lunch, a lovely lady who had been a nun but who had left her convent. She used to ride around everywhere on her bicycle even though she was 85.”

JOOLS HOLLAND Musician and presenter of “Later with Jools Holland”, BBC2 Saturdays “When I was small my parents and I lived in a bedsitting room on the top floor of a five-storey house in Chelsea.

“One Christmas, when I was four or five, I was given a policeman’s outfit which was just what I wanted. It included a helmet, striped armband, shirt and tie, truncheon and handcuffs, and as far as I was concerned I looked just like PC George Dixon. Dixon of Dock Green was my favourite TV programme.

“On Christmas morning I dressed in my policeman’s outfit, went out on to the landing and peered over the bannister, down the four flights of stairs to the hall below. The house was divided into lots of bedsitting rooms and the man who lived at the bottom was always considered a bit dubious. He was also rather short-sighted. He came out of his room into the hall, looked up at me with a really startled expression, ran out of the house and was never seen again.

“I spent the rest of Christmas dressed in my policeman’s outfit. I wasn’t interested in all this modern cops and robbers stuff; like George Dixon, I went about with my notebook making ‘routine enquiries’.”

DAVID BLUNKETT MP Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Employment “One Christmas my mother was very ill so we all went and spent the day with my married half-sister Doreen who, at that time, lived on the very edge of the Peak District in what I remember as an incredibly cold flat. We built up a fire in the living room and all huddled round to keep warm.

“While Mum put her feet up before dinner the rest of us went for a walk across the hills in the vicious cold.

“My image of Christmas has always been affected by reading Dickens and this particular year, when I would have been about 12, sticks in my memory vividly, I think because of the freezing coldness of the weather on the edge of the moors and the warmth of the family all gathered round the fire. It was the first time I’d eaten a Christmas dinner which had not been cooked by my mother. Doreen’s puddings, I recall, were wonderful.”

ERIN PIZZEY Writer and founder of the Women’s Refuge Movement “My father was a diplomat and the first Christmas I can remember was when we were living in Shanghai. I was about three and it was wartime. At the embassy children’s party I outraged my mother and shocked the embassy staff, and the ambassador, by standing up and singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles. It was a bad diplomatic incident.

“I also remember that Christmas because it was the year my twin sister Kate and I were given one tricycle between us which caused a bit of friction.

“In the new year we were captured by the Japanese and a number of my friends went to concentration camps. We were under house arrest for a while - I remember vividly the shortage of food which has affected the rest of my life. We were exchanged for hostages and taken out of China to South Africa.

“By the next Christmas we were in Beirut and my father was working as a diplomat again and normal service was resumed.”

SIR PETER USTINOV Chancellor of Durham University “I never really believed in Father Christmas and only kept up the pretence because my parents did.

“My early Christmases were German. I was born German - I even had a ‘von’ in front of my name at one time - and my father was the London representative of the German news agency.

“The first Christmas I can remember was the year I went to his office in the Reuter’s building on Christmas Eve and waited outside listening to him singing the German carol, O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum (which is the same tune as the Labour party song, The Red Flag). When he was through I was allowed in to collect the presents which we took home and opened the same evening (December 24).

“Later, there was a knock on the door and outside with a rather larger present, a pedal car, was my father dressed as Father Christmas - but in a disguise which was far too easy for me to penetrate.”

JOHN FASHANU Presenter of “Gladiators”, ITV Saturdays “My brother Justin and I were brought up by foster parents in Attleborough, Norfolk, having been in a Barnado’s home until we were three and four. Our foster mother was a very strict headmistress-type and at Christmas Santa always left presents for us in a big sock at the end of Mum’s bed so we couldn’t tinker with them in the early hours.

“We had to stay put until Mum knocked on our door and then we went into her room to open our gifts. I loved Christmas and believed 110 per cent in Santa Claus.

“The Christmas I remember most was when I was 11. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep on Christmas Eve and, very late at night, tiptoed downstairs and caught sight of my foster parents wrapping presents and putting them under the tree. I went back upstairs in tears with my illusions shattered. The next morning I had to pretend that I hadn’t seen anything or I would have been smacked for being out of bed so late. Christmas was never quite the same again...”

“My daughter is seven now and on Christmas Eve I always wedge a chair outside her bedroom door to make sure she doesn’t creep out of her room and have her illusions shattered like I did.”

TED WRAGG Professor of Education, Exeter University “The first Christmas I can remember was when I was about two-and-a-half. My parents gave me a little trolley, like the sort of porters’ barrows you see on railway stations, and I spent the rest of Christmas and a great deal of my time afterwards trundling things around in it.

“I was an only child and we were living in Sheffield at the time. The trolley was made by a neighbour - it was wartime and you couldn’t buy anything like it in the shops. It was made of wood, painted black with red wheels. I thought it was just wonderful.

“I think what probably made it so appealing was that it was the first time I felt I was in charge of something. I could decide what to carry on it and where to wheel it.

“Christmases when I was a child were very traditional. Father Christmas came and left presents, always wrapped up, under the tree which was decorated with bits of cotton wool, and glass balls and ancient glass decorations which were kept in dusty little boxes.

“The memory of that barrow has stayed with me. I always notice if somebody is wheeling a barrow around.

“The passing of the wheelbarrow culture in places like the Post Office and British Rail seems to me to mark the end of an era. There’s not the same romance about a forklift truck.”

DR ANTHONY STORR Psychiatrist “The childhood Christmas I remember best was the year I didn’t know it was Christmas at all. I would have been about five or six and I was ill with chickenpox. Nobody told me that Christmas was coming and I remember the absolute surprise of being woken up to be told that it was Christmas morning.

“I had my stocking and presents but somehow I had missed all the usual excitement and preparation. Christmas came as a complete surprise, right out of the blue.

“I had a brother and two sisters, all very much older than me, and always felt like an only child. I don’t know why nobody told me it was Christmas.

“It was a very, very long time ago but I still vividly remember the shock of finding out that what I thought was just an ordinary day was Christmas. ”

RT REV HUGH MONTEFIORE Former Bishop of Birmingham whose autobiography Oh God, What Next? was recently published by Hodder and Stoughton “Being Jewish, my family celebrated Chanukah, the festival of lights and the liberation of the Jews, just before Christmas. But we also enjoyed a secular Christmas (like most people do today) with food and drink and jollification which has nothing to do with religion.

“Very frum Jewish families give each other Christmas presents instead. We had turkey and plum pudding and I remember my mother always refused to put sixpences in the pudding because she was convinced my father would swallow them.

“As a child I used to go and shake Santa Claus’s hand in department stores and once I remember writing him a letter which I gave to my parents to post.

“Our home in Kensington was decorated with holly and mistletoe (which aren’t Christmas symbols anyway) and we had a tree with decorations on it. My two elder brothers and I always hung a stocking on the end of our bed on Christmas Eve and found it filled with all kinds of interesting things in the morning.

“When I became a Christian at the age of 16, Christmas had a new meaning for me but I still stayed with my parents and joined in their secular Christmas. On my first Christian Christmas I went to church on Christmas Day and learnt about the lovely carols and all the things we associate with the religiosity of the celebration.”