December 25 – I saw three ships go sailing by

GREETINGS all ye merrry ladies and gentlemen and a very merry Christmas to you all from all here at OTFD. We hope Santa brought you everything you hoped for, and if he did, we hope the various cuts and bruises sustained on all those new bikes are not too bad.

These days Christmas Day is football-less but it was not always so. There was a long tradition of professional football matches being played on the 25th stretching back to the latter part of the 19th century, and often clubs would play a match on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Frequently the fixtures were local derbies so they were regularly the best attended matches of the season with many fans seeing their only match of the year at Christmas a special treat.

By the 1950s however the times they were a-changing and the football fraternity began to get a little bit tired of having to run all over the country playing football instead of scoffing down turkey and Quality Streets and playing charades. The last time a full programme was played on Christmas Day was 1957, although there were matches in 1959 between Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool in Division One and Coventry City and Wrexham in Division Three – and, in the last match of all, Blackpool beat Blackburn 4-2 in a Division One fixture at Bloomfield Road in 1965.

Christmas Day in 1948 saw the first appearance of one of the innovations of the football experience that is still with us today. Fans who arrived at Stamford Bridge to watch the Chelsea match against Portsmouth were the first ever to be able to purchase a matchday programme. It was 16 pages long and cost sixpence (two and a half pence in today’s money) and was an instant hit, although the original creators had no idea it would one day be a vehicle for Ken Bates’ increasingly enraged and incoherent rantings.

The most famous Chrimbletide kick about was of course the unofficial truce between the German and British troops in 1914, which we told you about last year. While that event is one of the most remarkable and heart-warming in human history, spare a thought this Christmas for poor old Gary McAllister. Poor old Gary was born on Christmas Day, but will probably struggle to enjoy his combined birthday and Yuletide celebrations after jolly old Santa look-alike Ken Bates gave him the sack on the weekend. Ho ho ho Ken.

We’ll call it a day there so you can get back rooting around in drawers for batteries and struggling to construct whatever complicated presents were unwrapped this morning.