A Christmas Hope

Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.

--A Christmas Carol, Dickens.

Britons last week could only hope that the Ghost of Christmas Present would provide a transformation for them, as it had for Scrooge. Instead, they chuckled grimly over a bitter Christmas jest, "Starve with Strachey, shiver with Shin-well" (Fuel Minister Emanuel Shinwell)*, watched the delivery of the King's traditional gift of a hundredweight of coal to the needy of four Windsor parishes, read hungrily about the progress of a British freighter, the Highland Monarch, as it butted through the foggy Atlantic. Aboard were 250,000 turkeys from Argentina, which would help feed many a hungry Briton this Christmas.

Able Food Minister John Strachey (whose wife had no guarantee yet of a turkey for her husband) had granted extra rations of an extra pound and a half of sugar for everybody, an extra half-pound of candy for those under 18 and over 70, and an extra eightpence worth of meat. But even though shops were more abundantly stocked with pineapples, tangerines and other fruits, Britons would not eat as well this Christmas as they had in 1945.

* Town & Country Planning Minister Lewis Silkin also got his share of panning. Sly residents of the little hamlet of Stevenage, which had furiously opposed Silkin's plans to reconstruct the town along model Socialist lines (TIME, May 20), Russified their railroad station signs and signposts leading into the town to read "Silkingrad."

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