My Christmas memories are good and bad – but Big Issue provided the most cheer

One Christmas I was given a goose by the foreman of the Queen’s butcher – Cobb & Co – in London’s Knightsbridge. Not a turkey or a chicken, but a large goose that was all white and given in the closing minutes of business on 24 December 1960 – as an afterthought.

“Some posh ponce has ordered it and not picked it up,” the foreman told me, explaining why I was being so indulged. I was the last butcher’s boy to leave the premises, held back to sweep up the sawdust from the shop floor. 

By the time I had got on the Piccadilly Line to Earl’s Court, then the District Line to Fulham Broadway, and had walked for 10 minutes to our block of council flats, I was exhausted. The bird was enormously heavy. It took all night to cook the thing. The chicken that my mum had bought stayed in the fridge for Boxing Day. We were going to have a goose, a very Victorian offering but unheard of in the British working classes. My father knew how to cook it, though, and did a fine job and made Christmas Day a joy, meat-wise. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

But I was deeply disturbed. I was surrounded by trouble and was always in it. I couldn’t understand why there was so much hatred either. I started the year 1961 thinking I needed to be in the army so that I could get some control in my life. I would join when I officially left school aged 15 in a few months’ time. Unofficially I had already left school because I had been excluded by the headmaster of St Thomas More school in Chelsea. He called me a rotten apple. He said they would fill in the register for me so I wouldn’t get into trouble with the juvenile court, where I was a ward of court. 

This coming Christmas will be my 79th. The one I talk about above was when I was still under parental control. Christmases had marginally improved since my first one in 1946 in a Notting Hill slum. Seven slum Christmases were followed by two in a Catholic orphanage. Then five in a Fulham council flat. Where money was so tight we made decorations out of old newspapers. 

Two Christmases on leave from a reformatory followed, and they were joyous. The freedom of being away from officers controlling your every move. There followed many where for some strange reason once Christmas reared its head I was without a place to go. I still associate Christmas with loneliness. With a sense that it’s the worst day of the year that tells you you’ve failed as a human being. Or that you have so screwed up your life that you’re like a blank spot on the planet. People don’t want to know you. 

Read more:

• I’ve written a Jane Austen spinoff for my 80th birthday. Help me sell a million copies
• I love to paint, but it can’t cut me off from the world entirely
• Want a reason to be cheerful? Across Europe there are people trying to do the same thing as Big Issue

I suppose the worst Christmas was being excluded from a party in Earl’s Court only then to kick the glass door in, only for it to be plastic; meaning it broke but did not shatter. A knife-like piece of plastic slit my vein and caused me to bleed heavily. I limped to the hospital and nearly passed out. They saved me. But I was rescued early in the New Year when my Jamaican friend Danny in the World’s End, Chelsea, took me in and gave me a room in his house. I had no reason to feel sorry for myself thereafter. 

The early Big Issue Christmases were glorious because you had a lot of people in need of togetherness. Big Issue challenged loneliness simply by being there for the homeless. It was a great feeling that we were with people who were not ‘blank spots on the planet’. That their humanity had been recognised. And that homeless people were enjoying a kind of renaissance of feeling. Because as they sold their magazines they had a new relationship with people in the street. Not like begging, where the public found it difficult to relate to beggars. 

This Christmas I will be on TikTok doing a kind of 12 Days of Christmas. Every second day I will be shown in a little film made by Juliette who works in our social media team. I have spent time doing little stories wherein the main message is to buy Big Issue – and don’t forget to take the magazine. So many people give the money but don’t take Big Issue. This destroys the income Big Issue needs to make to run itself.  

We trade in the marketplace. If people don’t take the magazine they may support the vendor financially but they fail to support the whole reason why they have become vendors of Big Issue. 

I am a natural-born talker. I cannot be shut up at times. But I am not an actor. I cannot remember lines. One time It took me 12 hours to do a one-minute ad. So when I have to stand and read and then speak, I lose my naturally born bonhomie. So please be kind if you do look at our TikToks and I appear wooden and unreal. Put me before a room of a thousand, however, with no preparation and not knowing what I am going to say, and I will talk non-stop for an hour. I extemporise, make it up as I go along. More of a stand-up comic than a seasoned campaigner. 

If Big Issue is to carry on with its work it will need to keep selling magazines, and purchasers will need to keep taking the magazines. That’s why I’ve been dragooned into doing 12 Days of Christmas on TikTok. Do look out for us on the social media that is crammed full of people trying to grab your attention. 

My favourite Christmas is to go out to a restaurant and sit and eat and enjoy. I’m not a home bird. But it seems my family are more socially stable than me and want to be cosseted at home. 

It also makes me sad that there are so many inheritors of poverty, like me in my beginnings, who have little or nothing. And for this one day they are reminded, big time. Think of the 400,000 children we have campaigned for who were caught by the two-child cap which thankfully the government has seen fit to remove. Punishing the children for conditions they did not create seems inhuman. 

My best Christmas? When I was pregnant with one of my five children.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life this Christmas.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – or support online with a vendor support kit or a subscription – and help people work their way out of poverty with dignity.