Personally, Christmas was something to look forward to back then. You hadn't yet grown up to be some semblance of a disappointment to your parents.
Your grandparents were not only alive, but relatively younger and healthier. Folk actually went carolling, stopping door to door, eating food, tart, cake, ham, turkey, candy at every stop.
People actually hung up lights that required coordination and planning. You were too young to know the financial state of your household since you didn't ran it, but chances are your folks did enough, to make you feel loved and wanted to some degree and made it as commercial or homegrown as they could cause they had the spirit back then.
Grandmom used to cook/bake serious shyt and I'd watch my grandfather butcher a goat and slaughter a pig and take the bucket of meat back up to the house while I proudly walked with the head.
Huge pot of goat head soup, glazed ham, bagged ham, saltfish, coconut, pineapple, guava, peach and all other flavours in between. Black cake, that weirdo ass blood pudding, Rum Cake. Imagine your fave Jamaican restaurant that always out of shyt you love, using your kitchen as a base.
We were mid to upper middle class back then. I got to fukk with both the Sears and Jc Penny catalogue. Nerf guns, bop it robots, Super Soaker with the backpack tank that leaked a week in and wet my pants down so the neighbourhood taught I pissed myself one day when we was out having a water fight.
Crossfire board game, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid and Super Punchout for Snes. Had an autistic cousin who loved putting together them huge ass lego sets and we'd stay under the tree Xmas night rotating between helping him fix the shyt up and playing Sega Genesis between sips of rum we'd sneak from the old drunken nikkas outside playing Dominoes and arguing about who's older, with a throng of neighbours about.
If you was a kid and you was poor, you came over to my house if we was cool and kicked it. Just make sure you bathed, though. Yeah, you can take some plates back, Grandma made sure you did cause your mom's ain't shyt or your pops had more than one family.
Oddly enough I can NEVER remember it raining in a Christmas day back in them days, especially at night, so when you went outside you'd see a cacophony of houses filled with twinkling lights, some choreographed, some plain and a nikka would sit outside, 4th cup of goat head soup hoping they each house was as festive as mine, on some Sonder shyt.
Then you'd go to sleep AND DO THE shyt AGAIN, because the British take the 26th of December off to celebrate "Boxing day". Boxing day was supposed to be Christmas for servants and the help since they had to work for royalty/rich folk on Christmas but was allowed to take left over meat and food home in....boxes, to celebrate the day after.
People just gave more of a ahit back then. Even if I was in my 30's then to now, I'd prolly feel the same way answering this question in my 50's, cause today don't none of that shyt happen.
Grandparents gone to glory. Mom's technically got another family on another island. Nobody don't carol anymore, you'd be lucky to see lights on a porch much less around a house. Short of buying cheap tablets and loading them up with non troubling cartoons, I can barely feel any warmth on my side of the family anymore save for me buying some shyt for my bro and possibly getting a few ounces of homegrown weed from a Rastafarian brethren I help out on occasion.
I took them days for granted and I think I'm too defeated, jaded and uninspired at the moment to try and get that shyt back. Hopefully I will, for the sake of any kids I might sire one day, hopefully. But just like Internet in the mid 2000's you had to be there to know what I'm blathering about.
