Another Christmas. I love Christmas. I have always loved Christmas. I always will love Christmas.
Why? Three reasons. The Personal. The Spiritual. The Animal.
When I little girl, my mother and my father both loved Christmas, and it was a time when they were happy with the season and happy with each other and with me. This was unusual.
My mother was a flamboyant depressive – by which I mean that her depression had a theatrical nature – we were its audience as well as its victims.
For instance, when wallpapering the sitting room she needed to let us know that she was wallpapering the sitting room, and perhaps would always be wallpapering the sitting room, into some vast eternal sitting room in the sky where time has ceased to be. To indicate this she made us a nice tea, potato pie and mince, hot and in the oven, and directed us to serve it and eat it while she remained somewhere near the ceiling, like a domestic Michelangelo in a modest Sistine Chapel. Or like a bird of prey on a wire.
And when we wondered what to do about her tea, she said, as she painted on, ‘I’ll just have a sandwich up the ladder.’
She was still up the ladder when I went to bed, and she was still up the ladder when I got up for school the next morning.
Unsurprising then, that when I told her I had fallen in love with a girl, her varicose vein burst like a geyser, and as it hit the centre light she said ‘We’ve just had that ceiling decorated.’
But at Christmas she was never depressed. She loved it when I came hope from school dragging behind me a mile of paper chains, made all afternoon in greens and reds and blues and purples. Out came the drawing pins, and the chains were strung from the corners of the room to the centre light, then the string went up for the Christmas cards, then she made ham sandwiches with pickled onions and we inspected the fairy lights.
For some reason our fairylights were crocodile-clipped to a car battery, which is odd because we never had a car. I don’t know if this is because the lights were very old-fashioned – well they were, or if it was because Mrs W always believed that anything plugged in would someday explode.
Every Christmas Eve my father, who was a patient man, and a child at heart, stuck on a cotton wool beard and a red bobble hat and left a pillow case of presents at the foot of my bed. They could not really afford those presents, and for all the trials and troubles of my childhood, I know that both of them tried harder then I understood, and I know that neither of them knew how to be a parent, because they had been so badly parented themselves in their different ways, and because in those days, if you adopted a baby, especially a tricky one like me, nobody was there to explain how it would feel, how it would be, and perhaps, can I say this… how it would never be…
I DON’T mean that adopted kids can’t feel like your own – whatever that means, I mean that things are different, and the difference can be a rich place or it can be too scary to go near.
Mrs W baked mince pies – I owe every mince pie I make to her – and puddings and cakes, because she enjoyed baking.
She always had her hair done for Christmas, put her corset on every day, and wore a new apron. Both of them had their false teeth professionally cleaned. I liked going with them to get this done because nearly everybody else of their age was getting it done too, and there was a queue of people, teeth out, waiting for their dentures to be boiled and scrubbed and re-seated. Why was it the fashion to have all your teeth out in the forties and fifties?
My parents adopted me late, and because we lived in the north of England we were somehow living in an earlier time. I don’t feel I was a kid in the sixties at all, but a forties/fifties child, with hand-knitted jumpers and parents with no teeth.
I never fell out of love with Christmas. I like preparing for it, thinking about it, being in it. But I guess that it because it was the happy time of the year, and happiness wasn’t that easy to come by at home, though I never think of myself as an unhappy child… troubled, furious, unsocialised, unadapted, but not unhappy.
And the spiritual? We know that the Church took over Pagan festivals, and that while there is no clear date for the birth of Jesus, locating it near to the old Saturnalia, and the winter Solstice on December 21st, held the newer religious story in close contact with earlier reverential worship.
The winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, is a dark time, and was traditionally a fire festival – a way of lighting the dark, which is what the Church understood the birth of Jesus to be – a way of lighting the dark.
I never look to the Bible for literal factual truth – the Jews have always understood that the Scriptures are neither a geography nor a history, but a developing emotional and imaginative revelation, which is why, in Torah, the commentary is as important as the text, and each generation must add its own commentary – in other words, scripture isn’t relevant because it is unchanging – a fixed point in a moving world, but because it is strong enough, central enough and eternal enough to change its interpretation, without losing its message. Not rigidity but a breathing living daily experience.
I realise that Fundamentalists of all faiths cannot accept this.
At Christmas I read the story in Matthew and Luke (the accounts are very different) and in the right spirit, I write my own version, which is what THE LION THE UNICORN AND ME really is.
At Christmas, which should be a pause, and which should have nothing to do with how much you can spend and eat and drink, there is a little crack in time for meditation and contemplation, to be with friends and to be alone – yes always to be alone, for only in that alone space can we drop down to deepest peace. It is not about being lonely, and it isn’t about being a hermit, but time with yourself is time with past present and future, and Christmas is about all time being present, and perhaps above the surface of our minds, when usually we are sunk in it – time passing but not being noticed as time, only as events in time, but time itself, when felt, is mysterious. It can only be felt alone.
And I could never miss out the animal – not when I let myself be a donkey with a golden nose.
The smells, tastes, feel of Christmas, whether it’s hands in the flour, or the meat in the oven, or the rejoicing champagne smell as the cork is popped (never trust a man who doesn’t like champagne – its smell is entirely female).
And there are fires to light and holly to bring in and wood to stack and sprouts to be picked and walks to be had, and the sudden rush of brandy at the back of the throat on a freezing day, and the white air in your lungs, and a run through the first frost and into the red of the winter sun, and the dark wings of birds flying home, and you, a creature in a natural world, and the feel of your heart and your blood, and the utter delight in a body that’s yours, and saying yes.
I don’t know if the movie will be any good but I know how good the story is, and I shall be reading it AGAIN (one of the great pleasures of Christmas is repetition).
And I want to sit by my fire and read books and play with the kids and go for walks, and I am quite glad that my girlfriend is going away with her daughter and some friends, because where I want to be is home, is here, as I am now, with the fire lit and the candles on the mantelpiece, and a good glass of Sloe Vodka made in October with hedgerow sloes and horrible vodka now transformed into something marvellous.
And, Christmas Day, BBC 1 915am DON’T MISS my one hour kids’ special starring Una Stubbs and David Calder, and directed by Torchwood Brian Kelly. It’s called INGENIOUS.
And last but not least, on December 29th 2008 after he had been with me for Christmas, my father died. I am so glad he was here.
To everyone who has suffered loss this year, much gentleness to you, and may the renewing spirit of Christmas walk where you walk.
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