A Very British Christmas: Twelve Days of Discomfort and Joy

You can’t write a book about the British Christmas without speaking to a load of British people, and I’m indebted to the many kind souls who spared me time on the phone or in person to recount their stories and dispense their wisdom.

Special thanks are due to Selena McCubbin, Sarah Bee, Jenny McIvor and Keith Adams, all of whom spent a number of hours sitting at my kitchen table talking about Christmas when they had far more pressing matters to attend to.

My sister, my mum and my dad are mentioned in this book from time to time. I’m grateful to them for not taking out a super-injunction, and also for being there every Christmas, without fail, ready and willing to celebrate in the way we always do.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Twelve Gifts Unwrapping

Eleven Sherries Swigging

Ten Carols Screeching

Nine Journeys Trekking

Eight Channels Hopping

Seven Parties Dodging

Six Bargains Grabbing

Five Broken Limbs!

Four Appalling Burps

Three Spare Beds

Two Awkward Hugs

And A Nice Fibre-Optic Tree

Sources for quotations at beginning of chapters

Copyright

Introduction

Imagine if all your Christmases did actually come at once. Whoever coined that idiom was clearly trying to evoke an image of sheer delight, profound happiness and nothing going massively wrong, but the British Christmas doesn’t always turn out that way. Yes, sometimes all the gifts are perfect, everyone is on great form and no one chokes on a mince pie. But on other occasions there will be a heated argument about Tony Blair, or you’ll tip back on your chair and fall through a glass cabinet, or your narcissistic boyfriend will give you a framed photograph of himself as a gift, or you’ll accidentally set your cardigan on fire, or you’ll find yourself on your own in Ruislip and wondering how it ended up like this.

However hard we might wish it, Christmas doesn’t automatically shower good times upon us. Instead, it acts as a kind of emotional multiplier. If things are good, they feel glorious; if things are bad, they feel dreadful. This all makes for a rather intense period of time, and we can indeed be thankful that our Christmases don’t come all at once, and instead space themselves out evenly over the course of a lifetime at regular twelve-month intervals.

As we get older and those Christmases tick by, our attitude towards the whole event changes. We begin our lives having absolutely no understanding of it; we lie there bemused, surrounded by people much older than us who are wearing paper hats and behaving in an unusual way. Within a few years we become ridiculously excited by it, counting the number of sleeps until Christmas, driving ourselves and our families nuts with anticipation. Once we emerge from childhood it becomes an exercise in nostalgia; we remember the way our Christmases used to be and either make great efforts to recreate them, or just wistfully reflect on the fact that we all change year on year, and Christmas inevitably changes too.

The reasons why we’ve ended up celebrating Christmas the way we do are a bit complicated. The credit (or blame) is often laid at the door of Charles Dickens; his hugely popular A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, gave us a rough blueprint of how he felt a British Christmas ought to be properly celebrated, and it’s assumed that we just started blindly following his instructions to the letter. But while Dickens crystallised the Christmas celebration and made it sing for his readers, it’s not as if he made the whole thing up. In The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, written a couple of decades earlier, the American writer Washington Irving also describes a Christmas spent in Britain, with honourable mentions going to hot booze (‘the richest and raciest wines, highly spiced and sweetened’), masses of food (‘The table was literally loaded with good cheer’) and bored humans (‘a fat-headed old gentleman silently engaged in the discussion of a huge plateful of turkey’). In that sense, Christmas hasn’t changed much at all.

But in other ways, it definitely has. Over the decades we’ve incorporated countless innovations into our traditional celebration: cards, crackers, trees, Royal Christmas messages, advocaat, Slade, Eric and Ernie, Quality Street, John Lewis adverts and much else besides. On top of that are all the family traditions and personal habits, completely unique to you and your kin, which you’d have trouble explaining to anyone outside your immediate circle. That’s the kind of thing that I’m fascinated by, and as a consequence this book feels like less a tribute to Christmas and more a tribute to humanity; it features dozens of stories that give a sense of our uselessness under pressure, our unquenchable joie de vivre, our maverick imaginations, our propensity to behave badly and our sense of the absurd.

Luton, Christmas 1992

When my brother and I were little we both used to collect Panini football stickers. They would have the date of birth of each football player on the sticker, and one year we noticed that Gary McAllister was born on Christmas Day. Now, my family loves Christmas. We really get into it, but we’re not religious. So every year since then, our family has celebrated the birthday of baby Gary McAllister. We’ve just transferred all the stuff to do with Jesus over to Gary McAllister.

Last year my brother sent me a Christmas card that was just pictures of Gary McAllister. We have advent calendars with pictures of Gary McAllister in festive scenes behind each door. My sister-in-law does it, my mum really likes it, too, and on his blessed day of birth we raise a glass to Gary McAllister at Christmas lunch. To be honest, my stepdad isn’t quite as interested in Gary McAllister, but the rest of us have completely embraced the tradition. It’s dumb as hell, but we love it. Gary was fairly famous in the 1990s – I think he played for Leeds? – but no one really remembers him now. We do, though. We love baby Gary.

A. M.

McAllimas¹ certainly has a ring to it, but Jesus is obviously the figure around which Christmas pivots – little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay, about to be rudely awoken by some mooing cattle. (I would like the word ‘mooing’ to be incorporated into ‘Away In A Manger’ instead of ‘lowing’, not that it’ll happen.) But a warning: religion doesn’t feature very prominently in this book – not because I actively spurn belief systems, but if the publishers had wanted it to have an ecclesiastical ring to it they’d probably have asked Reverend Richard Coles to write it instead. In fact, one of the most enjoyable bits of putting this book together was to talk about Christmas with people of other faiths, people who might observe Hanukkah or Diwali or Mawlid during the winter months, but who still ‘do Christmas’ – not in solemn reverence to the Christ Child, but just because they value all the other stuff that Christmas brings: the family, the food, the giving, the receiving, the Top of the Pops Christmas specials. This is the stuff that unites us – well, almost all of us.

Because there are people who don’t like Christmas, and I wanted to hear from them too. Rev. Martin Turner gave a Christmas service at London’s Methodist Central Hall in 2014 where he talked about the lost and the lonely. ‘Guilt weighs them down,’ he said, ‘work wears them out, poverty imprisons them, lack of direction confuses them, the struggles of life agitate them, relationships come and go and hurt them, there seems to be no rest from the pressures of life, no still place, no Silent Night, no Holy Night.’ Many of us battle with these things on some level, and it’s all felt more acutely at Christmas. So you’ll find sad stuff in this book, too, things about love, and loss, and dashed hopes, and breaking your arm while trying to stuff a turkey. That kind of thing shouldn’t be glossed over, so I haven’t.

‘I’m not sure this book would have been commissioned in the US,’ said an American friend of mine the other day, ‘because people consider Christmas to be such a precious and magical thing. Americans have awful times at Christmas, too, but the idea that the awkwardness would actually be acknowledged is ridiculous.’ However, ridiculousness is perfectly acceptable in my book (literally), so I’ve tried to acknowledge all the weirdness of the winter holiday, all its idiosyncratic splendour and all the magnificent flaws dotted throughout it like sultanas in a Christmas pudding. I apologise for rather predictably dividing Christmas up into ‘twelve days’ (as we know, Christmas seems to run for more like fifty or sixty), but across those twelve chapters our cultural icons will be saluted, our national customs dissected, and the people who’ve eaten all the turkey and lived to tell the tale will tell us those tales. Tidings of discomfort, tidings of joy.

Twelve Gifts Unwrapping

Dawn: I love Christmas, I love birthdays. I get more excited about watching people open their presents than they do.

Director: You don’t seem to have bought much, Lee?

Lee: No, I don’t buy into it. It’s a con. What I usually say to Dawn is work out what she’s spent on me, and take it out of my wallet.

The Office, Christmas 2003

Nothing says ‘I love you’ like eighteen stock cubes in a limited-edition tin. It may not seem that way when you unwrap it and wonder why you’ve been earmarked as the perfect recipient of some dehydrated broth, but you have to remember that gift giving doesn’t come naturally to everyone. The combination of an obligation to buy presents along with a lack of imagination and an immovable Christmas Eve deadline results in high-pressure situations, with people getting shower mats they don’t want and being expected to show gratitude for them. The random selection of items that pile up under the average British Christmas tree is testament to our erratic emotional intelligence; we can be pretty good at giving the right things, but where we truly excel is giving completely the wrong things and then being told in passive-aggressive style not to worry about it because ‘it’s the thought that counts’, when it evidently isn’t.

We’ve been giving gifts at Christmas for many years. The recipients inevitably give us gifts in return, and so the following year we have to give them gifts again, and so it continues, for ever, in what French sociologist Marcel Mauss referred to as a ‘self-perpetuating system of reciprocity’, but in French. The whole thing has now escalated to a point where a truly desperate person can (and will) spend a meagre sum on an ‘I’m A Twat’ mug for their great-uncle. This is something that Dickens’s Ghost Of Christmas Future could never have foreseen.

In 1996, a Canadian academic called Russell Belk came up with six characteristics of the perfect gift, and it’s worth listing them here, if only to observe how few of those boxes are ticked by an ‘I’m A Twat’ mug:

1. The giver makes an extraordinary sacrifice.

2. The giver wishes solely to please the recipient.

3. The gift is a luxury.

4. The gift is something uniquely appropriate to the recipient.

5. The recipient is surprised by the gift.²

6. The recipient desired the gift and is delighted by it.

Number four is critical. Choosing a gift that’s carefully tailored to the needs and wishes of a friend or relative requires levels of insight and empathy that are beyond many of us, and that’s where luxury bath salts come in. But for those who feel embarrassed every time they buy luxury bath salts, inspiration can be sought from businesses such as The Present Finder, set up in 2000 by Mark Ashley Miller. ‘I always enjoyed finding unusual things for people,’ he said to me, ‘and I’d like to think that I’m good at it. For example, my wife likes to wash her hair every other day, but she can never remember whether she washed her hair the previous day or not. So last year I got her a personalised gift, Fiona’s Hair Wash Day, which she can put up in the shower and move a token along each day so she knows if she washed it or not. She uses it every day; it’s really useful, and it’s unusual. It ticks all the boxes.’

“I haven’t a clue which one of these he might like.”

Whatever skill it might take to come up with something as spine-chillingly practical as Fiona’s Hair Wash Day, I don’t have it. I’m rarely able to detect a need that someone has and then satisfy it with something clever tied up with ribbons. I’ve had a couple of brilliant flashes of inspiration in my time, but only a couple, and my persistent inability to think of decent gifts for others is mirrored by a failure to come up with ideas for things I want for myself. Every year my mum asks me and I never know what to say; one year I remember her ringing me for the fourth time with a note of desperation in her voice and saying, ‘Cutlery?’ (The threat of cutlery, or worse, ‘surprises’, forced me to come up with some ideas which, in retrospect, probably weren’t as good as cutlery or ‘surprises’.) This trait is shared by many people, and particularly men, according to Mark. ‘Everyone seems to struggle with buying things for men,’ he says, ‘because typically a man says, “I don’t need anything, and if I did want something I’d buy it myself.”’

Blackburn, Christmas 1988

One Christmas I bought my dad a Remington Fuzz Away. Not unusually, it was very hard to buy presents for him, but he absolutely adored this thing. He used it on all his shirts, other people’s clothing, furniture. He would look you over, notice any pilling on the fabric, and ask if you wanted him to remove it. He told everyone about the Fuzz Away and used it until it fell apart, and then he worked out how to hold it together so it still functioned. I never saw him as keen about anything, ever, let alone a Christmas gift.

S. S.

In 2008, a company called Life of Jay responded to the apathetic shrugs of British men in the lead-up to Christmas with a product called Nothing, consisting of a clear Perspex ball full of air. At a stroke, the company fulfilled the specifically stated wishes of several thousand men; they asked for nothing, and they received Nothing in return. Nothing (or ‘Nothing’) wasn’t what they really wanted, of course – but it’s their own fault for never expressing any delight at small things over the course of the year, and instead developing secret desires for ridiculously big things like yachts, or expensive Bang & Olufsen speakers that promise ‘optimum precision in sound’. These things are forever destined to remain pipe dreams, and men should set their sights a little lower, maybe somewhere just above luxury bath salts.

The annual tit-for-tat reciprocity of Christmas giving³ begins with Christmas cards, a tradition that only started in the mid nineteenth century but one for which the British continue to show great enthusiasm. The Christmas card industry is surprisingly resilient; we bought more than a billion cards in 2016, and they’re still seen as a more appropriate display of familial affection than sending your uncle an e-card with a virus that key logs his computer and sends his credit card details to a hacker in Minsk. Unlike festive JPEGs, the exchange of physical cards is constrained by Royal Mail’s last posting dates, which feels like a quaint concept in this Internet age. Some people fail to get their cards sent in time because they’re disorganised, but others do it very deliberately as part of a covert psychological operation.

My mum keeps a list of all her friends. Every year she goes down the list and writes everyone a card. Then she waits. The day after the last posting date for Christmas, she puts a second-class stamp on the envelope and then posts them. This ensures that if someone hasn’t already sent her a card by that point, they don’t have time to get one back to her. My mum thinks that these people have to remember her of their own volition, and not be reminded with a card. If they fail to remember, they get removed from the list.

But if she forgets someone and they send her a card, she obviously has time to send one back. So she doesn’t hold herself to the same standards that she holds everyone else. And if everyone adopted her system, the whole Christmas card industry would collapse. It’s ridiculous.

G. G., Nottingham

If you thought it was difficult to think of original gift ideas, spare a thought for the people who are tasked with designing and writing our Christmas cards, year in, year out. The struggle to come up with new concepts that might appeal to a fickle British public gets more difficult by the year. Millennials may have no interest in a traditional scene featuring a wintery landscape, twinkling stars and Robin Redbreast; they may prefer something a bit edgier, like someone in a Santa hat flicking a V-sign with the caption: ‘Fuck Christmas, I’m Getting Twatted Instead.’

I spoke to an editor at a greetings-card firm on condition of anonymity because she didn’t want to get the sack, which is fair enough. ‘You’d think it would be easy,’ she said, ‘but there’s a lot to think about. For example, you can’t use the word “I” in a greeting in case the card is being sent from more than one person. The main problem is making the messages seem personal, but also sufficiently vague for lots of people to want to buy them. And every year we have to come up with new Christmas puns, but they’ve all been done. They really have. We’ve gone a bit delirious with it, honestly.’

I used to spend every Christmas within a few miles of the Welsh village of Bethlehem, which in December becomes a magnet for people who want their cards to have a Christmassy postmark. (Most people don’t even read postmarks, but again, it’s the thought that counts.) ‘People come a very long way to get a stamp,’ says local resident Des Oldfield, ‘but we don’t actually have a Post Office here any more. For a while people were taking their cards to Llandeilo instead, and they were sent on to Cardiff to be postmarked with “Bethlehem”! What a scam! They may as well do it in London! So we offer our own stamping service from a café here in Bethlehem during December, from Monday to Friday. The post office lets us stamp the envelopes as long as we don’t frank the stamp itself. It’s a nice oblong blue stamp which says, “The Hills Of Bethlehem”, and I think people prefer it – because who reads postmarks anyway?’ (Exactly what I was saying, Des.)

The other unusual postmark knocking about over Christmas is ‘Reindeerland’, which adorns envelopes sent by Father Christmas (who definitely exists) to children who have made the effort to write to him. In the UK he has been assigned the rather cute postcode XM4 5HQ, and every year hundreds of thousands of children use it to send beseeching begging letters. He actually replies in person, and it’s definitely not dealt with by a team of people in Royal Mail’s national returns centre in Belfast. OK, hang on a second. If you’re excited about the prospect of Father Christmas visiting you this year, I suggest you turn to page 17 while we deal with some issues that don’t concern you.

Birmingham, Christmas 1988

I grew up poor in an Islamic family in a terraced house near Aston Villa football ground. We had nothing. My dad was a jailbird and my mother worked as the cleaner at the local fire station. But growing up, as the days got shorter and the nights got colder, came the onset of Christmas, and it was the best thing ever. Trees in people’s front windows, the tinsel… Christmas adverts were joyous and we always had a catalogue. We never ordered from it, but I would thumb through, picking out the toys I wanted, knowing I would never get them.

In our front room the fireplace had issues. It used to have a gas fire, but we couldn’t pay the gas bill so my dad ripped it out and taped it up with a piece of white board. But for me this was a problem. How was I going to get the present Santa had thrown down the chimney for me? The other kids got presents. Santa surely wouldn’t deny a Muslim child because, you know, he’s Santa. So I figured my presents were being stockpiled behind that piece of card. They were safe. I told no one in my family in case they took them, but Santa and I had a pact.

When the card eventually got taken away, there was nothing but dust and cobwebs. I thought with all my heart Santa had my back. Instead he turned out to be a bastard. Christmas is a bastard. Doesn’t stop me loving it, though.

A. S.

It’s impossible to write a book about Christmas without addressing the question of belief in Father Christmas. Last year I was invited on a radio programme to talk about matters pertaining to Christmas, and I was sternly informed by the show’s producers not to make any reference to the possibility of Father Christmas not being real for fear that irate parents would jam the switchboards, furious at their offspring having been mentally scarred. In 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority received hundreds of complaints about a Littlewoods advert that appeared to suggest it was parents, not Father Christmas, who brought presents into the home. The ASA allowed the advert to continue running, but preservation of belief in Father Christmas, rather like vaccination, does rely on everyone buying into it in order to avoid widespread misery.

Runcorn, Christmas 1977

In the mid to late 1970s, having a new hi-fi was a big deal, and taping ambient sound from that hi-fi felt like entering the realms of science fiction. One year my dad suggested that we just ‘leave the tape recording’ overnight, so we could hear the sound of Santa arriving. We left out a mince pie and some brandy as usual, and before we went to bed we hit those two chunky Play and Record buttons simultaneously.

On Christmas morning, Dad played the tape back. After a while, we heard footsteps, an exclamation – ‘my, what a lovely mince pie, ho, ho, ho’ and a jangling of sleigh bells, which my mum had contributed to add that important level of verisimilitude. To a 5- or 6-year-old mind, this was irrefutable evidence. It kept us believing for another year, anyway.

R. B.

Father Christmas hasn’t always been a benevolent bringer of presents. We’re told by historian Martin Johnes that Father Christmas was originally ‘an unruly and sometimes even debauched figure who symbolised festive celebrations’, but he merged with the American figure of Santa Claus during the nineteenth century to become a red-coated one-man logistical solutions unit. (Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the multinational force of Coca-Cola that imposed a bearded, rotund figure upon unwilling Christians. He was already chubby and dressed in red and white before Coke started promoting him.) By the early to mid twentieth century Santa (or Father Christmas) became the figure that was blueprinted a hundred years earlier in the American poem ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ (also known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’), and as the reindeer, sleighs, toys and chimneys of that poem became cemented in our culture, Father Christmas became almost too big a deal. Telling the truth to children was out of the question. So we keep up the pretence for a period that can last for as long as a decade, partly to maintain an element of Christmas magic, partly as a parenting tool to enforce good behaviour by threatening his non-appearance. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, you better tidy your bedroom.⁴

Essex, Christmas 1985

One year my parents couldn’t afford enough presents to fill our stockings from Santa, so they added some gifts from friends and family to bulk it up a bit. But they forgot to take the label off one of them, which was a mug, ‘With love from Ian’. I thought Santa had chosen me, of all the world’s children, to reveal his real name to, and was beside myself with excitement. I remember returning to school and telling everyone, but feigning nonchalance. ‘What? Yeah, his name’s Ian. He told me.’ What an idiot.