A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  “Well, Angela has certainly come out of her shell this evening.”

  You see the same disapproving tone in British tabloid newspapers, who publish pictures of debauched office parties spilling out onto the streets of provincial towns, like multiple stag dos happening at once, with a stern commentary about the declining morals of a once proud nation.10 Office Christmas parties might be unhealthy, they might even lead to a short spell in a police cell for the acting head of payroll who’s covering for Lorraine while she’s on maternity leave, but like them or not, they’re a part of our culture. In that fly-on-the-wall documentary of a typical British Christmas, Love Actually, Alan Rickman’s character states the typical approach to arranging one: ‘It’s basic, really,’ he says. ‘Find a venue, over-order on the drinks, bulk-buy the guacamole and advise the girls to avoid Kevin if they want their breasts unfondled.’ In truth, it might be better if everyone avoided everyone.

  Croydon, Christmas 1990

  I worked as part of a very dysfunctional team at a well-known shoe shop chain in south London. I remember that a goth ran the stock room, and he would write weird things on the shelves in permanent marker, like ‘I drink the vomit of the priestess’. The manager was this awful sleazy man, very large and sweaty, who had one of those wind-up clockwork penises on his desk.

  We had our office Christmas party inside the shop. We brought in sausage rolls, alcopops and strong lager, and we started making turbo shandies. Things got a bit out of control, and the sales staff ended up locking the manager in one of those metal cages with wheels that you transport stock around in, and then forgot about him.

  N. M.

  The mismatch between the overwhelming demand for venues and a woeful supply shortage means that the office Christmas-party season now begins in October, before Hallowe’en, and ends in early February, by which time people are sick to the back teeth of Christmas and the whole event feels like a Fire And Ice-themed hallucination. But whenever it happens, it can quickly morph into a drunken splurge of emotion following a year of tension over rejected expense claims and overlooked promotions.

  Manchester, Christmas 2009

  At our Christmas party the CEO got blind drunk and passed out. The new and enthusiastic HR manager woke him up to ask him to make a speech. Everyone was saying, ‘Nooo, don’t’, but it was too late and the now-awake CEO grabbed the mic and started ranting about how terrible everyone was at their jobs, picking on people one by one. Understandably, some people objected, which further enraged the CEO, who then punched the director of operations before passing out again.

  Another director said, ‘This is all your fault’, while pointing at the new HR manager, who burst into great drunken sobbing tears and everyone started shouting at his accuser for being cruel. Meanwhile, someone else tripped over outside while smoking a fag with his hands in his pockets. We sent him and his bloodied face to hospital in the same ambulance as two vomiting people who had alcohol poisoning.

  J. D.

  The many brands of painkiller, rehydration fluid and reflux suppressor that help people to deal with their hangovers tend to ramp-up their advertising campaigns in December, marketing themselves as the saviours of the gluttonous and the indulgent. Ridiculously, we tend to put these things very low down on our shopping lists.11 If, the morning after, you find a distressing absence of medication in the cupboard, there’s another option: hair of the dog. But while there’s plenty of dog hair to go around at Christmas, the evidence for it doing us any good is scant. We’re unlikely to benefit from seeking solace in whatever hurt us in the first place, and there’s an analogy I could draw here with a relationship I had in the early 1990s, but this isn’t really the time or place for that.

  Despite its often unedifying after-effects, we have limitless affection for hot booze (and particularly mulled wine) in the run-up to Christmas. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens writes of ‘seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam’, and describes how cash-strapped Bob Cratchit manages to knock together ‘some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons’ in order to place a boozy gloss on the poverty his family were having to endure that winter. We live in a country where the temperature doesn’t drop below freezing that often, and most of us have central heating, but we still feel the need to heat up vats of dubious liquor, make it palatable with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg and then ladle it into wooden goblets like a couple of Anglo Saxon revellers called Æthelbald and Eoforhild. The liquid might be billed as punch, mulled something-or-other, glögg (if you’ve got a thing about Vikings) or wassail (if you’re trying to lend your potent brew some historical legitimacy), but whatever it is, it gets you drunk more quickly than cold booze does. (I should add that I have no evidence for this theory other than my own weak anecdotal evidence. I did ask around, but it would seem that scientists have got better things to do than to test my unproven and probably incorrect theories about stuff that doesn’t matter, and who can blame them.)

  Hot booze is a surefire Christmas money-spinner for the struggling British pub. The booze you use doesn’t really matter; in the same way that cheap white wine becomes more palatable the colder it gets, heating up red wine or cider can mask all manner of unpleasantness. Get a bag or two of mulling spices, wang it in a cauldron on the bar, stick a cardboard sign on the side featuring a carefree snowman and you’re quids in. The mark-up may be substantial and the liquid rather toxic, but as customers we can’t complain. That money goes some way towards compensating bar staff for their unenviable Christmas workload: dealing with revellers who a) can’t hold their drink, b) keep asking what you think of their jumper, c) order two rounds at once, including cocktails you’ve never heard of, and d) cause general havoc to a Christmas soundtrack until 1 a.m. Spare a thought for those who serve us the alcohol that will soon compromise our dignity. After all, we did ask them for it. They’re only obeying orders.

  Peterborough, Christmas 1992

  Me and my partner, who I lived with, went to the pub on Christmas Eve and he proceeded to drink much more than I did. Much more. I woke up relatively early the next morning, and sensed a steamy fug in the bedroom. It was a bit… cowshed-y. It was only when I got up that I realised he’d wet the bed. It was Christmas Day, the mattress was sodden, and worse, he was still absolutely hammered.

  Initially he denied that he’d done it, which was ridiculous. Then he started to find it funny, but I was livid, and I told him that he’d ruined Christmas. He then went completely Basil Fawlty on me. ‘Right! I’ve ruined Christmas, have I? Well, in that case, why don’t I ruin Christmas completely?’ He marched down the stairs, over to the presents and unwrapped all of them, one by one, reading each label out to me as he did so. ‘So, Happy Christmas Uncle John, is it? Let’s see what’s in here, shall we?’ I just stood there, watching this drunken idiot ripping up paper. We’re not together any more, but I sometimes wonder if he remembers. It’s not something you’d forget, is it?

  K. M.

  We may all hope for the kind of soft-focus Christmas that we see in a Marks & Spencer advert, but alcohol can quickly turn from being an effective way of masking our emotions into suddenly becoming the bearer of great clarity. Situations that we’ve spent all year trying to avoid will suddenly be right there in the room, as honesty buttons are pushed and reality sets in. Drinkers find themselves doing things they really shouldn’t be doing, as booze traps them in their own worlds and causes them to unleash their own unique brand of embarrassing behaviour.

  Weybridge, Christmas 1988

  We always had big family Christmases. I’m one of seven, and we often had family friends over too. One Christmas when I was very young, I remember my primary school teacher turning up on the doorstep just as we were all sitting down for Christmas lunch. He had no trousers on. He was terribly apologetic about this, but he explained that he had no trousers with him either. My mum, who is very nice and would never have done anything other than invite him in, shooed him into the kitchen while she went upst
airs to fetch some trousers for him. It was funny at the time, but of course now I understand that he was an alcoholic.

  S. S.

  Wandering trouserless in the streets isn’t remotely festive, and there are evidently people for whom the drunken revelry of Christmas is problematic. The sight of wobbly guys and gals making fools of themselves can be amusing, but festive boozing might be more of an issue for Brits than we realise. The December wind-down to Christmas can become rammed with social engagements, many of them defined by drinking; the week before Christmas Day can feel like a Carlsberg-sponsored assault course with a first prize of some more Carlsberg; oh great, thanks. And if we’re not drinking to have a good time, we might be having a few glasses of this or that to alleviate the Christmas pressures of gift buying, food preparation, logistical arrangements and coping with the unusual whims of our in-laws. Perhaps tragically, we use alcohol to help us spend periods of time with people who, despite being part of our family, we just don’t know very well.

  ‘These days I make much more of a thing of, say, putting out the reindeer’s food,’ says Lucy Rocca, who’s been dry for six years and heads up Soberistas, a worldwide community of people trying to give up alcohol. ‘I used to rattle through all that stuff, because my entire focus was on getting drunk. It took precedence over everything. Now there’s a different emphasis that’s more about revisiting my childhood, I guess. And I don’t know whether it’s because people are thinking more about their health, or because they’re resisting the cultural pressure to drink, but these days we get a lot more people joining us in the run-up to Christmas rather than waiting until January.

  ‘Drinking can absolutely be about twinkly fairy lights and glamorous parties and lovely cosy evenings indoors, but the people for whom it isn’t… well, they’re not often thought about.’

  The thing is, it’s not always easy to let our hearts be light or, for that matter, put our troubles out of sight. Christmas boozing can assist with all that; it can help to clear out our mental in-trays and vigorously toe punt our worries into the New Year. But there, along with the dying Christmas trees, gym memberships and the dryest of dry Januarys, our problems will sit, waiting patiently for us to all turn up, regretful, dehydrated and wincing. Glass of Prosecco, anyone?

  Carlisle, Christmas 2007

  I had a traditional boozy Christmas Eve catch-up with some school friends in the pub. At closing time I went back to my mum’s, where I was staying in a small computer room. As soon as the lights went out things deteriorated pretty quickly. Trying to find my way out of the smallest room in the house at 3 a.m. was for some reason (and I still can’t fathom it) impossible, and I resorted to running my hands down every wall surface in a desperate attempt to locate a light switch.

  Unfortunately, all I succeeded in finding was the top of a bookcase, which I proceeded to pull over and towards me, pinning me to the bed. Disoriented, confused, surrounded by books and, crucially, leathered, I was now completely stuck, and my mum was trying to prise the door open (which was forced shut by the bookcase) and wondering what on earth was going on. I called her a ‘stupid woman’ and told her to go back to bed. Those were the first words I said to her on Christmas Day.

  D. K.

  Ten Carols Screeching

  Orphans [singing]: God bless Mr B at Christmas time and Baby Jesus too,

  If we were little pigs we’d sing piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,

  Piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,

  Oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo, piggy wiggy woo, oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo.

  Blackadder: Utter crap.

  Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1998

  Musicians are fond of wistfully recalling the first song they ever wrote. I’m now obliged to reveal that mine had the title ‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’. The passing of time would have wiped this from my memory, but I’ve got a cassette here marked ‘Christmas 1980’ which I’ve just listened to while biting my knuckles with embarrassment, and there I am, this precocious kid, giving its world premiere to a battered cassette recorder. My family isn’t religious, so I don’t know why I got rhapsodic about Bethlehem and set those words to music, but I did. I wasn’t very imaginative; I didn’t throw in mentions of any jugglers, traffic jams, poodles or candyfloss, and just stuck to the accepted version of events, i.e. wise men, shepherds, a stable and a star. The tune is meandering and the poetry is poor; I rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘rare’, for Christ’s sake. (Literally for Christ’s sake.) If I’d written it today, of course, I’d have rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘monsieur’, ‘masseur’ or ‘frotteur’, because my vocabulary is now enormous.

  ‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’ never entered the liturgical canon, partly because my parents didn’t promote it with a letter-writing campaign, and partly because it’s up against a collection of tunes that’s deeply embedded in our national consciousness, thanks to centuries of vigorous bellowing. At this stage it would have to be a pretty catchy number to edge out the likes of ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, although ‘Ding Dong’ (as it’s rarely known) isn’t without its flaws. It was written in 1924 by an Anglican priest called George Woodward, who took a traditional French tune called ‘Le Branle de l’official’ and shoehorned in words with such brute force that it’s surprising the matter wasn’t reported to the police.

  E’en so here below, below, let steeple bells be swungen,

  And ‘Io, io, io!’, by priest and people sungen

  Woodward repeated words in desperation and invented a couple of others to haul himself out of a poetic hole of his own making, before spreading the word ‘Gloria’ over thirty-five notes in the chorus, which is as audacious as anything Mariah Carey has ever attempted. In fact, on reflection, ‘When Christ Was Born In Bethlehem’ stands up pretty well against ‘Ding Dong’, and I’m going to stop being so hard on myself because I was only 9 years old.

  It’s easy to sit here picking apart Christmas carols,12 but they’re likely to be the oldest songs you ever learn, so if you’re remotely interested in maintaining a connection with the past it probably behoves you to give them a yearly airing. Many of our most popular carols, such as ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ and ‘Deck The Halls’, combine medieval folk melodies with words written in the mid nineteenth century, when the clergy was mounting a rescue operation to revive interest in a dying form. This was just as Dickens depicted Ebenezer Scrooge as threatening violence towards someone who dared to sing ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ at his door; composers presumably figured that carollers should be equipped with some better material, and they set to work.

  Carols such as ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’ were written from scratch at around this time, and within a few years a belting catalogue had been assembled that we still sing to this day. Some areas of the country take their carolling very seriously and have their own distinct repertoire. ‘Certain carols are peculiar to a small area,’ says Pat Malham, who’s sung local carols around South Yorkshire and Derbyshire for more than forty years. ‘For example, carols such as “The Prodigal Son” and “A Charge To Keep I Have” only seem to be sung in the villages of Ecclesfield and Thorpe Hesley. If you try to strike up an unfamiliar carol, the retort will come: “We don’t sing that one here”!’

  Cornwall, Christmas 1981

  I remember my dad taking us to midnight mass. We weren’t a church-going family, but me and my brothers thought it would be a wheeze to stay up singing carols past midnight and deliver one in the eye to Santa. But we were wrong, it was nothing of the sort. It was deathly dull, with carols coming all too infrequently during a very long, sombre sermon.

  I did, however, get to hear my dad sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, right out loud and with proper conviction. I don’t ever remember him making any other musical forays, so it was an unfamiliar sound, but it came across as both joyful and triumphant. Even to this day,
the climax of ‘O, come let us adore him’ can reduce me to shoulder-shaking sobs of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever went to church, nor heard my dad sing, again.

  J. T.

  Carols can have emotional resonance for many of us, but the grouchier members of the community will always resent the brutal sonic assault represented by ‘Away In A Manger’. Over a hundred years after the publication of A Christmas Carol, the novelist C. S. Lewis published an essay called ‘Delinquents In The Snow’, where he, too, stated his distaste for ‘the voices… of boys or children who have not even tried to learn to sing, or to memorise the words of the piece they are murdering. The instruments they play with real conviction are the doorbell and the knocker… money is what they are after.’ Thankfully we’re not all as mean spirited as C. S.; some of us give carollers the benefit of the doubt, and see them as nobly extending an ancient British tradition of wassailing and mummers’ plays, rather than assuming that they’re about to vandalise our car.

  My choir does carol singing every year. Christmas doesn’t feel like it’s started until I’ve done it. We sing the same carols in the same order and the same things always go wrong. We only sing for about an hour, but you can get very cold in that time, so a bit of mulled wine (provided by a local shopkeeper) with a decent slug of brandy is part of the whole experience.

  One year some builders pulled up next to us and played techno out of their van. Another year someone turned all the lights out in their house when they heard us singing. But the reception is generally positive. We sing under lampposts rather than at people’s doors, and send whichever teenage child has been dragooned into helping out up to the doors with a bucket. There’s a certain amount of ‘I don’t have any change’, but people have been known to follow us down the street after we’ve left their patch in order to donate. You can see yourself making people’s Christmases.