And yet, because of its context, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ feels like the most Christmassy piece of music imaginable. The truth, perhaps, is that there’s nothing musically unique about Christmas tunes. Mute the bells and delete any mention of the holiday season, and they’re just the same as any other tunes – although this may be hard to get our heads around because the psychological link between those songs and Christmas is so strong. ‘Oh Christmas Tree’ feels inseparable from Christmas, but the original German song, ‘O Tannenbaum’, wasn’t about a Christmas tree, just a tree. ‘Carol of the Bells’ conjures up all manner of spooky Christmas sensations, but it’s a Ukrainian melody designed to be sung in mid January. Songs end up sounding Christmassy merely because they’re played at Christmas; Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Power of Love’, Paul McCartney’s ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and E17’s ‘Stay Another Day’ all have a Christmassy air because they happened to be released in November. These days, end-of-year singles by triumphant X Factor winners are strategically, perhaps cynically, designed to evoke feelings associated with Christmas. Indeed, in 2009 a nation demonstrated that it had had enough of this by ensuring that Rage Against The Machine were number one at Christmas instead. But the following year everything just reverted to normal, proving that British acts of rebellion never last very long, e.g. the Peasants’ Revolt.
Mid Wales, Christmas 1996
My favourite Christmas song is ‘Stay Another Day’ by E17, which I appreciate is ridiculous. When I was 14 my best friend had an aggressive form of cancer. It went into remission for a while but they found out it wasn’t going to be curable. She absolutely loved Brian from the band, and so somehow the song became my memory of her, of getting sicker and going into a hospice, and of a bunch of adults who had no idea how to speak to 14-year-olds about death. Every year I hear that song and imagine her mooning over the school crush or making us laugh while skiving off PE.
Anyway, about ten years ago I got to work with Dom Hawken who co-wrote that song. I thanked him, and he said that over the years so many people had told him their own stories about how much that song means to them.
S. W.
Christmas music feels indestructible, almost bulletproof. For decades we’ve heard the same songs again and again and again, and providing you don’t work in retail (see Six Bargains Grabbing, page 113) their appeal seems to endure: ‘Little Drummer Boy’ by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, Paul McCartney’s ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ by Chris Rea (when we’re in a car) and Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop the Cavalry’ (when we’re marching to and from the enemy). If pollsters ask people whether they like these songs – and pollsters have – they discover a whole load of bah humbug; in 2003 Manchester Airport polled passengers about music choices at the terminals, and when more than 40 per cent of respondents said that they didn’t want to hear Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, it was pulled from the playlist.
But the idea of Slade’s song being absent at Christmas is too disorienting and upsetting to contemplate. Even a song as magical as ‘Fairytale of New York’ can suffer from overexposure by the time we hurl our Christmas trees out of the front door in January, but every year, at some point, we’ll hear it, perhaps wistfully mourn the passing of Kirsty MacColl, and associate the song with a pleasant memory or two. Christmas music may merely be a backdrop to our celebrations, but it’s an important one, and it never seems to lose its inherent magic. Even Scrooge recognised this. As he’s taken by the Ghost of Christmas Present to his nephew’s house, he hears his niece playing a familiar tune on the harp, and he remembers the past. ‘He softened more and more,’ wrote Dickens, ‘and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands.’
Nine Journeys Trekking
Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
In the lane, snow is glistening
A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight
Walking in a winter wonderland
Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith, 1934
In October 2011, brothers Victor, 67, and Henry Mears, 60, were cleared on appeal after spending 13 months in prison on charges of misleading advertising following their 2008 venture into the burgeoning Winter Wonderland market. Visitors to their Lapland New Forest just outside Bournemouth were promised a ‘snow-covered village’, a ‘magical tunnel19 of light’ and ‘beautiful snow-covered log cabins’, but customers complained of a broken ice rink, huskies in a muddy field and a nativity scene that was painted on a wall. Santa was punched, allegedly, and three elves, according to The Daily Telegraph, were also said to have been involved in ‘violent confrontations’.
Whatever may have happened at Lapland New Forest, it proved one thing: the British are prepared to get their wallets out on the promise of a magical Christmas outing. If your outing happens to involve standing in the cold and staring at a few miserable reindeer wearing Comic Relief noses, well, at least there’s a chance of you appearing on the news; by the time December rolls around, at least one news story describing how thousands of people have had a ‘hellish’ British Winter Wonderland experience is guaranteed. In 2016 it was the ‘disgusting mud bath’ of Bakewell, Derbyshire; in 2015 the ‘shambolic’ Redditch Christmas Market; the hour-long queues for Santa at Sutton Coldfield’s Magical Journey in 2014 caused consternation; while the ice rink at Winter Wonderland Milton Keynes in 2013 was accused of having no ice. You’d be forgiven for assuming that every British Winter Wonderland consists of five acres of mud rented by a bloke with a couple of boxes of fairy lights under his arm. But they’re not always like that, and our hunger for Christmas wonder makes them incredibly popular.
London, Christmas 2013
I used to work for a restaurant that opened a pop-up branch in a Winter Wonderland. Some builders quickly put a hut together and we just had to run with it. The experience was terrifying. It’s insanely busy. You can’t move. Courtesy goes out of the window. Everything is so expensive, it’s cash only and there are hardly any ATMs. I have no words to describe the toilets. And I remember all these people wearing novelty lederhosen and drinking steins of beer who got very angry when I told them that the whole thing closed at 10 p.m.
I suppose it’s one of the few Christmas ‘experiences’ that people can go to. But it’s not just parents trying to give their kids a Christmas to remember – there are hundreds of couples who turn up with selfie sticks, head to the ice rink and start posting pictures on social media to show how much fun they’re having. If you’re in a relationship, it seems you have to go to Winter Wonderland, because if you don’t then you don’t love each other. Last year my boyfriend suggested we go. I said, look, I hate it, but if you want to go, we can go. We went. It was awful.
E. D.
Summer brings many opportunities for us to go out with family and friends, perhaps a picnic, throwing a Frisbee, a cruise along a canal, arguing in a botanical garden or vomiting on a log flume. Over Christmas, however, options are more limited. Yes, there’s the tradition of zigzagging across the country to pay visits to people and families you feel obliged to see, usually turning up to find them half asleep in a onesie and in no state to receive visitors. But once you’ve seen that lot, what is there left to do?
Strangely, in a country where over half of us feel that the birth of Jesus is irrelevant to the festive season and where churchgoing is on the decline, Christmas services have found themselves increasing in popularity, according to former Methodist minister Martin Turner. ‘It’s a time when people seem to really like going to church,’ he says. ‘For a lot of people it’s their annual visit. People are touched by it, partly by the atmosphere, because the churches are candlelit, partly because it allows people to sit and contemplate deeper things. It’s what we might call the otherness, the side of things that people don’t usually have time for. Most people who come to church have a degree of brokenness and hurt, and they can bring that with them, along wit
h their hopes, disappointments, dreams and dreads. And a lot of people are touched by that, they find that very moving.’
My family, heathens that we are, have never been churchgoers, aside from the odd Midnight Mass. One Christmas, struck by cabin fever, we wrapped up warm and went to visit the Houses of Parliament, an experience about as festive as grouting tiles. Countless families like ours end up scouring the Internet for activities that don’t involve television and turkey; you may see this as our inability to entertain each other, but what can I say, charades tends to lose its lustre after a couple of days.
London, Christmas 1985
My dad was Jewish and he grew up during the war. I guess everybody with a Jewish parent has this, but when we watched television, say, The Rockford Files, he’d say, ‘James Garner? Real name is Bumgarner. Jewish.’ My parents only did Christmas for me, really. So we had a classic secular celebration, with a tree and cards and presents and so on.
But my dad also had a keen interest in the Holocaust and the truth of it. So this particular year he decided that we were going to have a big family outing, over two days, to the Curzon Mayfair to see Shoah, the nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. So me and my mum and dad spent two incredibly long days over Christmas in the cinema. It’s an amazing film, and I promise I wasn’t being a bored, surly teenager, but I do remember thinking after four hours of watching this awful eyewitness testimony of terrible suffering that I felt a bit uncomfortable and annoyed. It remains the least Christmassy thing I’ve ever done.
D. B.
Some local authorities recognise the woeful lack of Christmas entertainment and make efforts to remedy the situation; this tends to begin in November with the illumination of the Christmas lights. Every year, hundreds of ceremonies take place across the UK where people stand about in coats and scarves, go ‘Ooooo!’ when some lights come on and then go home. Traditionally, the flicking of the switch is performed by someone who is notable in some way, someone of status who is able to count backwards from ten without going wrong and can operate a light switch without throwing a hissy fit.20 In this category we have such luminaries as Panther from Gladiators (Aylesbury 1996), Boycie from Only Fools and Horses (Southampton 1999), Anthony from Big Brother 6 (Gateshead 2005), and Peppa Pig (Worcester 2012). You may deem them to be insufficiently famous to have the honour of illuminating your town, but big stars don’t come cheap. Nicolas Cage may have turned on the lights in Bath in 2009, ditto John Hurt in Cromer in 2013, but they both lived locally. Few councils would deem it an appropriate use of funds to get Madonna to turn on some LEDs, and to be honest she’s probably got more pressing things to be getting on with.
The appropriate calibre of celebrity to turn on Christmas lights is a regular dilemma in council meetings, because there will always be local residents who deem any Christmas-related spending to be a misuse of council tax, and will submit freedom of information requests to determine how much was spent on light bulbs, road closures and the Chuckle Brothers. In 2011, Davy Brown, an Ulster Unionist councillor in Belfast, stated that its switching-on ceremony had become ‘an embarrassment’ and urged his colleagues not to do what they’d done the previous year (which was, incidentally, to book Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford) and slash the amount being spent to around £20,000. His colleagues took no notice and voted to spend £138,000 on a ceremony that included Mr Tumble, Postman Pat and Fireman Sam. Everyone had a great time.
In recent years, pop-up ice rinks have enabled thousands of people to fulfil their dream of strapping on ice skates and going over on their ankle to the sound of Ravel’s ‘Boléro’. From Cardiff to Winchester, Edinburgh to London’s Strand, people hand over ten-pound notes while thinking to themselves, ‘Surely it’ll be fine. How difficult can it be?’ If you approach ice skating fearlessly, with the mindset of a polar explorer or a 6-year-old child, you’re likely to have a good time. Trepidation, however, can be your enemy.
York, Christmas 2015
If you go down on the ice it’s very hard to get up again. I remember falling over and someone openly laughing at me. It was like a cartoon, my legs were kicking out involuntarily, and as I tried to haul myself up I looked like I was trying to ride an invisible bicycle backwards. I realised at that point that I didn’t have enough core strength to get up unassisted, and that needed to be resolved, but the bell was going to ring in 25 minutes and there wasn’t enough time to work on it.
I ended up clutching the barrier and watching a couple of wankers, who had clearly turned up to show off, slicing expertly through the throng and performing double salchows while I muttered under my breath. I made a decision at that point never to be humiliated on an ice rink again.
J. H.
You have to salute our commitment to pursuing the perfect Christmas that exists in our heads. Long queues will form at anything billed as a ‘grotto’ or ‘Fairyland’, even though we know, deep down, that Fairyland never existed and the nature of the Fairyland we’re about to witness was argued about in a couple of meetings and budgeted on the back of an envelope. British department stores identified this need in their customers in the nineteenth century, and proceeded to blaze a trail. Liverpool lays claim to the world’s first-ever Christmas Fairyland grotto, which opened in the Bon Marche store in 1879; at one point, Bentalls in Kingston upon Thames even boasted a Christmas circus with elephants and a lion.21 In 1888, the J P Roberts department store in Stratford, east London, was the first to stick Father Christmas in a grotto; this began a long tradition of men with nothing better to do getting dressed up in red and going ‘Ho ho ho’ to placate distressed children. (Sorry – if you believe in Father Christmas then I suggest you should skip this bit too. I should have said earlier. Apologies. Rejoin us on page 72.)
The success of a grotto is entirely dependent on the quality of the Santa therein. Some personality traits simply aren’t compatible with the role: impatience, irritability, hypersensitivity, moodiness and a compulsion to belch swear words are just a few. Everyone I spoke to who has ever donned the red cloak stressed that it’s not as easy as you might think – which might explain the existence of Santa Schools, where attendees are drilled on Christmas tradition and reminded of the importance of kindness, sobriety and not making any firm promises. ‘You’re prepped on how to deal with the awkward child,’ says optician Peter Mitchell, a magnificently bearded gentleman who has worked across the UK as a Santa for the past few years. ‘There are the children who burst into tears, of course. And there are ones who tell you that they don’t have a chimney. I got myself a huge bunch of keys and had them painted gold, so I take those out and explain that the keys only work on Christmas Eve, in case they get distressed by the idea that I can get into their house whenever I want.’
“To be honest I never really wanted to be Santa, but as you’ll find out when you’re older, things dont’t always pan out the way you want them to…”
If a Santa wants to be rehired, he has to be a multitasking polymath. He needs to able to say ‘Merry Christmas’ in several different languages and keep his backstory consistent in case he’s grilled by the same inquisitive child two years running. He must be aware of the current crop of fashionable toys (so he doesn’t say, ‘What?’ when asked for a Nerf Modulus Tri-Strike) and be able to involve the whole family in a three-minute negotiation where the promise of good behaviour is exchanged for gifts. ‘Adults love it,’ says Peter. ‘They engage with me, because they have happy memories of Father Christmas, too. It conjures up the myth of the perfect Christmas, and you can take them back there. When I’m in the robes, it’s not really me. I become a vehicle for something much bigger, and the words come out, and it creates this sense of expectation and joy, and you realise how deep this stuff is embedded in all of our psyches.’
One of the most famous grottos in the UK is in Thursford in Norfolk, where a steam engine museum is transformed into a Winter Wonderland for the duration of November and December, prompting 180,000 people to descend on the village from across the
country. The main draw is the Christmas Spectacular, a three-hour Christmas-themed variety show with a huge cast of singers, dancers, comics, jugglers and a full orchestra. ‘It was started by my grandfather, George Cushing,’ says George Cushing, George Cushing’s grandson. ‘Not many people would visit the museum over Christmas, so he got a choir in and held a carol concert. That was 40 years ago; there were probably only 50 people there. But it grew to five hundred people, then a couple of thousand. And now we get coaches arriving from nearly every county in Britain.’
The barn that holds the Christmas Spectacular was never meant to be a theatre, but has ended up with one of the biggest stages in the country, the fourth-largest Wurlitzer organ in Europe and seats for around 1,500 people. The improbable rise of Thursford as an attraction that compels people to hurtle down from Scotland on a coach is a testament to the British desire for Christmas escapism and fantasy. ‘People turn up two hours before the performance just to walk around, as all the trees are covered in fairy lights, and it’s absolutely beautiful,’ says George. ‘People tell us that Christmas doesn’t start for them until they’ve come to Thursford.’
The lithe young performers who throw themselves energetically into Thursford’s Christmas Spectacular get to go home on 23 December, the show having been put to bed for another year. Not so with the cast of the British pantomime, who are back at work on Boxing Day, over New Year and well into January. My first pantomime experience was watching Davy Jones of The Monkees star in Puss in Boots at the Swansea Grand in 1980, a production which was still running on 8 March 1981; by this point the cast must have been so sick of being told, ‘It’s behind you’ that they would have shrugged and replied, ‘Look, it’s incidental to the plot so don’t worry about it.’
A Very British Christmas Page 6
