A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  My sister is about eight years younger than me, and at the time she would have been about six years old. She might have had one or two of her bars of chocolate over Christmas, but when it came to the first week in January, just when I was getting chocolate withdrawal symptoms, she’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got some, you could always buy them from me.’ She ended up selling her chocolate to me at a profit, which really showed some entrepreneurial flair on her part. You might expect that she went on to work for hedge funds or the Bank of England, but she ended up advising people who went into debt.

  A. A.

  With the greatest will in the world, it’s impossible for British families to make their way through all provisions on Christmas Day alone. Boxing Day has its own traditions unique to individual families, from joints of ham to smoked salmon to bubble and squeak, but one thing unites us all: a valiant effort to deal with the aftermath of Christmas Day, peering under bits of cling film to see what’s left over, and desperately trying to regain some perspective on one very important question: How much food does the average human being need to get through a single day of sitting very still? The answer, naturally, is not a huge amount – but Christmas distorts our thinking, and mentally rebalancing ourselves can take as much as a week. It usually manages to percolate by 2 January, and by that point our appetite, and our appetite for Christmas, is disappearing fast.

  Suffolk, Christmas 1970

  My dad didn’t cook very often. He was, however, very good at scrambled eggs; if he’d been a single man I suspect that he would have lived off them. Anyway, on Boxing Day morning, pretty hungover, he decided that’s what the family would be having for breakfast. He grabbed every single egg in the house, beat them up, and went to the fridge to get the butter. He’d always use a lot of butter, as he liked the scrambled eggs to be very rich. The resulting vat of scrambled egg was served up to everyone, at which point we discovered that he’d used brandy butter. It was disgusting. All the eggs had now been used, and we lived in the middle of nowhere, so there were no shops around to buy any more. Disaster. It’s worth noting that my dad’s mum ate the whole lot, although that may have been her sticking up for her son, who she was very proud of. But they were inedible.

  J. W.

  Three Spare Beds

  Are you waiting for the family to arrive?

  Are you sure you’ve got the room to spare inside?

  Slade, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, 1973

  An essential part of my Christmas is for my dad and I to have a late-night heart-to-heart about electricity. On the night of Christmas Eve, as I sit on the sofa staring at my phone, he’ll decide to go upstairs to bed, but before he does he’ll give me a detailed rundown of exactly which electrical appliances need to be switched off, which ones need to be turned off at the wall and which ones need to be unplugged. It’s unclear whether he’s trying to save a few pence on the quarterly electricity bill or he fears that we’ll all perish in an electrical fire in the dead of night, but it’s a serious business and one I show respect for, despite inwardly wondering what the big deal is. I would never say, ‘Hey pops, what’s the big deal,’ partly because I wouldn’t dare call him pops, but also partly because I’m not too old to be given a thick ear.43

  Spending Christmas in someone else’s house, even if it’s a house you lived in as a child, requires great consideration and understanding as you adapt to new ways of doing things. Mealtimes may come bizarrely early or distressingly late. Central-heating thermostats might be set to ‘Greenland’ or ‘Congo’, depending on the tolerance of your hosts to extreme temperatures. People may disappear to bed before the ten o’clock news. Possessions may be tidied away when you’re not looking, leaving you hunting for stuff that you only put down for a second or two. Children returning to the family nest may be accused of treating the house ‘like a hotel’, but if only they could. At least then they might get a choice of pillows, and be allowed to wander around the building during the night without being confronted by an alarmed parent wielding a hammer.

  The environment that awaits us after Driving Home For Christmas is a familiar one, in that there are (hopefully) friendly faces we’ve known all our lives. But it can also feel very alien. Furniture may have been changed without our approval. Old habits may have been replaced by eyebrow-raising new ones. You may be shouted at for leaving a plate on the pouffe. The biscuits may be kept in a different cupboard. Your old bedroom may be referred to as an ‘office’ because your bed has been replaced by a desk and a wheezing Pentium 4 desktop. You may find yourself thinking, in the words of Radiohead, ‘I don’t belong here’.

  Few things sum up the skewed sense of connection you have with the family home as the place you’ve been given to sleep. When I spend Christmas Eve at my parents’ house in Dunstable, I sleep in a single bed in my sister’s old room under a duvet decorated with flowers, and within reaching distance of several ageing soft toys from my childhood. Back in 2011, I posted a picture of this unsettling scene on social media, and it became a kind of cathartic catalyst; hundreds of people began sending me photographs of their own Christmas sleeping arrangements, ranging from the claustrophobic to the creepy to the cheerless. No one sent me pictures of tastefully lit rooms with pristine white bedding and graceful Yuletide embellishment, and if they had I would have ignored them. I wanted to see childhood duvet covers, retrieved from the bottoms of drawers and deployed by parents in a mischievous attempt at low-level humiliation. Ferociously offensive curtains, swirls of brown and orange, held together with bulldog clips in rooms ventured into only once or twice a year. Rooms with stepladders, plastic crates and several hundredweight of car-boot sale fodder: well-thumbed crime fiction, Sanyo cassette players, Ladybird books, broken remotes and upturned furniture partially hidden by tartan throws. Rapidly deflating airbeds, barely the width of the average human body, draped with fitted sheets that don’t fit. Sleeping bags dating from the mid 1980s, hideous monstrosities patterned with graphic, grey and red motifs that look like plummeting sales graphs.

  Every Christmas Eve for the past six years I’ve been sent these things, and tradition demands that I sit at my laptop until the early hours of Christmas morning, sharing the spoils. Last year, some genius on Twitter going by the handle of @crouchingbadger came up with a hashtag for it all: #duvetknowitschristmas. It’s become clear to me that we’re incredibly keen to have a peek into other people’s slightly dysfunctional situations – maybe because it helps to reassure us that our own circumstances are just as weird and unorthodox as everyone else’s. According to the script, traditional Christmases don’t feature elderly grandparents crammed into bunk beds and nephews banished to attics with no heating or lighting. But we weren’t consulted when the Christmas script was written. If we had been, we could have told them to make urgent adjustments to incorporate haunted clocks that give us the creeps, or piles of jigsaws that have the habit of falling on our heads at three in the morning. That’s the Christmas we know, the Christmas we’ll always remember.

  Limavady, Christmas 2016

  Every Christmas I come home from Scotland to Northern Ireland to stay with my parents. This particular year my brother should have been spending Christmas with his partner, but his partner had dumped him. So he was looking to spend Christmas at my parents’ house, too, but my mum hadn’t realised this. There’s only one bedroom, and that’s where I sleep because I’m the prodigal daughter. So we had a problem.

  On Christmas Eve my mum asked my brother in passing, ‘Oh, where are you sleeping tonight?’ And that’s when he realised that I was there, and that the bed was taken. He wouldn’t sleep on the sofa, so my mum said, ‘OK, how about the spare room?’ This is basically a room full of all my mum’s ironing crap and the dog’s bed. My brother looked at it and took great offence. He said, ‘You two are absolutely ridiculous, I’m not sleeping here, I’m out of here,’ and he said that he was going back to stay with the partner who’d dumped him. My mum said, ‘Are you even speaking to each other?’ He said, �
��I don’t care’, and he left. My mum said to me, ‘Oh, that’s the first year he’s not come to Mass, your Gran won’t be happy with that.’ As he came and went over Christmas and the marital difficulties continued, it became a running joke. On New Year’s Eve he was faced with the same situation, but this time he was so drunk he just slept in the dog’s bed.

  R. R.

  Essex, Christmas 2015

  My husband and I have been married for seven years, now. We spend Christmas at his parents’ house, and my in-laws are absolutely great, I get on very well with them, but there’s a weird bedroom situation. Every year we’re put in my husband’s old room, which has two rather austere-looking single beds in it and a bedside table between them, keeping us apart. I’m not really used to sleeping in a single bed, and it’s quite narrow and slightly uncomfortable. Now, there’s another room in the house which has a double bed in it, but we’re never put in there. Every year we think, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll get put in the other room’, but it never happens. I understand that it’s his old room, but it seems to ignore the practicalities of the situation.

  I’ve come to expect it now, but of course it’s never spoken about. It would never be mentioned, not by them, or us. We wouldn’t complain. We just get on with it.

  M. D.

  Milton Keynes, Christmas 2016

  My brother-in-law, my little sister’s husband, is in his late thirties. For his whole life, Christmas has been the number-one event in the calendar. Throughout December he does a Christmas countdown, with a different jumper for every day. He really is Mr Christmas, and it’s the best place to be over the Christmas period – particularly for someone like me who comes from a small family. I just never feel that Christmassy, so it’s really nice to have that brought out in me. He’ll turn up on Christmas morning in a Christmas tree onesie that’s about five feet wide across the bottom. And there’s always a camcorder around, and he’ll spend all Christmas filming, and then the following Christmas the entire family get a DVD of the previous Christmas. We take the piss out of him a little bit, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. He absolutely makes Christmas. He really does it properly.

  He’s an amateur puppeteer and magician, and he collects these puppets. So when we go to stay over the Christmas period, we get put up in what you might call his man cave, which is a converted garage at the front of the house. That’s also where he keeps his collection of Muppet-style puppets, all sitting on a shelf, looking faintly sinister. There’s a sofa bed in there; you lie down, and you’re confronted with all these faces looking down at you, waiting to be brought to life. And I’m thinking OK, I’m 35 years old, I shouldn’t be terrified. But I kind of am.

  M. R.

  Coventry, Christmas 2015

  My in-laws have a camper van. When they come to see us for Christmas they’ll bring the van, and they’ll always end up sleeping in it. When they visit at other times of year they’ll take the van to a campsite, but on Christmas Eve, when my kids are going to be getting up early, it might be parked outside so they can pop in and spend more time with their grandchildren in the morning.

  When they first started doing it I didn’t know whether to take umbrage at the fact that they didn’t want to stay indoors, but actually it works out really nicely. Sometimes when people come to stay you end up having enough of them, don’t you? Because they’re under your feet and in your face. But this way they’ve got their space and we’ve got ours. We’re all creatures of routine, and my father-in-law likes a cup of coffee at 9 p.m., at which point they’ll both retreat to the vehicle. It’s lovely to spend Christmas at home, and that’s definitely helped by them having their van.

  S. H.

  Chesterfield, Christmas 2014

  I spend Christmas with my sister, who lives up in Derbyshire with her family, and our mother. My room over Christmas is in my brother-in-law’s home office, which is a pretty standard office except for this massive white board that’s full of equations. He has a PhD in physics (superconductivity I think) and he’s one of those people who reads and understands Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. He collects physics books, old textbooks from the 1950s and 1960s, and it’s his passion.

  He’s a website designer for his job, so he keeps his brain active by doing what I’d call leisure physics. He retreats into that room and writes out equations on the board, doing hard sums and trying to work out what’s going on with this and that. My son, who’s 15, says, ‘Oh, I wish our physics teacher was like him, he’s really enthusiastic about it.’ And one of my nieces has written on the bottom of that white board, ‘I love prime numbers’, so his enthusiasm is definitely contagious. When I’m sleeping in there on the sofa bed, I’m not sure whether it feels slightly oppressive and makes me feel intellectually inferior, or whether it makes me wiser by a kind of osmosis while I’m asleep.

  S. T.

  Scarborough, Christmas 2013

  I no longer have a room in the family home. My old bedroom is now referred to as my niece’s room, even though she doesn’t even live there; it’s just the room she sleeps in when she stays there. So I guess she’s somehow surpassed me, in all ways. Maybe they prefer her to me?

  It’s a child-sized bed, one of those ones that converts from a cot to a toddler bed, and it has a Fairy Princess duvet. Luckily I’m quite short, so I just about fit, but it’s very thin – I can’t turn over, I have to lay still otherwise I’ll just fall out. I think my parents justify it because I only go home once a year, and to be honest it’s a good justification, but I do pay the price. For the last four Christmases I now have backache on Christmas Day, and I generally feel a bit crap because I slept on a tiny bed. And of course I don’t say anything about it. I mean, what do you say? ‘Thank you for my presents but I’m really upset with the sleeping arrangements?’ A little bit of dignity would be nice, but it’s fine. I don’t mind being a Fairy Princess. At least I’m a girl, I suppose. And now it’s part of the family Christmas tradition.

  N. H.

  High Wycombe, Christmas 2014

  My parents sold our family house, where there were enough rooms for all of us to stay at Christmas, and very selfishly decided to downsize. The first year I went there for Christmas, my elder brother had first dibs on the spare bedroom, with a double bed, and I was put on a makeshift mattress in the utility room, which is more like a corridor. I wasn’t there when Mum made the bed up, but she was very proud of it. When I arrived she held back the door to show me as if to say ‘Ta-daa!’ And she’d turned down the duvet, as if it were a hotel, to make it look more inviting – but I was literally wedged between a wall and a washing machine. She couldn’t do the laundry in the days I was there for that reason.

  I hadn’t slept in a single bed since my first year at university, but my mum kept the bedding that I’d had in that year and used that. I think she thought it would provide comfort and familiarity, but it was more like a kick in the teeth. Also, there isn’t a radiator in there, so it’s basically the same as being in a tent in the garden. I tend not to sleep very well, so maybe they thought, hey, let’s stick the insomniac in the utility room.

  V. J.

  Shrewsbury, Christmas 2014

  My niece came over on Christmas Eve with her 6-year-old son and her baby, whose name is Nyla. The plan was for them to spend some time with us on Christmas Eve, and then head back to their house so they could wake up in their own beds. The three of them came over at around five o’clock, and we’d planned to show her son the International Space Station flying overhead and pretend that it was Santa, a charade that went brilliantly. And then the evening wore on, as evenings do wear on, and it got later and later, and by the time they decided to go home there were no taxis. So we suggested that they stay with us, but we already had our adult children staying. It was a full house.

  We had to be resourceful. Nyla’s mum ended up sharing a bed with her cousin, and we found somewhere for her son to sleep, but that left us with Nyla. So we had to improvise a bed for her, which ended u
p being the cardboard box we kept the Christmas decorations in. It was all we had. We emptied it out, and we had to cut the end off because she was slightly too long for it. Nyla slept in the box at the end of our bed – although she kept us awake, so none of us slept very well. But yes, there was something vaguely Biblical about it. No room at the inn, no crib for a bed.

  I. D. S.

  Two Awkward Hugs

  Barbara: Mam, who do you want to pull your cracker with? Do you want to pull it with Darren?

  Nana: No! I don’t want to pull me cracker with Darren.

  Barbara: Who do you want to pull it with, then?

  Nana: Well, I was hoping for Valerie.

  Barbara: Oh. Well, pull it with Valerie, then.

  Dave: Barbara, who am I going to pull my cracker with?

  Barbara: With Denise, Dave, she is your wife.

  Jim: Bloody hell, Barb. Can’t we just pull the bloody thing?

  The Royle Family, Christmas 2000

  On 19 December last year, my mum sent me a text that read: ‘Assume we can expect you over the festive period?’ A while later I replied: ‘I think that’s a reasonable assumption.’ That might give an indication of the muted approach my family has towards Christmas, not that you asked for it. We celebrate it, and we enjoy it, but making a big deal of it would run contrary to the family motto. We don’t actually have a motto, but if we did it would be something like ‘Let’s Not Make A Fuss’, or more properly,44 ‘Ne Faciamus Vexationem’.

  If you fancy adopting this as your own motto, feel free (my friend Dave translated it into Latin and I don’t think he needs paying), but I recognise that not all British families adhere to the British stereotype: a dislike of conflict, a reluctance to complain, a preference for brisk handshakes over loving hugs and a rejection of anything resembling feelings. It would be wrong of me to assume that a whole nation suppresses its emotions over Christmas, nodding politely in an elongated pretending session. Some of us let our emotions run free, transforming the living room into an amphitheatre of dramatic tension. Others will read this and simply not have a clue what I’m on about because their own domestic situation has all the freewheeling, jovial bonhomie of a Graham Norton chat show. But every family has its unique set of personalities which interact in a very particular way, and Christmas places a tinsel-trimmed magnifying glass over each of them.