A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  The abnormality of the domestic Christmas begins with the clothes we wear. Some families may adopt a pragmatic approach, bearing in mind the colossal amount of food that awaits them, and choose to slob around in leisurewear with no waistband while burping discreetly. Christmas jumpers have traditionally been a semi-amusing wardrobe option, but they’ve lost some of their cachet of late. They had managed to become an ironic comment on crap British knitwear, but I felt that irony sapping a little when the checkout staff at my local Tesco Express started wearing them to boost goodwill among people shopping late at night for bog roll.45 Other families, like mine, choose to dress up smartly for no reason I can comprehend, resulting in a situation where we all look as if we’re about to go to a wedding except we’re wearing slippers.

  “Look, dad, I’m just more comfortable like this.”.

  Oxfordshire, Christmas 2016

  My mum and dad come from quite traditional families, and I think they always wanted Christmas to be a bit more fun. My dad’s a serious businessman but has a performing streak in him, and my mum’s an art teacher and is really creative. When I was younger we’d have a day of arts and crafts where we’d make Christmas hats, but when my sister and I were old enough to drink alcohol things started to escalate.

  Now we do themed Christmases. The first time we did it we were Snow Queens on Christmas Day and had a Scandinavian theme on Boxing Day. One year we linked up with family friends who also do fancy dress and we did a whole Narnia thing, with a faun and a lion and a white witch and so on. In the morning, everyone helps each other to get dressed up, and then we take a load of pictures, I mean a ridiculous number. Then the day cracks on as normal, and by the afternoon everyone’s had a few drinks and they forget they’re in fancy dress. Last year there were only four of us, so we did a play about a Zombie Apocalypse with four characters and no audience. We performed it to no one. It was brilliant. Next Christmas I think the theme is ‘The Elements’.

  H. B.

  Deep down, I’ve got some suppressed envy of families who can indulge in singalongs, dance routines and magic tricks without feeling self-conscious and while dressed in seventeenth-century French court costume. The idea of my family having, say, a Star Wars-themed Christmas where I’m draining sprouts while wearing a Princess Leia outfit appeals to me on a conceptual level, but in reality it could never work. I know this, because in 2013 my sister made overtures in this direction by sending out an email to us in late November, announcing that on Christmas afternoon we would ‘entertain others by demonstrating or undertaking an activity which is new to you. The activity can take any entertainment form. You will need to provide your own props or equipment should any be required.’ The email was ignored, and nothing of the sort happened. I salute my sister for having a go, but she was attempting to break down decades of self-restraint that had become calcified. It was doomed to failure.

  This chapter was never intended to be a form of therapy where I detail the various ways my family manhandles Christmas, but I may as well carry on now that I’ve started. We enjoy having a tournament on the Nintendo Wii – perhaps archery or ten-pin bowling – but that might be because it’s mediated via a television set and we’re all facing in the same direction. I’ve spoken to people who relish the prospect of playing Cards Against Humanity46 with their folks on Christmas Day, but the idea of us doing that makes me hyperventilate. One Christmas my family received a board game whose name I forget, but it involved questions being read out from cards. Crucially, it hadn’t been vetted for risqué content, and as my grandmother, my mother and I attempted to play it at the kitchen table, we found ourselves discarding any cards containing questions we didn’t feel comfortable reading out. ‘No, not that one,’ we’d say, politely, placing the card face down. It’s possible that all this repression could be upturned by one therapeutic Christmas visit from a filthy-mouthed team-building expert called Chris, but I’m certainly not going to book Chris and I’m not convinced that Chris would be able to change anything in any case. This stuff is firmly embedded.

  Milton Keynes, Christmas 1993

  My ex-aunt was a sex therapist. She was completely incognisant of any kind of social norm, and believed that sex should be discussed in the same dispassionate and dull tone as everything else. Every year the family would go to her and my uncle’s house for Christmas Day, and she’d have this incredibly rigid, joyless timetable, the first bit of which involved sitting in the living room while she handed out presents as if she was a factory owner giving out extra gruel as a treat. This particular Christmas she’d been given a Greatest Hits CD of the Bee Gees. She put it on the CD player, and we all sat in silence listening for a while. She turned to my mum and said, ‘Do you like them? I love them. They’re just incredibly sexy, aren’t they?’ No one answered. My uncle and cousin were used to it, my dad didn’t have an answer, I was only 9 years old and my grandma hated her. My mum just gave her a pained smile.

  The CD was turned off and we went into the next room for lunch, no talking, no laughing, just grim-faced chewing. Then, God knows why, my aunt said, in her incredibly flat voice, ‘The thing about the Bee Gees is they wear their sexuality very frankly. I mean, can you remember the last time they wore trousers where you couldn’t see their penises?’ At this point several attempts were made to change the subject, but they didn’t work. She then put her cutlery down, patted her mouth with her napkin, and said, ‘I would happily have an orgy with all three of them.’ Everyone at this point did a frantic closed-mouth giggle, except me, a child, who leaned over to my mum to ask what an orgy was. My mum clearly saw what I was about to ask, and said, ‘Not now, darling.’

  P. R.

  Families who undergo the Christmas reunification process will quickly drift into well-established patterns of behaviour. My sister and I begin to needle each other as if we’re teenagers, and she will display minor petulance towards our father in a way that I would never dare. Conversation operates at a level that we’re happy and familiar with; in-jokes are rolled out, anecdotes are recounted and the world is put partially to rights, but our brand of light chat can drift into territory where I think ‘hang on, this is weird’ and feel compelled to write it down to gain some perspective. On Christmas Day 2011 my dad asked, ‘How many ways can you think of to spell the surname Maudsley?’ No one replied. On Christmas Day 2016, my mum said, wistfully, ‘I don’t like ten-pence pieces. I don’t like fives much, either. I do like twenties. Fifties are alright, I suppose.’ Some may find these kinds of comments moribund, but I relish them. I certainly prefer them to ‘So, why aren’t you married?’ or ‘Give me one good reason for voting Labour’ or, controversially, ‘I love you.’ It’s just how we operate. It’s fine.

  Middlesex, Christmas 2011

  I’d split up with my partner, who’s the father of my son, back in the summer. But we were still living together, and we hadn’t told my parents that we’d split up, because the practicalities of it hadn’t been worked out and I knew that they’d be devastated. So we all went to my parents’ house for Christmas Day, and we were just pretending that everything was OK, but it was clear that something was wrong, and the pressure to be normal felt completely overwhelming. My mum evidently noticed that I was pale and miserable, and she said, ‘Is something the matter?’

  I looked over at my partner, and he was stony faced and miserable, too. So I snapped and said, ‘Well yes, actually, something is the matter.’ She thought I was going to tell her that I had a terminal illness or something, and she became completely hysterical. I said, ‘Look, we might as well tell you, we’re not together, we’ve split up.’ My mum was terribly upset, and we ended up going home. I felt awful that I’d ruined her Christmas, but there was never going to be a good time to tell her. It was going to be a crap day anyway because of the strained atmosphere, but I guess I made it that little bit crappier. She now refers to it as our EastEnders Christmas.

  K. B.

  The intensity of the psychological load that Christmas du
mps upon us has a lot to do with the emotional warmth that we feel the need to cultivate. Reminders of what constitutes a Merry Christmas seem to become more intense every year; not just feel-good films, sentimental songs, lifestyle articles and emotive advertising, but also our awareness of fun-filled Christmases that other people might be having. ‘When I lived in London,’ says counsellor Eileen Wise, ‘I remember walking down the streets in late December and glancing into people’s living rooms. You’d see a lovely warm kitchen, a dog curled up by the Aga, children making Christmas decorations… Of course, we know nothing about what’s actually going on in those houses, but it seems like a very rosy world, and many people feel that they don’t belong to it.’ That feeling can be exacerbated these days by social media, where people post idealised depictions of their Christmas that conveniently omit to mention that the spuds are burned, the dog’s farting and the drains are blocked.

  Many of us try to achieve Christmas perfection by assembling as large a family group as we can in a display of love, unity and harmony. The novel The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen shows how Christmas can almost become fetishised by people who feel their family has become atomised or disjointed, and while that story is set in America, we’re just as fretful over here. But that atomisation can happen for a reason, and forcing people to come together can effectively mean lining everyone up for something that’s inherently rubbish. ‘If people have fallen out over something,’ says Eileen, ‘it can be very hard to set those things aside. In a forced environment where you’re spending so much time together, it’s hardly surprising that gaskets blow, arguments start and people feel unhappy. I’d say it’s far more likely that families will encounter problems at Christmas than for everything to be lovey-dovey.’ But Christmas is so culturally gigantic, the pressure to celebrate so immense, that we shrug, we accept the invitations, and think ‘Well, how bad could it be?’

  Dorset, Christmas 1998

  My dad died when I was quite young. After that, Christmas just fell apart, and it didn’t really know what it was doing. We tried to recreate it the way it had been, these kind of pseudo Christmases, but it just wasn’t working. This particular Christmas Day, me, my mother and my brother had gone round to the house my sister shared with her friend, because there was more room, the kitchen was bigger and it was a nicer environment to be on Christmas Day. In the build-up to lunch, four of us were in the kitchen getting things ready while my mum was in the lounge watching television.

  My brother’s quite socially awkward. He’s lovely, but has the habit of blurting things out, his brain just goes off like a pinball machine. We were in the middle of getting everything onto plates when my brother pulled out a piece of paper and said, ‘Oh, I just wanted to tell you all that I’ve had an AIDS test and it’s negative’! He was holding up this medical certificate. We couldn’t quite believe it. I mean, there’s a time and a place for these things. Maybe he could have taken me aside during a long walk after lunch? But, no. Over the years we’ve developed a way of laughing about how weird our family is (it feels like we’re just thrown together and don’t have a great deal in common), and my brother revealing his AIDS test result at Christmas lunch became part of that. Fortunately, my mother was out of earshot. She would have been horrified.

  E. L.

  Some family groups, whether it’s through independence of mind, courageousness, shyness or downright laziness, will successfully resist the pressure to take part in Christmas reunions. They may suddenly disappear to Mauritius and choose to deliver the annual update on their lives via a typed round-robin letter that has your name written in biro at the top and theirs at the bottom. Years ago, Simon Hoggart did a magnificent job of collating the most ridiculous examples of this genre in newspaper columns and a couple of books, but many people remain committed to the round-robin cause, despite it being widely mocked and made largely redundant by the relentless drip feed of Facebook. News of exam attainments and failures, computer viruses, inconsequential trips to Huddersfield and routine surgery will appear across four sheets of closely-typed A4; the more inconsequential the information, the greater the merriment it causes. The other catch-up method for those in absentia is the Christmas Day phone call, a barren conversation in which both parties exchange platitudes because they feel that they ought to. A bit like a first date, really, except without any high hopes beforehand, or the potential payoff of sex afterwards.

  Those who can’t get out of Christmas may choose instead to hide themselves away within the family home, giving the illusion of a reunion but spending as little time as possible actually reuniting. Grown adults revert to their teenage selves, retreating to a small room, shutting the door and watching a flickering black-and-white portable television set while pondering the direction their lives have taken. They will stay up late and get up late, take long walks for spurious reasons like ‘getting some air’, minimising personal contact and occasionally sighing loudly in the kitchen. Quite why they do this is difficult to say; in many cases it boils down to a listless emotional lethargy. After all, it is possible to make an effort, just for a couple of days. Maybe Christmas is a bit like a music festival. You get there and you think, Oh, I don’t know if I really want to be in this environment. But then you break through some kind of mental barrier and start buying into it, and by Sunday you discover that you’re really into the festival and you don’t really want to go home.

  If you’re not spending Christmas with your own family, you may well be spending it with someone else’s. In theory this can represent a moment of emotional bonding where two separate traditions fuse in one glorious celebration, but that theory doesn’t legislate for cultural clashes surrounding food, booze, television or any of the other stuff mentioned in this book. When Christmases collide it can go one of two ways: either an exciting new hybrid Christmas is formed, incorporating the best elements of each, or there’s a tense stand-off as decades-long traditions suddenly look to be under serious threat. A friend of my sister always spends Christmas with my family, and his welcome presence in the house makes us approximately 50 per cent more upbeat and sociable than we usually are, but the announcement in 2016 that he would be making paella for us on Boxing Day was met with puzzled consternation. Paella? On Boxing Day? It took me a couple of days to come to terms with this rupture in the family routine – but you know, the paella was great, and maybe we’ll have it again this year, or maybe he’ll volunteer to knock up a lamb dhansak and precipitate another two-day crisis.

  “Every Boxing Day I do my ostrich routine, and every year you look at me as if I’m an idiot.”

  Christmas can be terrifyingly significant for anyone in a new relationship. If you’ve both decided you can tolerate each other’s personal foibles and the whole shebang might be romantically viable, the possibility might be raised of one of you spending Christmas with the family of the other. This is a big deal. Some optimistic couples may make efficient use of the time by announcing their engagement, figuring that the champagne is already on ice and it’ll save on phone calls. Others may end up being so appalled by the behaviour of the family they were considering marrying into that they simply bale out in January, figuring that their union would pose too much of a genetic risk to future generations. Many don’t even make it as far as Christmas; the prospect of buying gifts for each other can ring alarm bells labelled ‘commitment’, and examination of Facebook data has shown that mid December is a peak break-up time. But the season doesn’t just create potential flashpoints for new couples; it can also cause long-standing relationships to be placed under forensic examination, as couples wonder if it’s really working and whether they might be happier apart.

  Saffron Walden, Christmas 1995

  Christmas was always amazing at home. It was only ever the four of us in the house, me and my brother, my mum and my dad, and we had so many little traditions of our own making. On Christmas Eve we’d have spaghetti with anchovies and hazelnuts, and me and my brother would be allowed one present each because we wer
e like coiled springs. On Christmas Day we’d wake my mum and dad up at 8 o’clock, and we’d always have croissants for breakfast. It sounds silly, but we’d only ever have croissants on Christmas Day.

  My parents’ marriage had been on the slide for a while, and my dad had sometimes been sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs. One Christmas Eve I remember saying to my dad, ‘You’re not going to sleep on the sofa tonight are you, dad?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ But on Christmas morning I came downstairs and he was on the sofa. We looked at each other, and nothing was said; it was the tiniest of moments, but it was then that I knew that Mum and Dad had stopped pretending that everything was going to be OK. The day just carried on as normal, we did all the same things, we did the croissants and the presents, because we were good at the stiff upper lip thing. But it was the last Christmas we spent as a family, and it was never the same again. We still do the traditions, though. We still do the spaghetti, the hazelnuts, the croissants. Some things don’t change.

  L.B.

  As much as we might wish to the contrary, time doesn’t stand still. We grow apart, we grow old, and successive Christmases can make that stuff alarmingly apparent. I spoke to so many people who told me stories of how their elderly relatives displayed their elderliness at Christmas, either through being unwell, or being forgetful, or just no longer giving a shit about the niceties of family life and doing whatever the hell they wanted. One friend of mine described an excruciating Christmas (‘it probably wasn’t as long as it felt’) with just her, her boyfriend and her grandmother, who came from an old-fashioned Hungarian family with archaic traditions, and who expected her boyfriend to stand up when she did and kiss her hand. He did neither of those things, of course. ‘She didn’t like him at all, and it was really awkward,’ my friend said, with characteristic British understatement – but we all have the capacity to behave unpredictably, and as we get older that capacity increases.