A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  Surrey, Christmas 2000

  My mum’s mum was in her eighties, and had been forgetful for quite a long time. She went to bed on Christmas Eve relatively early, and she was completely fine. But when she got up on Christmas Day, she said to us, ‘I’m not sure if I’ve been taken to the right room, and I’m not sure who I need to speak to about this.’ My mum was half laughing, but then it became clear that she didn’t know who we were, and she thought she was in a hotel. It was quite shocking. When it dawned on my mum what was happening she was really upset. She ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom.

  My dad went to go and talk to my mum, and so for about 45 minutes I sat downstairs with my grandmother. She didn’t know who I was, she thought she was in a hotel, and so I had to pretend that I was the receptionist. I was only 12, so I was old enough to have a sense of what was going on, but it was really strange. Eventually my parents came downstairs, and suddenly my grandmother said, ‘Oh. I’ve just had a funny turn, haven’t I?’ And within a few minutes, she was back to normal. In subsequent Christmases she would show signs of dementia again, suddenly thinking she was in the 1950s or something, but the Christmas when we first realised was really stressful. I guess we handled it in a very British way, everyone feeling rather uncomfortable, but trying to make it less awkward for everyone else.

  N. P.

  You’d have to wonder what domestic pets make of our erratic behaviour and bizarre rituals at Christmas. Never having owned a dog, cat, bird or tortoise, I feel ill-equipped to ponder this question; I suspect that the answer in most cases is ‘not much, where is my food’, but I asked my colleague Sarah Bee about her own canine Christmas experiences, because she knows much more about this stuff than I do. ‘Dogs tend to love a gathering,’ she said, ‘and all kinds of people turn up at Christmas. There’s the constant smell of food, too, which is overwhelming for us, so it must be almost psychedelic for a dog, a total sensory overload. But I remember with my dog, Kaine, you’d see him circulating, socialising, but eventually he’d become overwhelmed by the attention. You could see him getting weary of it, and at some point he’d have to take himself away, and go and lie quietly in a corner to recharge.’

  Many of us can identify with Kaine’s retreat to his dog basket at the end of a long Christmas Day: that intense level of social interaction over a short period of time can take it out of you. There’s a point where you have to leave the arena, decompress and reflect on the way we behave and why we make each other feel the way we do. We might all consider our own families to be a bit weird, but it’s that weirdness, displayed with full contrast and full brightness at Christmas, that defines us, way more than our social class or the achievements we’ve accrued. If Christmas wasn’t a bit weird, it wouldn’t feel like Christmas at all.

  Walsall, Christmas 2002

  We’re a large family, two aunts and uncles, each with four kids and partners who have kids of their own, so family get-togethers are quite hectic. My nan – Nanny Red – had a new boyfriend that year, and he was invited for Christmas Day. (This was the boyfriend after the Malaysian man with a wonky leg and before the used-furniture salesman with the Citroen C3.) We’d all copped some form of Nanny Red’s corporal punishment over the years (the most impressive being my cousin taking a golf club to the head from 30 feet), but we’re very protective of her. In fact, we’re a bunch of absolute bastards, and very hostile to outsiders.

  Anyway, the boyfriend’s name was Michael Jackson. The three-hour meal consisted of nothing but taunts based around Michael Jackson songs and throughout the meal you could see him getting visibly agitated. The boiling point came just as we were finishing off the turkey. I can’t remember what exactly triggered it, but I remember Michael Jackson standing up, striking the remnants of the bird with his cane and storming out. Nan didn’t bother to follow him. We never saw him again. I feel a bit sorry for him now, but I honestly think that if he’d stuck around, Nanny Red would have eaten him alive.

  C. B.

  And A Nice Fibre-Optic Tree

  The Doctor: Christmas trees.

  Donna: What about them?

  The Doctor: They kill. Get away from the trees! Get away from the Christmas trees! Listen to me! Stay away from the trees!

  Donna’s mother: Oh, for God’s sake, the man’s an idiot. What harm is a Christmas tree going t— [sound of exploding baubles]

  Doctor Who, Christmas 2006

  With the tasteful deployment of decorations, a nondescript British living room can be magically transformed into a nondescript British living room with some balloons in it. Brightening our surroundings, however minimally, is an important part of the Christmas experience; it has its roots in the centuries-old display of evergreens such as holly and ivy as symbols of rebirth, although that tradition used to involve burning the decorations after Christmas for superstitious reasons, and now we just put it into storage for 12 months before hauling it out again, a bit like Noddy Holder. This splurge of colour, of golds and silvers, reds and greens, helps to offset some of the gloom of winter, and if you enjoy keeping up with design trends you might even use Pinterest to mood-board the living crap out of your upcoming Christmas. But most of our decorating involves specific objects and action plans that are rooted in tradition and very particular to our own family.

  We have a gold plastic electronic bell that used to play tunes. It died years ago, but it still gets hung up. We have a special twig display in the dining room that gets knocked over every time someone gets up from the table. There’s a heavy cast iron candelabra (a special Christmas one, of course) that hangs above the table with twenty lit candles in it, posing something of a threat to those below. A Santa hat for the clock above the fireplace. Various tree ornaments with our names on from when we were kids, a massive poinsettia attack in the hallway, and one bit of tinsel – the only one allowed throughout the whole Christmas display – twirled around the grandfather clock. And strict rules about who decorates what. I could go on.

  K. S., Carlisle

  There’s a snobbery attached to Christmas decorations that dates back decades. In 1967, the new director of the National Portrait Gallery, Roy Strong, got pretty het-up in The Spectator about the ‘gaudy paper chains’ and ‘nauseating plaster robins’ that the British clearly felt a strong attachment to. ‘This is a message,’ he wrote, ‘to all those who need the strength to free themselves from the triumph of tastelessness, vulgarity and cheap sentiment that epitomises the British Christmas,’ before going on in a similar fashion for another 900 words. That tension between what’s acceptable and what ain’t seems to run along class lines, and you see that divide in our towns and cities. Some people will point and laugh at a revolving illuminated Santa doing his thing in one front garden, while two streets away others will sneer at an ostentatious display of wealth in the form of a 12-foot tree shimmering with white light that’s supposedly a lot more tasteful. In 2004, people living on a housing estate in Redcar started getting anonymous letters from an uncharitable soul styling him or herself as ‘The House Doctor’, criticising their decorations as ‘a cross between a bingo house and a brothel’ – not that it had much effect. We’re fiercely proud of the way we decorate, and residents of Sheffield’s Abbeydale Park Rise know all about this. They adorn the street’s cherry trees with lights every year, drawing crowds from across the city, and when the council earmarked nineteen of those trees for felling in 2016, one local described the impact it would have on Christmas as ‘devastating’. That might be a slight exaggeration, but Christmas traditions die very hard indeed.

  The big exterior displays of lights that some people consider to be self-indulgent grandstanding also manage, simultaneously, to be a selfless gesture towards the local community. ‘Last year I collected £3,100 in a box out the front for charity,’ says Denise Mansell, who transforms her St Albans home into a riot of luminescence for three weeks around Christmas. ‘The cost of the electricity is about £13 a day, so what’s that, about £250, and I pay that out of my
own pocket. But people give more and more every year, they make special trips to see it, and so we make it bigger and bigger. We can’t even get a car in the garage any more, and we’ve had to build extra sheds to store all the stuff. But every time a grandmother or grandfather comes down with their grandkids, and I see their faces, I remember why I do it.’ And how are the neighbours with all this? ‘They’re brilliant,’ she says. ‘We all use it as a landmark for taxi drivers after a night out. “Just take us to the lights,” we say.’

  “I have to be honest, Dave, all the blue LEDs make it look like there’s been a massive Christmas emergency.”

  Thanks are probably due to American inventor Edward Hibberd Johnson, who first had the idea of using electric light to spread Christmas joy back in 1882, when he hung 120 light bulbs around a 6-foot Christmas tree in his New York home. In turn that tree was connected to a dynamo in the basement which caused the whole thing to slowly revolve.47 ‘One can hardly imagine anything prettier,’ wrote a local journalist at the time, and more than 130 years later we attempt to emulate Johnson’s pioneering electrical experiments by amateurishly wiring long strings of lights into the same overloaded plug and praying for a Christmas miracle – i.e. the miracle of survival. Having said that, electric light is surely, on balance, safer than candlelight. If you look back at old videos of the making of that traditional British decoration, the Blue Peter Advent Crown, you see large red candles being stuck with Plasticine into holders loosely attached to a frame of coat hangers, leading you to wonder why it wasn’t called the Blue Peter Advent Deathtrap. Indeed, as you watched the Blue Peter presenter of that era light the fourth candle in the week before Christmas, with the sound of the Chalk Farm Salvation Army band marching into the studio, you felt a palpable sense of relief that they’d reached Christmas without setting Television Centre on fire.

  A Christmas tree generally forms the centrepiece of any British Christmas display, but as a nation we’re not always good at assessing them for size. Get one that’s too small, and you may stand accused of undervaluing Christmas; too big, and it can end up becoming an obstruction to family life. Last year my friend Paul bought himself a huge tree from Argos without measuring up, and proudly installed it in the corner of his living room with the top rammed against the ceiling and bent through 90 degrees. The opposite problem was happening 200 miles west, where Cardiff council, in an echo of the ‘Stonehenge’ scene in the film This is Spinal Tap, spent £30,000 on a ‘spectacular’ 40-metre high Christmas tree, only to discover on delivery that it was an ‘embarrassing’ 40-feet tall. Dissatisfaction with the aesthetic appeal of municipal trees is commonplace, from Stockton-on-Tees (‘ashamed is an understatement’) to Peterborough (‘like a pile of luminescent haemorrhoids which cost £50,000’), but the standards to which we hold local authorities don’t seem to apply in our own homes.

  Cardiff, Christmas 1988

  One year my dad decided that he’d enough of hauling pine trees home for Christmas, only for them to spike him and then shed needles everywhere. One afternoon, while on a dog walk on a disused railway line, he saw an attractive-looking twig. He brought that home and that became our tree. It was affectionately known as the Christmas Twig, and it lived in the loft between festivities. It was quite a nice twig. The only reason it got retired was because every year a few more bits would snap off.

  E. C.

  When our front doors are safely closed, it scarcely seems to matter what’s chosen to represent the tree. If it’s been used for two or more years in a row, then you’ve successfully made it ‘a thing’ and you should probably stick with it. From Greek-inspired Christmas boats with three masts, to festive pineapples surrounded with coloured beads, no one is going to criticise you for your choice – unless you take a photograph of it, post it on Twitter and ask people what they think, in which case you’re liable to be shot down in flames. The LED-studded fibre-optic tree, to which tribute has been paid in the title of this chapter, may lack a certain amount of German authenticity, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of this book it’s that you can do pretty much what the hell you like.

  Brighton, Christmas 2002

  When my son was 3 years old we bought a very small Christmas tree – maybe 8 inches high? – and showed it to him and asked him if he liked it. We lived in a small terraced house with a hallway that ran from the front door along to the kitchen at the back. He looked at the tree, carefully put it down at the entrance to the kitchen, announced ‘it stands up really well’, took aim and booted it as hard as he could, all the way along the hall to the front door. His reason for doing this was never known – he was never a violent or aggressive child. Anyway, it’s become a tradition each year for him to stand this little tree up and boot it as far as he can. He’s now 18 years old and we still do it. It signifies the start of Christmas in our house.

  V. S.

  In 2016, Hillier Garden Centres did a customer survey to find out which object was most commonly found at the top of the average British Christmas tree. Around 90 per cent of respondents either had a star, an angel or a fairy, but far more interesting stuff could be found in the lower reaches of the league table. There we see a set of coloured umbrellas, a wireless camera (to see who’s stealing the chocolates), a Norwegian gnome, a bumblebee, and a piece of the Barwell meteorite, which landed on a Leicestershire village on Christmas Eve 1965. Given that there are no precise rules laid down about what should sit astride the tree, it’s a shame that more of us don’t use a little more imagination48 – but the further down the tree we go, the less of a hoot we give for Christmas protocol. Literally anything goes.

  Middlesex, Christmas, 1983

  Sometimes my mum would give us oven chips as part of our dinner. Whenever this happened, me and my brother would have a ‘longest chip’ competition to find out which of us had the longest chip on our plates. We’d put them on our forks, measure up and see who’d won. One day in December my brother sacrificed one of these longest chips, attached a loop of wool with a piece of tape, and hung it up on the Christmas tree.

  We wondered if our parents would tell us to take it down – but incredibly, it survived Christmas, possibly because my mum was slightly sentimental about anything that we’d made, even if it was a chip with some wool stuck to it. After Christmas me and my brother just put this dried chip back in the box with the other decorations. The following year it was there again, and again the year after. I remember one year my brother decided to colour it in with green felt tip, and the next year it was there again, this green Festive Chip. It ended up being on the tree for at least 10 years. No complaint from my parents – in fact, no comment at all. The Festive Chip was never even mentioned. It just hung there.

  S. A.

  A display of all the things we put on our Christmas trees would look like a completely deranged car-boot sale haul. I’ve heard tell of a camouflaged Action Man (‘My mum moves him every night, and every morning we have to find where he’s hiding’), a vulture covered in glitter (‘She’s called Vivienne, she’s fabulous’), a clown doll (‘It terrified me when I was 3 years old, I still hate it and I think it hates me, too’), gold sprayed tampons (‘My mother was given them as a present and they just hang there from their blue strings’) and popcorn on thread (‘not sure if this is weird or not’). In 2016, Twitter user @L3GSV received enormous approval online and in the press for having decorated her tree with loo-roll angels featuring the faces of celebrities who had died in the previous 12 months. ‘My sister did one in 1997 as a tongue-in-cheek ode to Princess Diana,’ she says, ‘and in November she suggested that I should do it again. Prince was the first one I made. I stuck the wings on him and he immediately looked amazing. The reaction was almost universally positive, except for a handful of people who didn’t like the curtains that were behind it in the picture.’

  My parents never have a Christmas tree in their home, not because they hate Christmas (I’m almost certain they don’t) but because our Christmas Day has a
lways been spent elsewhere, either with my grandparents or at my sister’s, and so they probably deem it an unnecessary extravagance. Their concession to Christmasiness is a display of cards on two living room doors, which both have small panels of glass, each with a card stuck on with Blu-Tack. I talked to my mum about this for about two minutes on the phone. ‘There are 15 panels on each door,’ she said, ‘so you’ve got 30 cards displayed in the living room, and then 15 on the other side of one of them, but I tend not to stick them on the other side of the door that goes into the hallway. We usually get about 60, so the family cards and the larger ones go on the dresser. It’s all very technical. Then after Christmas I look at the backs of the cards to see how many of them are charity cards, and The Woodland Trust tends to be the most popular. Please don’t quote me on any of this, will you.’ Of course I won’t.

  Some things are too heavy to hang from Christmas trees, so through gravitational necessity they end up becoming Christmas ornaments. My sister owns two pint-sized, battery-powered dancing Christmas trees which, when turned on, play ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ by Bobby Helms at very slightly different speeds; when set off at the same time they create this disorienting effect, as if time is being stretched in her living room, causing us to clutch our heads at the prospect of a Christmas marginally elongated by Bobby Helms.