Wirral, Christmas 1985
In the mid 1980s, my grandpa (who absolutely lived for Christmas) gave each branch of the family a really tacky, battery-operated Santa which rang a bell and played ‘Jingle Bells’ so loudly that it felt like someone had Black & Deckered their way into your cranium and was piping it directly into your brain. There was no volume control. We said, ‘Thank you’, and quietly agreed that as soon as the batteries died we would put it away and never speak of it again.
I kid you not – this thing is still going, on the same set of batteries, 32 years later. My mother swears blind she’s never replaced them and I’m inclined to believe her as they’re the old orange and blue Ever Ready batteries that you can’t buy any more. I suspect demonic possession.
L. B.
The inventory of Christmas objects, assembled over decades, is guaranteed to trigger nostalgic feelings when they’re brought out, resulting in a strange amalgamation of This Is Your Life, Antiques Roadshow and Britain’s Biggest Hoarders. My friend Kate tells me of three classical-style angels, two feet high, which used to stand in a Dolcis shoe shop on Kensington High Street in the 1950s. Her grandmother idly asked the shop assistant one day if they would be thrown away after Christmas, and when the answer came ‘yes’ they were dutifully added to the family collection. Another pal, Lucy, tells me of the grandmother who stole decorations from the businesses she used to clean for, resulting in a big sign hung on her living room wall reading: ‘Merry Christmas to all our customers from Hamlet Cigars’.
But this stuff doesn’t have to be festive, ornate or even useful. ‘We have a tin can,’ confesses writer Emma Beddington, ‘which is unadorned except for one small curl of wood shaving glued to the top. No one knows what it was supposed to be when it was first created, or who made it, or indeed even if it was a Christmas thing originally, but my sister and I always insist it must be brought out every Christmas and given pride of place. This used to drive my mother insane.’
Wallington, Christmas 1988
We weren’t a religious family, and we weren’t particularly well off, so Christmas was really all about traditions. We’d have metres of crêpe paper in garish colours that my mum had layered up and sewn on the sewing machine. This stuff would be unrolled, huge balls of it, then my dad would get up the ladder and it would be put up everywhere. And there was a little postbox that my brother made out of a cereal box, and we’d put our Christmas cards to each other in it.
We also had these robins. I’ve no idea what they were made of, but over the years they got more and more battered. Every year these knackered robins would come out, and they almost seemed to reflect us as a family. All the resentments and family ‘stuff’ over Christmas would leave us feeling pretty battered, too, but then all that ‘stuff’ would be put away, just like the robins, and re-emerge 12 months later without anyone having discussed anything or sorted anything out. We’d be the same, just slightly older, slightly more battered.
A. M.
The family box of decorations, with its tinsel, paper chains, stars, wreaths, cardboard sculptures and partially inflated Santas, comes with no best-before date and no use-by date. It’s the one aspect of British cultural life where recycling was traditional long before the Household Waste Recycling Act came into force. Some families take this idea to extremes, particularly in the case of my friend Joe, whose mother would insist that the doors of the advent calendar would be shut after Christmas so it could be put away for 11 months. It was then hauled out the following December, the hope presumably being that everyone would have forgotten the sequence of Christmassy images that lay behind each window. ‘One particular calendar lasted more than a decade,’ said Joe, his eyes filling with tears of nostalgia (possibly, I’m not sure; he told me all this over Facebook Messenger). Joe’s family’s strategy wouldn’t work with modern advent calendars, the posh, upscaled ones, where twenty-four miniature Jo Malone perfumes sit in a series of individually numbered drawers. (Yours for £280.) I’ve never owned a luxury advent calendar, but I think I might miss the element of surprise that you get from the traditional ones. ‘Oh look,’ I would say to my non-existent wife as I open the door of my non-existent L’Occitane calendar, ‘it’s another luxury product by L’Occitane’, before sighing and setting off to my non-existent highly paid job.
Edinburgh, Christmas 1987
My grandpa used to individually attach baubles to the living room ceiling with drawing pins, despite the fact that it was the act of a lunatic and everyone mocked him relentlessly for it. One year Santa brought my brother a Ghostbusters ‘Ghost Popper’ (basically a Nerf gun) and the extended family all spent a cracking afternoon attempting to shoot the baubles down. Grandpa was apoplectic about it, then and for years afterwards.
A. M.
The traditional Christmas cracker has also undergone a facelift as lifestyles become more aspirational and we lay down specific demands for valuable gifts that are small enough to fit inside a toilet roll. Swarovski produce a £99 box of six crackers that each contain a crystal, if that’s the kind of thing that lights your festive candle, but personally I don’t see what’s wrong with a plastic fortune-telling fish, a mini pack of playing cards, a metal puzzle, a key ring, a bouncy ball and a green monster that fits on the end of a pencil. I also demand a paper hat that splits down the side as soon as I put it on my head, and jokes that make no sense. Examples of British cracker-joke wit that I’ve encountered or been alerted to over the years include: ‘How do you turn a lemon on? Tickle it’s citrus’ (rogue apostrophe intended, but it doesn’t help the joke); ‘Knock knock? Who’s there? Snow? Snow who? There’s snow business like show business!’ and ‘Why do ghosts live in the fridge? Because it’s cool.’ It’s telling, perhaps, that this combination of gift, hat and joke simply doesn’t work in other countries; a former employee of a major UK cracker firm told me that they’d tried to break America several times, but that the Americans just didn’t get it.49 The problem with the cracker, and indeed its unique selling point, is that there’s nothing to get.
It feels like mistletoe may have had its day. In times gone by it may have been symbolic of a kind of romantic innocence, as people who were too meek to admit liking each other any earlier in the year suddenly felt emboldened enough to steal a kiss beneath its bough; as historian John Pimlott wrote in his book The Englishman’s Christmas, ‘It was popular because it provided an outlet for impulses which had at other times to be restrained.’ These days, however, it feels like more of a sex pest’s charter, with sprigs of the stuff toted by red-eyed drunkards who feel it gives them licence to proposition anyone within a two-metre radius – which, needless to say, is not symbolic of romantic innocence, quite the opposite. In 2014, a scheme was tested in UK branches of restaurant chain TGI Fridays, whereby staff would fly drones bearing sprigs of mistletoe over the heads of dining couples. This gimmick was then taken to the USA for a holiday promotion, where, at the launch, a drone blade sliced off the end of a photographer’s nose. (Yet another potential Christmas danger to be added to an already long list – see Five Broken Limbs.) So yes, mistletoe presents all kinds of problems, and it should probably be quietly forgotten about. The right-wing press may bemoan the death of a long-standing tradition, but nature itself is rebelling against the way the British use mistletoe, refusing to grow in sufficient quantities on these shores and requiring us to import the stuff from mainland Europe.
Twelfth Night traditionally marks the end of the Christmas period in Britain, and rather wonderfully there seems to be no consensus on when that actually is. If you count Christmas Day as day one, then Twelfth Night is on the evening of 5 January. If you count Boxing Day as the first day, it’s on the 6th. But to be honest, all this stuff is academic, because our appetite for anything Christmassy has usually evaporated a few days earlier in any case. On the morning of New Year’s Day it can feel as if we’ve had enough celebration to last a year, which is fortunate, as that’s roughly when next Christmas is due to turn up.
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br /> There’s a commonly held belief that it’s unlucky for decorations to be left up after Twelfth Night, and while I’d challenge that belief on scientific grounds, there’s definitely something unsettling about going back to work in January and coming home in the evening to a glittery reminder of the previous fortnight. And so begins the packing away of decorations, the packing away of Christmas, as things are put in boxes and we start to wonder what to do with the tree that’s already shed a quarter of its body weight onto the carpet. If you live near a zoo or safari park, it’s worth remembering that Christmas trees are like catnip to lions; if you haven’t seen footage of them rolling around and rubbing themselves against them in post-Christmas ecstasy, get on YouTube and have a look – it’s brilliant. But obviously don’t lob Christmas trees into lion enclosures yourself. In fact, to be on the safe side, just leave them outside your home for the council to deal with, but leave them in the right place, and on the right day, otherwise they’ll become a gently decaying reminder of baby Jesus.
There are people who can’t bear the idea of Christmas ending. ‘My mum loved her tree,’ says my friend Dora. ‘She’d leave it up until early February, and then she’d reluctantly take it down just before my birthday party, because I was embarrassed that my friends would laugh at it when they came over. But after we’d moved away from home, she’d sometimes leave it up all year round. She loved the lights, the ornaments and the spirit of what it represented. It made her happy.’
There’s no flaw in Dora’s mum’s reasoning. Happiness is, after all, what we strive for, and Christmas can certainly make us happy. It can also make us infuriated, bored, elated, drunk, sentimental, depressed, generous, agitated, buoyant, stressed, amorous, argumentative, excitable and confused: confused at the way our emotions become heightened during this annual holiday, bemused as to why a fairly arbitrary double-digit date in deep midwinter should make us feel that way.
Scrooge, of course, ultimately made his peace with Christmas; according to Dickens, he learned ‘how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.’ And just there, right at the end of A Christmas Carol, Dickens gives us the excuse we need. Because there is no precise definition of how to ‘keep Christmas well’, no code laid down, no edicts to adhere to, not really. We all keep it just as we want to keep it, doing our own thing, shaped by our own circumstances, unique, distinct and very, very real.
Every year we cope with all the pressure
Although I’m not sure how
So hang an Action Man upon the highest bough
And Have Yourself A Very British Christmas now
Sources for quotes at beginning of chapters
Quote from The Office by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
Quote from Gavin & Stacey by James Corden and Ruth Jones
Quote from Love Actually by Richard Curtis
Quote from Blackadder’s Christmas Carol by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton
Quote from ‘Christmas Alphabet’ by Buddy Kaye and Jules Loman
Quote from ‘Christmas Island’ by Lyle Moraine
Quote from ‘Winter Wonderland’ by Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith
Quote from The Likely Lads by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais
Quote from Bottom by Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall
Quote from Peep Show by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain
Quote from ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Noddy Holder and Jim Lea
Quote from The Royle Family by Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash
Quote from Doctor Who by Russell T. Davies
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Rhodri Marsden 2017
Rhodri Marsden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008256739
1 I have sympathy for those who have Christmas Day birthdays, because you rarely get anywhere near ‘double presents’ and your friends are never around. ‘It’s like 28 Days Later’, says writer Rhik Samadder, who suffers from this particular affliction. ‘Everyone disappears. Although things have improved since Facebook came along. People will be sitting at home bored out of their minds, and they’ll get a notification that it’s my birthday, so they’ll take time to write me a proper message. But before Facebook, the only positive aspect of having a Christmas Day birthday was mentioning it during excruciating small talk to get a very brief conversational fillip.’
2 An ‘I’m A Twat’ mug characteristic fulfils only this one. Surprise alone isn’t sufficient for a gift. Otherwise, eviction notices and chlamydia would fit the bill.
3 I made a solemn promise to myself that I wouldn’t use the word ‘gifting’ in this chapter, because I actively dislike it. It inspires the same hollow feeling as when I see ‘cleansing’ replace the word ‘cleaning’. Street cleansing? Seriously? But now I’ve used both words in a footnote. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
4 Some may disagree with the idea of ‘lying’ to children about Santa, but we all have periods as kids where we pretend that things are real and form magical relationships with those things. When I see a child talking to a teddy bear, I don’t march over and say, ‘Stop that, it’s not real.’ I’m not a monster.
5 I’ve been alerted to a variant on Secret Santa called either Secret Satan or Yankee Swap. The rules: Spend £10 on something you’d actually like, wrap it and bring it. Draw straws for someone to go first. They pick any present from the pile and open it. Person two then chooses whether they’d like to open a new present or steal the first person’s open gift. If they steal, Person one gets to choose a new present. Person three then gets to open a gift or steal either of the open presents. If they steal, the person whose present is now missing can open a new one or steal from the other. You can’t steal directly back from someone in the same round that they’ve stolen from you, but you can in the next round. Apparently this sets off chain reactions of evil behaviour, bartering and strategic nabbing, which can lead to resignations, demotions and widespread resentment – but apparently it can also be enormous fun. That’s the gamble. I’ll leave it with you.
6 ‘She was a very difficult woman,’ says Dee, ‘and she didn’t like me. She explained to me later that the reason that I didn’t get £2,000 was “because you’re not getting married”, but that made no sense at all because my brother wasn’t getting married either. Anyway, he split the £2,000 with me and I used it to pay for root canal work.’
7 Pets might be particularly peeved about the inevitability of their gift, but they aren’t able to voice their displeasure. Show them you care a little more this Christmas with something more imaginative, like a Salman Rushdie novel or a set of ratchet spanners.
8 The global marketing manager at De Kuyper, who make Warninks, points out to me that the origins of advocaat may not be from eggnog at all, but from Dutch sailors who returned home and attempted to recreate an avocado-based Caribbean (or Brazilian?) drink without using avocado, because the
re weren’t any in Holland. Somewhat illogically, they used eggs instead. Don’t try the same approach when making guacamole; it won’t work.
9 It took the original manufacturer of Baileys, Gilbeys, three years to come up with a way of doing it that didn’t result in a curdled mess, and, perhaps understandably, they were never keen on telling us how they did it. They described the birth of Baileys, on 26 November 1974, as an ‘almost magical accident’, although every accident involving Baileys since then has been much less magical.
10 There are no such concerns about morality when that same newspaper has its own Christmas office party, which ends up with three people stark naked in the back of a Transit van for reasons that no one can quite remember.
11 I contacted a representative from one such brand to enquire about their feelings towards Christmas, and they replied: ‘While many people use [it] for managing a hangover, this isn’t an official indication of the product, which means we are not allowed to proactively communicate anything on this topic.’ This particular brand is so inextricably associated with hangovers that I feel a bit sorry for the marketing department. They must spend long meetings trying to come up with exciting new angles, e.g. using the boxes as doorstops.
A Very British Christmas Page 17
