Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘How wonderful!’ said David, and they started to laugh, and Marty opened the champagne and they sat together among the glow-hearts that glowed all Christmas. Except for one. Marty ­secretly took it away with the battery out so that it would always be David for him.

  David knew what Marty was thinking. He held him tight. ‘This is for now,’ said David. This tonight. This now. ‘The Promised Land is never in the future or the past – it is only ever now.’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ said Marty.

  ‘Look for the signs,’ said David.

  Marty arrived home. Two drunks lying in a doorway were pointing skywards. Marty gave them money and didn’t look up. He knew the helium-filled Santa was overhead. Now it was hovering over his house like the star in the story.

  Marty let himself in and went straight to bed. It was around a quarter to two in the morning. He fell asleep, deeply, but some time later he woke to hear David saying, ‘I told you to look for the signs.’

  Marty started up. He could see the luminous fingers of the clock – still a quarter to two; must have stopped. The street-lamp was faintly lighting up the bedroom. And David was sitting cross-legged on the bed. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and a tweed jacket. His feet and chest were bare.

  ‘I didn’t take any clothes with me,’ he said. ‘You don’t when you die. These are yours.’

  ‘I’m dreaming,’ said Marty, ‘but don’t wake me.’

  ‘Did you like the Santa Claus I sent?’

  ‘You sent it?’

  ‘I was getting desperate – this is my last chance.’

  ‘Christmas Eve – isn’t that a bit corny?’

  ‘You are so hard to reach! I can’t get through to you!’

  ‘I think about you all the time!’

  ‘That’s the problem – you’re so busy thinking about me, the dead part of me, that I can’t get through. I sent so many signs.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Two comets on the beach last summer – remember those?’

  Marty did remember but he wasn’t playing games. ‘Comets are space phenomena, not signs.’

  ‘That first summer, after the solstice, we saw two comets in France – I said to you, “They are for us.”’

  Marty remembered. He had loved David’s way of making the whole universe party to their love. But he had to protest. ‘Romantic, but wrong!’

  ‘So I sent them again – to remind you. And what about that day at the British Library – the woman who walked right up to you and said, “Hello David.”’

  ‘I never saw her before in my life. She was a madwoman.’

  ‘She was my auntie,’ said David. ‘She’s clairvoyant. She could see me walking right next to you.’

  ‘How was I to know she was your clairvoyant auntie? Why didn’t she say so?’

  ‘You had already strode on by into the crowd – she didn’t get a chance! I sent her all the way from Milton Keynes by train.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t YOU tell me?’

  ‘I did! You weren’t going to the British Library that day – I had to force you. I stood behind you yelling GO TO THE FUCKIN’ ­LIBRARY! Of course, I can’t yell because I don’t have a voicebox – but you get the idea.’

  Marty felt remorseful. He had neglected his lover and been rude to his lover’s clairvoyant auntie from Milton Keynes.

  ‘Should I send your auntie a Christmas card?’

  ‘That would be nice; her address is on my iPhone under PA – Psychic Auntie. You still have my iPhone?’

  Marty nodded. He had once scrolled through the addresses and stopped – too many men he had never met.

  ‘No regrets,’ said David, as if he could read Marty’s mind.

  Marty had a thought. ‘How are you speaking to me if you don’t have a voicebox?’

  ‘I have your full attention. We are communicating by thought.’

  ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’

  Marty put out his hand to touch David. But something like a light barrier was between them. His hand was luminous. He drew back his hand and wiped his eyes. He was suddenly frightened and tired.

  ‘I can’t live without you, David. It’s like living as a shadow. You were the sun.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. Hey, you didn’t even get the soup sign last week. You were at Chez Henri with Dan and Dan ordered my favourite soup, and when the waiter came he gave it to you by mistake. I was right there doing the switch.’

  ‘Are you always there?’

  ‘No, but I come and see you.’

  ‘Hold me.’

  ‘I can’t – it’s the Einstein thing, E=mc2. All mass is energy but not all energy is mass. You are in mass-form. I am in energy-form. I’m not lost, I’m not wasted, but I don’t have a way to hold you. I can warm you up, though. Feel – here – put out your hand again.’

  Marty put out his hand towards David’s chest. There was nothing solid there. He’d had so much muscle until it started to waste away – but perhaps it wasn’t wasting away, perhaps it was becoming what it needed to be. Energy not mass.

  Marty felt his fingers tingling and his hand warming. He held out his other hand, as though David were a fire lit on the bed. He started to cry.

  ‘Don’t cry, princess,’ said David. ‘That’s why I’m here. For both our sakes you have to stop. I need to go and you need to stay. I’ll always be around but I want you to start living again. Life is beautiful and brief. Don’t waste it.’

  ‘I can’t forget you,’ said Marty. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You won’t be forgetting me – you’ll be honouring what we had, what we did. Love isn’t a prison. You can’t be imprisoned inside your love for me. Take our love with you – it is with you; you’re not getting over me or moving on or any of that junk, you’re taking me with you.’

  ‘Take me with you instead,’ said Marty. ‘I don’t want to be here alone.’

  David looked at him with infinite love. ‘You have to trust me, like you always did – yes?’

  There was a long silence. Then Marty said, ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Get up in the morning – have coffee in the yard and I’ll be there. You’ll know I’ll be there. Wait and see. Then we’ll walk together to lunch at Chine-Ease and I’ll say goodbye to you outside; I’m not eating right now – no stomach for it.’

  Marty laughed but he didn’t want to laugh.

  ‘And then,’ said David, ‘I want you to start again.’

  Marty fell asleep. When he next woke it was just past 8am and the snow had stopped. He looked out of the window. There was no sign of the inflatable Santa Claus. He rubbed his head.

  And David? A dream.

  He sighed and went into the shower, shaved, wrapped himself in his dressing gown. Coffee. In the back yard. That’s what Dream ­David had told him to do. In the back yard? It was freezing.

  Marty made the coffee, hot and black, slipped on his boots, laces undone, and unbolted the door and went into the yard. The air had ice particles in it and there was a trail of cat paws through the snow. He could see the rough outlines of the box pyramids and doll’s house shape of the shed.

  And then he saw it.

  The glow-heart.

  Hanging on its chain from the apple tree was the last glow-heart that Marty had saved from their last Christmas together.

  David?

  The glow-heart shifted a little in the wind but there was no wind.

  Marty took the heart from the tree and hung it round his neck. There was a tiny beat of warmth from it against his chest.

  And later, lighter than he’d been, or so it seemed, he arrived at the restaurant. Sarah was just going in. She held out her arm.

  ‘I just have to say goodbye to someone,’ said Marty. ‘I’ll be in soon. Save
me a seat next to you.’

  Sarah looked surprised but she went inside.

  ‘Goodbye, David,’ said Marty, out loud. ‘Thank you for coming with me.’

  Marty opened the door. ‘They seem to be playing your song,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas now . . . ’

  welfth Night is a strange one. January 5th or 6th. Time to take down the decorations and end the holiday season.

  Twelfth Night marks the day when the Three Kings came to visit the baby Jesus. In Ireland, and in some parts of ­Italy, models of the Three Kings are added to the Nativity cribs on Twelfth Night.

  The Kings kneeling before the baby in the stable follows the pattern of reversals that midwinter festivals celebrated in pre-Christian times.

  The Roman Saturnalia and the Celtic festival Samhain both honour a Lord of Misrule. The period of the festival overturns the normal strict hierarchies of class, wealth and gender. The Italians at carnival time call it il mondo reverso – the world turned upside down. High becomes low, low becomes high, women tell the men what to do, and there’s plenty of cross-dressing too.

  The Catholic Church was genius at grafting its own religious occasions onto existing non-Christian festivals and Twelfth Night was part of the retro-fit.

  In Shakespeare’s time, Twelfth Night was an important feast. Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night dramatises the tradition of ­reversals – a girl dressed as a boy, a servant who fancies his chances with a high-born lady, a shipwreck where the past is swept away. The chaotic pantomime of the Dark House.

  Pantomimes themselves – staple Christmas entertainment – ­always have a cross-dressed dame, and an ordinary lad or lassie who will ­become the prince or princess, plus a few villains made to eat dust.

  There’s a beautiful poem by T. S. Eliot called ‘The Journey of the Magi’. It’s about the Three Kings making their way to the Christ Child – and questioning what happened – what was it they had ­witnessed? Was it a birth? Or a death?

  The birth of the Christ Child heralds the death of an existing order.

  That’s the thing with reversals – and you can find this principle in all the fairy tales too, some reversal of fortune, or circumstances, rags to riches, riches to rags, an end that is really a beginning, a brave new world that is only an animated necropolis, the loss of something precious that allows us to find the treasure that is really there.

  The reversal of any fixed situation allows a new possibility to present itself.

  Twelfth Night is also known as Epiphany. Epiphany means ‘manifestation’. Something is revealed. And what is revealed will be a challenge to the old order.

  We hear a lot about disruptive start-ups, like Uber, or Airbnb, challenging the existing order. We’re told this is creative and necessary. Maybe it is.

  My feeling is that we could do with more stability in our ­outward-facing lives so that we could risk disruption to our inner lives; our thinking, feeling, imaginative lives.

  When we’re just like the animals, concentrating on food, territory, survival, mating, being the leader of the pack, then what is the point of being human?

  The sad truth is that no political system (and capitalism is a ­political system) has succeeded in providing most of us with the ­basics we need, so that we have some freedom to explore what might be happening in the 98 per cent of our brains that we don’t use.

  That looks like failure to me.

  Epiphany is an inspired reversal of power structures and hierarchies, of class systems and the status quo, a reminder that the way we live is propositional: we made it this way – we could remake it in a different way.

  The Kings kneel before something bigger than authority – they are kneeling before a possible future, one based on love, not fear; one where there is abundance and not lack.

  We know that what follows in the Bible story is King Herod’s slaughter of every male child under two years old – his blood-soaked effort to hold on to power, to rigidly enforce what is, and wipe out what will be.

  But the child he wants is already gone, wrapped in his mother’s arms, trotting across the desert to his destiny.

  There is always another chance.

  And us?

  We’ve got the ersatz version of Follow Your Star – but what happens when the star leads us to a wormy, dungy stable in a crummy town and we’re wearing our best clothes and expecting applause and instead we have to kneel down in the straw and give our gifts (the best of us) to something we don’t understand?

  Quest stories and gaming make it seem so simple – challenges, monsters, setbacks, and then success. The trouble is that the real quest doesn’t have an end, or a happy-ever-after, or a series of moves to follow. A commitment to being conscious, to being creative – whatever that means to you – a commitment to love, a desire for change; that is a life’s work.

  Stars lead us where they will. What we do when we arrive at the unexpected destination is up to us.

  Journeys need food. I love fish, and these easy fishcakes can be left to cool and taken as a packed lunch or picnic supper. Or eat them hot and delicious with home-made mayo or your own tomato sauce.

  I don’t put potato in my fishcakes because I like eating them with chips. If you want a light and nutritious meal, try these with a squeeze of lemon or lime and a big bowl of seasonal salad. Or a plate of hot buttered cabbage.

  YOU NEED

  Quantity of mixed fish – this depends on how many fishcakes you fancy. I use a mixture of fresh cod and salmon with about 20 per cent smoked haddock. If you don’t like smoked haddock, leave it out. I’ve tried these with cod and small shrimp. Pretty good.

  Chopped onion – not too much, enough to give flavour

  Eggs. Eggs work as the binder as you’re not using potato.

  Breadcrumbs made with day-old bread

  Flour

  Flat-leaf parsley

  Salt and pepper

  METHOD

  The key here is that these fishcakes are small – too big and fat and the fish won’t cook through. Bigger fishcakes with potato need you to cook the potato and fish first – we’re not doing that. So think small.

  Chop up the fish small and the onion smaller.

  Mix together in a big bowl and add the egg or eggs so that you have a viscous mixture. Add parsley and seasoning.

  Put some flour onto a board. Using both hands, shape little flat fishcakes, then pat each side into the flour to hold together, and then pat each side into the breadcrumbs.

  As you make each one put it aside on a big plate. Make sure each little fishcake is firm.

  Chill in the fridge for an hour if you can. If not . . .

  Heat sunflower oil in a pan – get it good and hot and slide the fishcakes in one by one, turning after 4 minutes.

  If you want to make a tomato sauce you’ll need to do that ahead. The recipe below is very simple and just as good for pasta or rice as it is for fishcakes.

  Take some biggish tomatoes with a good flavour and skin them by placing in a big pan of hot water for about half an hour.

  Heat some olive oil in a heavy pan and add a bit of garlic. I add onion but you don’t have to. I add a fresh red chilli too sometimes, depending on how I feel and if I have one.

  When the garlic, onion and chilli are softened, add your peeled, coarse-chopped tomatoes and stir it all around. At this stage I sometimes put in a sprig of rosemary from the garden.

  Put the lid on the pan and cook on a medium heat for 30 minutes. Don’t let it burn.

  If everything has slooped together and it tastes good, take out the rosemary stalk (if you put it in), add seasoning and reduce the sauce to the desired consistency.

  You can throw in fresh basil at the end if you like. This is so simple and versatile and pretty quick. Enjoy!

  CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
/>   FROM THE AUTHOR

  ime is a boomerang, not an arrow.

  I was adopted by Pentecostals and stamped Missionary.

  Christmas was important in the missionary calendar. From the beginning of November, either we were preparing packages to send to the Foreign Field or we were preparing packages to deliver to those in Hot Places returning to the Home Front.

  It might have been because my parents had been in WWII. It might have been because we lived in End Time, waiting for ­Armageddon. Whatever the reason, there was a drill to Christmas, from making the mincemeat for the mince pies to singing carols to, or rather at, the unsaved of Accrington. Still, Mrs Winterson loved Christmas. It was the one time of the year when she went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a vale of tears.

  She was an unhappy woman, and so this happy time in our house was precious. I am sure I love Christmas because she did.

  On December 21st every year my mother went out in her hat and coat while my father and I strung up the paper chains, made by me, from the corners of the parlour cornice to the centre light bulb.

  Eventually my mother returned, in what seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather. She carried a goose, half-in, half-out of her shopping bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody can remember. She passed it to me – goose and dream – and I plucked the feathers into a bucket. We kept the feathers to restuff whatever needed restuffing, and we saved the thick goose fat drained from the bird for roasting potatoes through the winter. Apart from Mrs W, who had a thyroid problem, everyone we knew was as thin as a ferret. We needed goose fat.

  After I had left home, and later gone to university at Oxford, I went back to the old house, that first Christmas-time. My mother had given me the ultimatum to leave home long since, when I fell in love with a girl, and in a religious house like ours I might as well have married a goat. We hadn’t spoken since that time. I had lived in a Mini for a bit, lodged with a teacher and eventually left town.

  During my first term at Oxford I received a postcard – one of those postcards that says post card in blue letters at the top. Underneath, in her immaculate copperplate handwriting was the message: are you coming home this christmas? love mother.