Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

by Jeanette Winterson

  As I reached our little terraced house at the top of the street I could hear the mostly musical sounds of what is best described as a bossa-nova version of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. My mother had thrown out the old upright piano and got herself an electronic organ with double keyboard, orchestra stops, drum and bass.

  She hadn’t seen me for two years. Nothing was said. We spent the next hour admiring the effects of snare drum and trumpet solo on ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’.

  My Oxford friend from St Lucia was due to visit me at home, which was brave of her, but when I had tried to explain about my family she thought I was exaggerating.

  At first the visit was a great success. Mrs W considered a black friend as a missionary endeavour all of its own. She went round to the retired missionaries from the church and asked, ‘What do they eat?’ Pineapples, came the answer.

  When Vicky arrived my mother gave her a wool blanket she had knitted so that Vicky would not be cold. ‘They feel the cold,’ she told me.

  Mrs Winterson was an obsessive and she had been knitting for ­Jesus all year. The Christmas tree had knitted decorations on it, and the dog was imprisoned inside a Christmas coat of red wool with white snowflakes. There was a knitted Nativity scene, and the shepherds were wearing little scarves because this was Bethlehem on the bus route to Accrington.

  My dad opened the door dressed in a knitted waistcoat and matching knitted tie. The whole house had been re-knitted.

  Mrs W was in a merry mood. ‘Would you like some gammon and pineapple, Vicky? Cheese on toast with pineapple? Pineapples and cream? Pineapple upside-down cake? Pineapple fritters?’

  Eventually, after a few days of this fare, Vicky said, ‘I don’t like pineapple.’

  Mrs W’s mood changed at once. She didn’t speak to us for the rest of the day and she crushed up a papier-mâché robin. The next morning, at breakfast, the table was set with a pyramid of unopened tins of pineapple chunks and a Victorian postcard of two cats on their hind legs dressed up like Mr and Mrs. The caption said nobody loves us.

  That night, when Vicky went to bed, she found that her pillow had been taken out of its pillowcase, and the pillowcase stuffed with warning leaflets about the Apocalypse. She wondered whether to go home, but I’d seen worse and I thought things might improve.

  On Christmas Eve we had a group of carol singers round from the church. Mrs W did seem happier. She had forced me and Vicky to wrap several half-cabbages in tinfoil and spear them with cocktail sticks of Cheddar cheese, topped with the rejected pineapple chunks.

  She called these things sputniks. It was something to do with the Cold War. Tinfoil? Antennae? The scaremongering that the KGB had listening devices hidden in cheese?

  Never mind. The offending pineapples had found a purpose and we were all singing carols quite happily when there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be the Salvation Army singing carols too.

  This was reasonable. It was Christmas-time. But Mrs Winterson was having none of it. She opened the front door and shouted, ‘Jesus is here. Go away.’

  Slam.

  When I went away after that Christmas I never went back. I never saw Mrs W again – she was soon too furious about my debut novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985). Quote: ‘It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book in a false name.’

  She died in 1990.

  As you get older you remember the dead at Christmas. The Celts, during their midwinter festival of Samhain, expected the dead to join the living. Many cultures would understand that; not ours.

  That is a pity. And a loss. If time is a boomerang and not an arrow, then the past is always returning and repeating. Memory, as a creative act, allows us to reawaken the dead, or sometimes to lay them to rest, as at last we understand our past.

  Last Christmas I was alone in my kitchen, the fire lit – I love having a fire in the kitchen. I was pouring myself a drink when Judy Garland came on the radio singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. I remembered how Mrs W had played that song on the piano. It was one of those moments we all know, of sadness and sweetness mixed together. Regret? Yes, I think so, for everything we got wrong. But recognition too, because she was a remarkable woman. She deserved a miracle to get her out of her trapped life of no hope, no money, no possibility of change.

  Fortunately, she got the miracle. Unfortunately, the miracle was me. I was the Golden Ticket. I could have taken her anywhere. She could have been free . . .

  The Christmas story of the Christ Child is complex. Here’s what it tell us about miracles.

  Miracles are never convenient (the baby’s going to be born whether or not there’s a hotel room – and there isn’t).

  Miracles are not what we expect (an obscure man and woman find themselves parenting the Saviour of the World).

  Miracles detonate the existing situation – and the blow-up and the back-blast mean some people get hurt.

  What is a miracle? A miracle is an intervention – it breaks through the space-time continuum. A miracle is an intervention that cannot be accounted for purely rationally. Chance and fate are in the mix. A miracle is a benign intervention, yes, but miracles are like the genie in the bottle – let them out and there’s a riot. You’ll get your Three Wishes, but a whole lot else besides.

  Mrs W wanted a baby. She couldn’t have one. Along comes me – but as she often said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’ Satan as a faulty star.

  That’s the fairy-tale element of the story.

  Sometimes the thing we long for, the thing we need, the miracle we want, is right there in front of us, and we can’t see it, or we run the other way, or, saddest of all, we just don’t know what to do with it. Think how many people get the success they want, the partner they want, the money they want, et cetera, and turn it into dust and ashes – like the fairy gold no one can spend.

  So at Christmas I think about the Christmas story, and all the Christmas stories since. As a writer I know that we get along badly without space in our lives for imagination and reflection. Religious festivals were designed to be time outside of time. Time where ordinary time was subject to significant time. What we remember. What we invent.

  So light a candle to the dead.

  And light a candle to miracles, however unlikely, and pray that you recognise yours.

  And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much.

  And light a candle to the future; that it may happen and not be swallowed up by darkness.

  And light a candle to love.

  Lucky Love.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to everyone who worked to pull this book together with me. My editors in London and New York, Rachel Cugnoni and Elisabeth Schmitz. Áine Mulkeen, Ana Fletcher, Matt Broughton and Neil Bradford at Vintage. Laura Evans on copy-edit and proofs. ­Kamila Shamsie, Sylvia Whitman at Shakespeare and Company. And my glorious agent Caroline Michel, who loves Christmas as much as I do.

  And absent friends: Kathy Acker and Ruth Rendell. And of course, Mrs Winterson and Dad.