Christmas. The time of fists and mellow
fruitlessness. A cocktail of saleable
ingredients, wavering between arch comedy and hollow melodrama. The time when
Lennie the Drink read about the evils of drinking, so he gave up reading. The time for mother-in-law jokes, such as:
‘I’ve got a vile mother-in-law. She
treats me like a piece of dirt beneath my feet.
I bought her a new chair for Christmas but she won’t let me plug it in.’
The grey
mornings, the greyer afternoons. The
bare trees and the lowering clouds. The
lights in the High Street, switched on at three. The enforced bonhomie. The need to be nice to everyone. Much better to adopt the Groucho Marx
principle. In Duck Soup, he says to the
heroic stately galleon, Margaret Dumont: ‘Give me a lock of your hair.’ ‘A lock of my hair?’ she replies. ‘That’s
right’, he says, ‘a lock of your hair.
Think yourself lucky – I nearly asked for the whole wig.’ Later, making
advances to her, he asks her where her husband was. ‘Why, he’s dead,’ she
wails. ‘I was with him at the very end.’ ‘Then it was murder,’ Groucho replies.
Time for
shovelling out money, hand over fist. Time
for the romantic ideal of a church covered in a thin layer of snow with a
platoon of surplice-clad choirboys singing ‘Away In a Manger’ with a cheery
family walking through the virgin snow enraptured by a sky full of twinkling
stars and a spiritual glow over the church spire. God surely cannot be very far
away. Or a pastoral scene with lovely
Jersey cows lying on grass in front of an old Norman church, whilst Christmas
lights hang from a thousand-year-old yew tree in the quaint old churchyard and
the bucolic farmer leans cheerily over the gate, chewing on a straw, unburdened
by EU farming regulations.
Christmas morning
will find dutiful parents in their usual state of high excitement, fingers
wrapped around mugs of sweet, steaming tea, drinking the scalding, soothing
liquid while small hands make light work of carefully wrapped parcels. The aqua-green walls of the room are covered
in family pictures. The carpet is bright
red and the bookshelves depict an eclectic mix of literary tastes. The paper mounts up, then the cardboard, then
the broken gifts. Cart the whole lot
away to the recycling bin.
Time to
eat. Six courses, cooked with loving
care. A turkey the size of a small
elephant, dry as Polyfilla until doused with a gallon of bread sauce. Brussels
Time to
recall your childhood, when your dad bought you a ninth-hand Meccano set as a
present. When he bought it, the set was
discoloured and rusty. He painstakingly
sanded down and painted every one of a thousand pieces of Meccano: every angle,
every bracket, every girder, every stanchion, every wheel, every trunnion. He soaked all the nuts, bolts, clips, shafts
and washers in a pint of vinegar for days leading up to Christmas to clean away
the rust and make pieces easier to assemble.
Then he made a wooden box with neat compartments to keep all of the
pieces in. He spent dozens of hours on
this labour of love. Your interest in it lasted a day. Your father had to sell the Meccano set, much
to his great regret, just a year later, because money was tight. You knew, but you didn’t care.
That was
Christmas. That is why Christmas bothers me yet.
