Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days Read online

  Christmas was banned by the Puritans in the UK and the USA because it is such a gaudy ragbag of a festival with something borrowed from everywhere – pagans, Romans, Norsemen, Celts, Turks – and because its celebratory free spirit, its gift-giving, topsy-turvy misrule, made it anti-authority and anti-work. It was a holiday – holy day – of the best kind, where devotion has joy in it.

  Life should be joyful.

  I know Christmas has become a cynical retail hijack but it is up to us all, individually and collectively, to object to that. Christmas is celebrated across the world by people of all religions and none. It is a joining together, a putting aside of differences. In pagan and Roman times it was a celebration of the power of light and the co-operation of nature in human life.

  Money wasn’t the point.

  In fact, the Christmas story starts with a demand for money:

  And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (Luke 2:1)

  And ends with a gift – ‘unto us a child is born.’

  The gift of new life is followed by the gifts of the magi – the gold, frankincense and myrrh.

  In the best-loved of all Christmas carols the poet Christina Rossetti poses the question of what we can give that is not about money or power or success or talent:

  What can I give Him, poor as I am?

  If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

  If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

  Yet what can I give him: give my heart.

  We give ourselves. We give ourselves to others. We give ourselves to ourselves. We give.

  Whatever we make of Christmas, it should be ours, not something we buy off the shelf.

  For me, feasting with friends is a lovely part of Christmas-tide, so I’ve included some recipes here that have personal stories attached to them. I am hopeless with quantities and cook by eye, texture and taste. If pastry is too dry, add water or egg. If it’s too wet, add flour – that kind of thing.

  There was a big fight with my editor over whether the recipes should be in metric or imperial – ‘Even Nigella has gone metric,’ she argued.

  I asked Nigella and she said, ‘Have both.’

  And where I say things like ‘cabbage’, the query came back: ‘What size cabbage?’

  There are so many things to do every day – and wondering what size cabbage isn’t one of them.

  These recipes are a little disorderly, the kind of thing we’d make together, and I’d say, ‘Damn, I forgot the mushrooms,’ and then we’d just do without them. So don’t worry too much. Cooking has become a lot like cycling. By which I mean people used to pop out on their bikes – now everyone has to wear Lycra and goggles and beat their own speed and distance record. Cooking at home is not an Olympic sport. Cooking is an everyday ordinary miracle.

  I like cooking but I prefer writing.

  Stories are where I live – they are physical three-dimensional places to me. When I was a kid and locked in the coal hole for various crimes, I had a choice: count coal – a limited activity. Tell myself a story – an unlimited world of the imagination.

  I write for the delight of it. Sitting down at a keyboard to play. Christmas has a special delight – as though the season is cheering you on. It’s a time for tales, presided over by the Lord of Misrule, who must be the guardian spirit of creativity, as he is of the ancient twelve days of Christmas-tide.

  And strangely, in a house that was generally unhappy, Christmas was a happy time for me when I was growing up. We don’t lose these associations; the past comes with us, and with luck we reinvent it, which is what I am suggesting we do with Christmas. And everything is a story.

  Stories round the fire at Christmas, or told with frosty breath on a wintry walk, have a magic and a mystery that is part of the season.

  Writing is an epiphany of its own, in the sense of something unexpected being revealed. Christmas, which seems so familiar, maybe even worn out, is a celebration of the unexpected.

  Here are the stories I have written so far. Twelve of them for the twelve days of the season. Here are ghost stories, magical interventions, ordinary encounters that turn out to be not ordinary at all, small miracles, and salutes to the coming of the light.

  And joy.

  SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

  t was the night before Christmas and all over the house nothing was stirring because even the mouse was exhausted.

  There were presents everywhere: square ones with bows, long ones with ribbons. Fat ones in Santa paper. Thin ones tantalising as a diamond bracelet, or disappointing as a chopstick?

  Food supplies had been stockpiled like a war-warning; puddings the size of bombs were exploding off the shelves. Bullets of dates were stacked in cardboard rounds. A line of grouse, like toy warplanes, hung outside the back door. Chestnuts were ready to heat and fire. The free-range organic turkey – nothing that a good vet couldn’t ­revive – was crouched next to hangar-loads of tinfoil.

  ‘Good thing the Twelfth Night pork is still eating windfall apples in an orchard in Kent,’ you said, trying to squeeze round the kitchen table.

  I was staggering under the weight of the Christmas cake – it was the kind of thing medieval masons used to choose as the cornerstone of a cathedral. You took it from me and went to pack it in the car. Everything had to go in the car, because we were going to the country tonight. The more you loaded, the more likely it seemed that the turkey would be doing the driving. There was no room for you, and I was sharing my seat with a wicker reindeer.

  ‘Hackles,’ you said.

  Oh, God, we had forgotten the cat.

  ‘Hackles doesn’t celebrate Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘Tie this tinsel round his basket and get in.’

  ‘Are we going to have our Christmas row now or shall we wait until we’re on the road and you’ve forgotten the wine?’

  ‘The wine is underneath the box of crackers.’

  ‘That’s not the wine, that’s the turkey. He’s so fresh I had to tape him in to stop him trying to claw his way out like something from Poe.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting. That turkey had a happy life.’

  ‘You’ve had a pretty good life but I’m not thinking of eating you.’

  I ran and bit your neck. I love your neck. You pushed me away – in play – but do I imagine that you push me away not in play these days?

  You smiled a small smile and went to repack the car.

  Soon after midnight. Cat, tinsel, tree with flashing lights, reindeer, presents, food, my arm out of the window because there was nowhere else to put it – you and me set off to a country cottage we had rented to celebrate Christmas.

  We drove through the seasonal drunks waving streamers and singing about Rudolph in red-nosed solidarity. You said it would be quicker to go right through the middle of town so late at night, and as you were slowly pulling away from the traffic lights down the main street I thought I saw something moving.

  ‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Can you reverse?’

  The street was completely empty now, and you took us backwards, the engine whining under the weight of the effort, until we were outside BUYBUYBABY, the world’s biggest department store, finally and reluctantly closed from midnight Christmas Eve for an entire twenty-four hours (online shopping always available).

  I got out of the car. The front window of BUYBUYBABY had been arranged as a Nativity scene, complete with Mary and Joseph in ski-wear and a number of farm animals keeping warm under tartan dog coats. There was no gold, frankincense or myrrh – these three kings had bought their presents from BBB. Jesus was getting an Xbox, a bike and an apartment-friendly drum kit.

  His mother, Mary, had been given a steam iron.

  Flitting about in front of the Nativity, her nose pressed inside the window, was a tiny child.

>   ‘What are you doing in there?’ I said.

  ‘Trapped,’ said the child.

  I went back to the car and tapped on your window.

  ‘There’s a child left behind in the shop – we’ve got to get her out.’

  You came and had a look. The child waved. You looked doubtful. ‘She probably belongs to the security guard,’ you said.

  ‘She says she’s trapped! Call the police.’

  The child smiled and shook her head as you took out your phone. There was something about her smile – I felt uncertain.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said.

  ‘I am the Spirit of Christmas.’

  I heard her clearly. She spoke clearly.

  ‘I can’t get a signal,’ you said. ‘Try yours.’

  I tried mine. It was dead. We looked up and down the ­strangely deserted street. I was starting to panic. I pulled and pushed at the doors to the store. Locked. No cleaners. No janitors. This was Christmas Eve.

  The voice came again. ‘I am the Spirit of Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ you said. ‘It’s a publicity stunt.’

  But I wasn’t listening to you, I was fixed on the face in the window, which seemed to change every second, as though light was playing on it, shrouding, then revealing, the expression. The eyes were not the eyes of a child.

  ‘She is our responsibility,’ I said, quietly, not really to you.

  ‘She is not,’ you said. ‘Come on, I’ll call the police as we drive.’

  ‘Let me out!’ said the child as you turned back towards the car.

  ‘We’ll send someone, I promise. We’re going to find a phone— ’

  The child interrupted. ‘You must let me out. Will you leave some of your gifts, some of your food, in the doorway, just there?’

  You turned back. ‘This is crazy.’

  But the child was hypnotising me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said and, half-dazed, I went to the car and flipped up the back and started dragging wrapped shapes and bags of food towards the doorway of the department store. Every time I put something down, you picked it up again and put it back in the car.

  ‘You’ve gone mad,’ you said. ‘This is a Christmas stunt – we’re being filmed, I know it. It’s reality TV.’

  ‘No, this isn’t reality TV, this is real,’ I said, and my voice sounded far away. ‘This isn’t what we know, it’s what we don’t know – but it’s true. I’m telling you, it’s true.’

  ‘All right,’ you said, ‘if this is what it takes to get us back on the road – here’s the bags. OK? Here and here.’ You slammed them down in the doorway, your face flushed with tiredness and exasperation. I know that face.

  And you stood back, hands in fists, not even thinking about the child.

  Suddenly all the lights went out in the window of the store. And then the child was standing in between us on the street.

  Your face changed. You put your hand on the smooth glass, as clear and closed as a dream.

  ‘Are we dreaming?’ you said to me. ‘How did she do that?’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ said the child. ‘Where are you going?’

  And so, past one o’clock in the morning, we set off again, my arm inside the car now, the child on the back seat next to Hackles, who had climbed out of his basket and was purring. I looked in the wing mirror as we left and saw our bags of food and gifts being taken away, one by one, by dark figures.

  ‘They are the ones who live in the doorways,’ said the child, as though reading my thoughts. ‘They have nothing.’

  ‘We are going to be arrested,’ you said. ‘Theft of in-store display. Dumping on a public highway. Abduction. Merry Christmas to you too, Officer.’

  ‘We’ve done the right thing,’ I said.

  ‘What exactly have we done,’ you said, ‘except lose half of what we need and collect a lost child?’

  ‘It happens every year,’ said the child. ‘In different ways, in different places. If I am not set free by Christmas morning, the world grows heavier. The world is heavier than you know.’

  We drove along in silence for a while. The sky was black, pinned with stars. I imagined myself, high above this road, looking back on Planet Earth, blue in the blackness, white-patched, polar-capped. This was life and home.

  When I was a child, my father gave me a glass snow-scene of the earth shook with stars. I used to lie in bed and turn it over and over, falling asleep with the stars behind my eyes, feeling warm and light and safe.

  The world is weightless, hanging in space, unsupported, a gravitational mystery, sun-warmed, gas-cooled. Our gift.

  I used to fight off sleep for as long as I could, squinting out of one closing eye at my silent, turning world.

  I grew up. My father died. The snow-scene was in his house, in my old bedroom. When we were clearing I dropped it, and the little globe fell out of its heavy, star-shot liquid. That was when I cried. I don’t know why.

  I must have reached across the car seat then and taken your hand as we cruised along on the night road.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ you said, gently.

  ‘I was thinking about my father.’

  ‘Strange. I was thinking about my mother.’

  ‘Thinking what?’

  You squeezed my hand. I saw your ring finger glinting under the low green dashboard lights. I remember that ring and when I gave it to you. I see it every day but today I see it.

  You said, ‘I wish I’d done more for her, said more to her, but it’s too late now.’

  ‘You never got on.’

  ‘Why is that? Why do so many parents and children never get on?’

  ‘Is that why you don’t want us to have children?’

  ‘No! No. Work . . . We always said we’d think about it . . . but . . . yes, perhaps . . . Why would I want my child to hate me? Isn’t there enough hatred in the world?’

  You never talked like this. Glancing at your profile, in the eerie green light, I could see the tension in your jaw. I love your face. I was about to say so, but you said, ‘Ignore me. It’s this time of year. A family time, I guess.’

  ‘Yes. What a mess we make of it.’

  ‘Of what? Of our families, or of Christmas?’

  ‘Both. Neither. No wonder everyone goes shopping. Displacement activity.’ You smiled, trying to lighten the mood.

  I said, ‘I thought you liked the presents under the tree?’

  ‘I do, but how many do we need?’

  I was about to remind you that you had yelled in my face less than an hour ago, when a voice from the back seat said, ‘If only the world could rid itself of just some of its contents.’

  We both glanced round. I realised that the green light in the car wasn’t the instrument panel; it was her. She was glowing.

  ‘Do you think she’s radioactive as well?’ you said.

  ‘As well as what?’

  ‘As well as . . . well, as well, as I don’t know, as well as . . . ’

  ‘Suppose she’s who she says she is?’

  ‘She hasn’t said who she is.’

  ‘Yes, she has, she’s . . . ’

  ‘I am the Spirit of Christmas,’ said the child.

  I said, ‘And suppose something extraordinary is happening to us tonight.’

  ‘An unknown child on a wild-goose chase?’

  ‘At least it’s seasonal.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The wild goose.’

  This time you squeezed my hand and I saw the muscle in your jaw lower just a little.

  I want to tell you about love, and how much I love you, and that I love you like the sun rising, every day, and that loving you has made my life better and happier. I know this will embarrass you, so I don’t say anything at all.

  You switched on the radio. ‘Hark! Th
e Herald Angels Sing.’

  You sang along. ‘ “Peace on earth and mercy mild . . . ” ’

  I saw you watching the child in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘If this goes according to plan,’ you said, ‘we should be seeing ­Santa and a team of reindeer about now. What do you think about that, Spirit of Christmas?’

  The voice from the back seat said, ‘Turn right here, please!’

  You do. You hesitate, but you do it, because she’s that sort of child.

  You took the dark bend, accelerated forward and stalled the car.

  Just touching down over the roof of a handsome Georgian house, holly wreath on the blue front door, was a sledge pulled by six antlered reindeer.

  Father Christmas smiled at us and waved. The child waved back and climbed out of the car. Locks didn’t seem to make any difference to her. Hackles jumped out and followed her.

  Santa clapped his hands. The house was in darkness but a sash window on the first floor was pushed up by some unseen inside hand; three bulging sacks thudded to the ground. Santa Claus shouldered them easily and loaded them onto his sledge.

  ‘He’s robbing the place!’ you said, opening the car door and getting out. ‘Hey, you!’

  The figure in red came forward convivially, stamping his boots and rubbing his hands.

  ‘We can only offer this service once a year,’ he told you.

  ‘What bloody service?’

  Santa Claus took the opportunity to fill his pipe. He blew star-shaped smoke rings, blue into the white air.

  ‘In the old days we used to leave presents, because people didn’t have much. Now everyone has so much, they write to us to come and take it away. You’ve no idea how much better it feels to wake up on Christmas morning to find it all gone.’

  Santa rummaged in one of the bags. ‘Look, hair curlers, a year’s supply of bath salts, more socks than anyone can have feet, baked garlic in olive oil, an Eiffel Tower embroidery kit, two china pigs.’

  ‘And now what?’ you said, half-furious, half-fazed. ‘Car-boot sale for New Year?’

  ‘Well, come and see if you like,’ said Santa. ‘Follow me.’

  He pocketed his pipe and went towards his sledge. The Spirit of Christmas went with him, and Hackles.