Christmas

Cyber Monday. It's an odd phrase, more likely to conjure apocalyptic visions of a Terminator-style machine invasion than a frenzied day of online shopping. Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is relatively new to these shores. In just a few short years, it's become part of the year's busiest spending weekend, with both days book-ending a four-day shopping spree. This year it looks like Cyber Monday will overtake Black Friday in terms of sales as people shift towards online spending. Experts predict that UK shoppers will increase spending by a fifth to £1.9 billion today. Amid all this hype, however, is the very real prospect that falling for retailers' hyperbole surrounding the last payday before Christmas will result in an untold number of pointless purchases.

The first Sunday of Advent is 27 November this year. For those of us who prefer Advent services to Christmas ones, the earlier the better, frankly. I relish the frisson of gloom, foreboding and fear of judgment you get at Advent, alongside the hope. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is all very well, but it’s the minor chord at the end of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ that I crave. So do thousands of others, it seems. The Advent service at Salisbury Cathedral, for example, is so oversubscribed these days that it’s repeated on three consecutive evenings, starting on the Friday before Advent Sunday. So, tears barely dry from the Remembrance Sunday requiem, you find yourself queuing in the cloisters for an hour and a half on Friday 25 November.

Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts, apples or money for bobbing — viz, sticking your head in a basin of water to dive after coins and apples. There was barmbrack — a sort of yeasted fruitbread you ate on the night — which contained a ring to predict who would be the next to marry (that dates it) and, in old-fashioned houses, a matchstick to predict poverty. It was quite a big thing, but over in a day or two.

There's always one. One colleague, friend or family member who starts banging on about Christmas months in advance. One smug person who risks a punch in the face for boasting 'I've done all my Xmas shopping' before the clocks have gone back. Thanks all the same but I don't want to know how many days it is until December 25. I have no interest in seeing the M&S festive range. And I have zero appetite for a sneak preview of the John Lewis Christmas ad. Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas and all that it entails. The bulging stocking (yes, my mum still does this), the tin of Quality Street, the massive over-eating. And it's particularly special now my niece is old enough to enjoy it.

When I moved to London, my husband Henry gave me a copy of Kate Fox’s Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. He was hoping the gift would avoid an awkward conversation about our cultural differences. As an American, I cannot think of anything more English than that. Fox’s chapter about introductions bothered me. The brash American approach: ‘Hi, I’m Bill from Iowa,’ particularly if accompanied by an outstretched hand and a beaming smile, makes the English wince and cringe. I had never known friendliness to be cringeworthy. I felt sorry for Bill from Iowa. I pictured him arriving in my neighbourhood and being scorned for enthusiastically introducing himself to strangers. Henry tried to explain. ‘We don’t talk to neighbours.

I was at home in Devon for the month of December. My sister was also there and her tyrannical, wildly fluctuating moods set the weather inside the house. She sleeps badly and usually appeared in the kitchen at 10 or 11 o’clock in a hagridden state, insane with anger at we know not what, daring anybody to wish her a good morning. I timidly observed one morning that the weather was quite mild for the time of year. She vehemently denied it and flew into a rage, presumably at Nature’s rivalry for supremacy over the climate. She has no culture or accomplishments and doesn’t work. Her only interest outside her competing appetites is in celebrity gossip. As she has grown older, her voice has become more upper class and manual tasks have fallen further beneath her dignity.

The new year challenge was to compose a thank-you letter for a particularly unenjoyable Christmas visit to relatives that manages to be diplomatic but deters them from ever inviting you again. This one obviously struck a chord. You produced a catalogue of seasonal torture that had me squirming in my judging throne: uncomfortable blow-up beds; minimal central heating; lecherous uncles; interminable Trivial Pursuit sessions; 2,000-piece jigsaws (‘all week spent on that dried-up riverbed from central Africa’ — Jeremy Carlisle); unpalatable vegan food; home-made celery, nettle and parsnip (mulled!) wine. And so it went on. There was nice work all round, but high fives in particular to William Casement, J.C.H.

From Nicky Haslam Q. Being considered something of a guru on the subject of things common, can you advise me how to finesse the host or hostess who asks, challengingly, ‘I suppose you think my twinkling decorations/strings of cards/mulled wine/sushi/antler headband/children are terribly common?’ A wan smile won’t suffice. A. Say, ‘Yes I do. You’re so clever to be in the vanguard. Common is the new chic.’ This is an extract from the Christmas issue of The Spectator. Subscribe here.

Ever since my teens I’ve hated Christmas, but last year something happened which made me change my mind. On 20th December, my teenage son was struck down by bacterial meningitis. No rash, no stiff neck. He’d been off school the day before but we all thought it was just a nasty cold. By the evening he seemed to be on the mend. He wolfed down a huge supper and sat up on the sofa, watching TV, tormenting his little sister. In the small hours he started throwing up. He became incoherent, then unresponsive. By the time the ambulance arrived he was like a statue. By the morning he was in intensive care, unconscious, wired up to all sorts of weird machines. Mercifully, he came round, quite suddenly, 24 hours later. I was by his bedside. I’d been awake for three days.

Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by 'Christian values'? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons get help from a church-based group every year. If you see a queue of homeless people in a town centre at about 6 o’clock in the evening, you can bet there are a bunch of God-botherers handing out sandwiches at the other end of it.

I was in Toys R Us in Brent Cross the other day with my kids, pondering the true miracle of Christmas -- that thanks to capitalism, global poverty has halved in just a generation, and we are now able to feed, clothe and shelter record numbers of people -- and buy them lots of presents. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/7PcxR/index.html"] My two-year-old was screaming because he wanted some toy cars, just a handful of fun things among an awesome display of toys that are far better, and cheaper, than they were when I was a child -- and available to more people, not just in Britain but across the world.