Christmas

Tuesday

Steerpike

We wish you a Merry Bin-mas, lots of love the Brighton Green Party

I have been passed a snap of the Christmas tree inside Brighton and Hove's Green Party run council building. Or more accurately, I have been passed a snap of some bits of old shit collected from Brighton beach and put on a shelf under the title 'One Planet'. After a year where rubbish has gone uncollected from the streets of Brighton due to an industrial dispute between the lefty council and the evil capitalist refuse workers, the irony of this installation will not go unnoticed: Hardly very festive, and are those bulbs energy efficient? We should be told.

Monday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What would Mrs Fulford like for Christmas?

From Francis Fulford Q. Have you any suggestions for what to give my wife for Christmas? She doesn’t want anything practical and was deeply unamused when I gave her a ‘top-of-the-range’ Barbour tweed coat some years ago. So obvious things like gardening forks, dog leads etc are out of the question. My children have suggested that she would like a 50” colour TV from Argos (currently a ‘bargain’ at £299) but I am not convinced and don’t want to have her suffer a major sense of humour failure when she unwraps it in front of all our Christmas guests. A. What do women want? You need look no further than the answer given in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, which rings true even today.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us

After lunch on Christmas Day my father always stood at the sink in his apron and yellow Marigolds and did the washing-up. Rolling up his shirtsleeves the gentleman’s way, as he claimed it was, with two turns maximum to just below the elbow, he couldn’t wait to get started. I can see him now, paper hat, suds up his arms. However, the underlying and perhaps most pressing reason for his doing the washing-up all afternoon was that he was a furtive drinker. When my father courted my mother, he led her to believe that he was a non-smoking, teetotalling Christian believer, when in truth he was the exact opposite of those three ideals; and though a long one, their marriage essentially foundered on the rocks of those discrepancies.

Alexander Chancellor

Without Jesus and with less Santa, what does Christmas mostly consist of?

More than ever this year I find friends planning to go abroad for Christmas, some to countries such as India where the sun shines and Christmas is barely celebrated at all. I can see why. The goodwill and good cheer that the festival is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress and anxiety it causes. This has been the case for years, but it gets worse with the passage of time. More couples divorce, more families break up, and Christmas tends not to heal such wounds but to aggravate them. The preparations for Christmas are more than joyless; they are soul-destroying. Try visiting Oxford Street at this time of year; or rather, don’t. There is frenzy in the air, and it can’t be attributed to philanthropy.

Matthew Dennison

Snow – art’s biggest challenge

In owning a flock of artificial sheep, Joseph Farquharson must have been unusual among Highland lairds a century ago. His Aberdeenshire estate covered 20,000 acres — surely enough to support the modest local ovine needs. But Farquharson was a painter, the fake sheep artist’s models. For cleanliness and biddability, few grazing ewes can match a woolly dummy. Joseph Farquharson was 27 when he scored his first hit at the Royal Academy in 1873. ‘Day’s Dying Glow’ depicts a handful of sheep negotiating a snowy incline alongside an icy burn. Leafless trees crown a mound. Behind them a sickly sun is sinking or possibly rising.

Joan Collins

Joan Collins’s diary: The joy of fake Christmas trees

Every year Christmas comes earlier and earlier in America. Cards, baubles and imitation trees were being sold in the big department stores in August, and the street decorations have been up in Beverly Hills since well before Halloween. From late October onwards, it’s the season of dressing up and showing off in downtown LA. Street parades are all the rage and hundreds of thousands of people saunter around in costumes, some gorgeous, most grotesque. Infants and children are usually done up as baby chicks or bunnies, which is inoffensive — but some adults go beyond the boundary of what is acceptable.

Dot Wordsworth

The curious language of Christmas carols

I could never understand as a little girl why we sang: ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.’ I knew what a manger was, and I knew that people set up cribs at home and in churches with the Child Jesus in the manger and the animals, shepherds and all the trimmings. It turns out that I was right to be puzzled, for crib has the primary meaning of ‘a manger’, not ‘a baby’s cradle’. It’s a good old English word. Richard Rolle wrote in the 14th century of Jesus ‘born and laid in a crib between an ox and an ass’. The ox and the ass do not come from the Gospels, but from the prophetic words of Isaiah (1:3): ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib,’ as it’s translated in the Authorised Version.

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively’s notebook: Coal holes and pub opera

I have been having my vault done over. Not, as you might think, the family strong room, but the place beneath the pavement — the former coal cellar — pertaining to an early 19th-century London house. The vault opens onto the area — mine is the last generation to know that that is what you call the open sunken space between the basement and the pavement — and has been given the latest damp-proof treatment, plus shelving and smart lighting, so that I can use it for storage. Others use their vault more creatively: a couple next door had theirs excavated several feet and made into a troglodyte bedroom. No, they said, they couldn’t hear feet overhead, but wheeled suitcases could be tiresome.

Pippa Middleton

Pippa Middleton on wine, fishing and Kim Kardashian

A few days ago I went truffle hunting in Piedmont. It’s been a bumper year for white truffles in northern Italy — the best ever, according to some experts — thanks to climate change and an exceptionally wet summer. My guide was a brilliantly sharp-eyed Italian, Mario, whose dog Rex did the snuffling. Mario told me that dogs are better trufflers than pigs because pigs often eat the truffles before you can get your hands on them. We (or rather Rex) found two, and I have been devouring truffle since I returned; I’ve had it with scrambled eggs, mashed potato, pasta and even just straight onto toast. I didn’t think it was possible to get bored of something so expensive, but I must say I’m a bit truffled out, and my flat now smells of truffles.

Valérie Trierweiler

Valérie Trierweiler’s notebook: Christmas as a singleton

Christmas will be a very warm occasion for me. I’ll be spending it with the Massonneaus — my family — as I do every year. It will be five brothers and sisters, gathered around our mother in our childhood home, a council house that, for us, felt like a palace when we first moved in. As always, our mother will try very hard for everything to be perfect, from the meal to the mountains of presents. With 12 grandchildren, who are all at an age to bring around a special someone or a ‘fiancée’, it usually becomes quite boisterous. However, this will also be my first Christmas for a very long time as a single woman and it will be my last Christmas in my forties. In two months, I will cross the threshold of 50.

John Rutter

The threat to Christmas carols – and how to save them

So, Christmas carols — they haven’t really gone away, but we don’t sing them as much as we used to. We aren’t, in general, much good at massed singing these days. Look around you at a church wedding when it’s time for a hymn and watch the congregation standing in mute embarrassment, the only sound coming from the organ and the choir (if there is one). That’s partly because hymns nowadays are known only to churchgoers, and they are in a minority; but it’s also inhibition. Singing is like swimming — a natural, healthy and intensely pleasurable physical activity — but you have to try it, preferably when very young, to make this discovery. If, as an adult, you enjoy singing, you probably came to it as a child.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do you stop someone wearing leather trousers to work?

Q. My husband employs an ageing rocker in his shop. She is highly efficient, and is an extremely nice woman. Our problem is that she will insist on wearing leather trousers to work and the noise is driving my husband mad. She is not the type to complain of harassment but how do you suggest he approach this delicate issue? — Name and address withheld A. In the early days of rock, it was thought that there was no better vehicle with which to display a good figure than leather trousers. The modern alternative — as worn by photographer Lady Brocket — are leather-look trousers, often with a waxed ingredient. They look like leather but are noise-free and with none of that distinctive leather smell. They are also resistant to pouching.

Thursday

The Spectator

The price of seeing Santa (and what it gets you)

Dear Santas A £22.50 a head Christmas theme park in Warwickshire designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen closed temporarily for improvements after visitors complained of mud, a skinny, swearing Father Christmas and elves who stood around smoking. What do you get when you take your children to see Santa? Prices for family of four: — £20 Santa Lane, Hyde Park. Rides, visit to Santa’s toy factory plus visit to Santa. (Visit to Santa is free; the charge is for the adjoining Magical Ice Kingdom.) — £44.40 Santa’s Magical Wonderland, Motherwell. Reindeer visit, indoor carousel, 1 hour soft play or skating, plus Santa visit. — £57.96 Twinlakes Winter Wonderland, Melton Mowbray. 25ft high toboggan run, 2.2km train ride plus visit to Santa.

Thursday

The Spectator

Actually, Bob, they do know it’s Christmas (we checked)

Yeah, Bob, they know The answer to the rhetorical question posed by the Band Aid single, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’, is broadly yes. Christmas Day is a public holiday everywhere in Africa except Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Somalia, although countries have widely differing customs associated with the event. — In Liberia, one of the Ebola-affected countries, it more resembles Halloween, where children go from door to door dressed as demons and begging for presents. — The two countries where Bob Geldof’s line might be appropriate are Ethiopia, the target of the first record in 1984, and Egypt.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Yes, Bob Geldof, Africans know it’s Christmas. Do you know it’s time to pack Band Aid in?

In this week's Spectator, out tomorrow, our leading article looks at the Band Aid 30 single and why it's time for Bob Geldof to pack Band Aid in. Pickup a copy tomorrow or subscribe from just £1 here.  Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob ­Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a ­latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof himself has been in every studio exhorting people, with his usual stream of expletives, to buy it.

Monday

Susannah Hickling

Rest in peace: seven ways to stop snoring this Christmas

Did you know that snoring was bad for your heart? It’s thought to cause changes in the carotid artery and is linked to metabolic syndrome, both of which put you at risk of cardiovascular disease. Not only that, you’ll keep your partner awake, which won’t do your relationship a lot of good, either. So what can you do?  Consider these potential cures before opting for weird gadgets or surgery. 1) Sleep on your side. When you lie on your back, your tongue may partially obstruct your breathing, making tissue in your throat vibrate. That’s less likely to happen if you lie on your side or your stomach. Think it’ll be hard to break the back habit? Try sewing a pocket into the back of your pyjamas and stuffing a tennis ball in it.

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

All I want next Christmas is new Christmas songs 

Three months until spring. Four months until the start of the cricket season. And only nine months until the radio starts playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ again. Or have you heard enough of Christmas songs by now? Many of us had heard enough of them by Christmas 1988. Every October they return. The first strains of Shakin’ Stevens emerging tentatively from high street shops. Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, still bickering. Greg Lake, possibly alone now in believing in Father Christmas. Roy Wood’s enormous beard, wishing it could be Christmas every day. And for three months of every year his wish is granted. Millions of Britons suffer the consequences.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

How we lost the seasons

So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay and ivy up until 2 February, Candlemas? This last is in fact the correct answer for traditionalists; prior to Victorian times, people kept the Christmas season going, along with the greenery, right up until Candlemas. Mind you, given that Christmas trees only caught on with Prince Albert, pre-Victorians didn’t have the problem of pine needles dripping all over the carpet.

Friday

Digby Anderson

Christmas comes but once a week

In the 2 December 1995 edition, Digby Anderson bemoans a Britain in which people just cannot postpone any pleasure: not crisps, not carols. Christmas was and still is regarded as a time of feasting. Traditionally, however, the feasting started on 25 December and went on to 2 February, the feast of Candlemas. Now, the feasters just about last till after lunch on Boxing Day. When offered the most modest pre-dinner drinks on that evening, they haul up the white flag and holler, 'Nuff.' Christmas Day used to be the start of carol singing, Christmas carols that is; it was Advent carols that were sung before the 25th.

Thursday

The Spectator

A Charm against Indigestion

Soothe your post-Christmas dinner indigestion with these readers' charms, dug out from the spell-book that is the 24th December 1954 edition. The usual prize of £5 was offered for a charm against the pains of indigestion after Christmas dinner, in not more than eight lines of English verse: the charm to be pronounced while taking the prescribed dose of bismuth, bicarb., or other normal remedy. Nearly ninety competitors were prepared to reinforce their doses of magnesia, bismuth, bicarb. and alka-seltzer with a rhyming charm; but, although among the big and little guns there were (as Sir John Squire said in a Masefield parody) `some interesting ones,' I was rather disappointed not to come across a really charming charm.