Christmas

Monday

Bridget Phetasy

Have yourself a very basic Christmas

From our US edition

Humbug! I’ve written before in these pages about how much I loathe Christmas. It’s not just Christmas though: with the exception of Thanksgiving, because it’s all about eating and gratitude and football, I could never stand any of the holidays. This has gradually abated over the years as I’ve started creating traditions of my own here in Los Angeles, but I still resent the feeling of obligation. Then this year, a neighbor asked, “What’s your daughter going to be for Halloween?” That was the moment it struck me — I’m going to have to fully engage in the holidays now. All of them. No more hiding under the bed and letting them blow over. Turning off the lights and pretending Halloween doesn’t exist is not an option.

basic
Ross Anderson

The return of Lindsay Lohan

From our US edition

Falling for Christmas has a ridiculous logline: “Newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress gets into a skiing accident, suffers from total amnesia and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas.” The Netflix romp is notable only as it marks Lindsay Lohan’s return to a genre that made her famous. “It’s such a refreshing, heartwarming romantic comedy and I miss doing those kinds of movies,” Lohan told Netflix, in earnest, while describing her character as, “Extravagant. Temperamental. Glamorous.” You could build a campy slasher flick or porno off such plot scaffolding; none would be great cinema. And yet Falling for Christmas is more complicated than that. Why?

lohan
gingerbread
Hannah Moore

A gingerbread house divided

From our US edition

To celebrate my birthday, which falls six days before Christmas, my mother used to make gingerbread houses for me and a dozen of my friends. Every December, she set to work baking sheet after sheet of gingerbread. The baking would take up the first week of the month, and in the second she would assemble the houses, laying their icing foundations and sealing the four walls with crisp white frosting. These would dry in the basement laundry room, taking up every available surface. After school, I would peep at the houses and dream about my party. On the big day, my mom set out each perfect house at the formal dining room table, and we convened to decorate them.

christmas
Calla Jones Corner

My smorgasbord of Christmas traditions

From our US edition

Like many American families with multicultural members, my own family incorporates traditions to reflect different ways to celebrate Christmas. I count seven besides American: Swedish, English, Scottish, German, French, Swiss, Belgian. The first five are in the family DNA. The remaining two reflect countries where we have lived and raised our children. Growing up with Swedish immigrant grandparents under the same roof, my Christmas took on many Swedish customs, starting on December 13 with the celebration of Santa Lucia. Legend has it that the fourth-century saint was a child-martyr who brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs. A young girl is dressed as the saint, in virginal white, sashed in red, representing a baptismal robe and the blood of martyrdom.

Christmas
Priscilla M. Jensen

The magic of Christmas caroling

From our US edition

On Christmas Eve it began to snow. No one believed it at first; Christmas snow is very rare here and usually the hot air from our nation’s capital a few miles away keeps it too warm. But it was Christmas Eve and it was snowing, late in the afternoon before all the light was gone, a snowglobe snow that stopped us in our bustlings and meltdowns and general atmosphere of excited dread. It was just magical. The children were old enough not to count on snow and young enough to think of it as entirely fitting. And they were old enough to know some songs and young enough not to be embarrassed all that much by their parents. “Let’s go caroling,” I said. We’d unpacked the Santa hats; they and various wreaths of those silver sleigh bells were already lost around the house.

Monday

Sarah Rainey

‘Christmas creep’ has gone too far this time

For sale in the village shop last week: punnets of locally-grown strawberries, multicoloured bucket-and-spade sets, postcards featuring British beach scenes… and no fewer than 14 varieties of Christmas bauble. Down the street at the Post Office, you can buy Christmas cards, tinsel – in green, red or sparkly silver – and wrapping paper festooned with candy canes. The garden centre, meanwhile, is doing a roaring trade in tins of festive shortbread (expiry date: 26 October). Christmas, so the saying goes, comes but once a year. And this year, it seems to have come during a baking hot August. Before you suggest I live in a sort of Yuletide wormhole, it’s happening nationwide.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Delicious wines from the Omicron Open

From our US edition

Some people think that it is the job of a wine critic to discover great bargains in the world of bottles and impart the news in hushed but excited tones to the madding crowds. Maybe that’s part of the remit. I incline, however, to this piece of wisdom from George Saintsbury, prosodist to the stars and incomparable, if quirky, cicerone to the fructum vitis et operis manuum hominum, which is to say: wine. “There is no money,” Saintsbury wrote, of the expenditure of which I am less ashamed, or which has given me better value in return, than the price of the liquids chronicled in Notes on a Cellar-Book. When they were good they pleased my senses, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people.

wine

Sunday

Peter Wood

The meaning of trees aflame

From our US edition

One of my favorite trees collapsed the other day. It was a tall balsam fir that stood almost cylindrical on the steep hillside behind my house in Vermont, keeping post beside an old hemlock. The branches of the hemlock turn and twist in the breeze with joyous abandon. The fir tree, however, faced the harshest gale with stoic reserve, barely swaying. But last week it suddenly uprooted itself and fell like a wounded comrade into the embrace of its brother. Arborcide, of course, has been in the news lately. On December 8, a man set fire to and destroyed the fifty-foot artificial tree outside News Corp headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Forty-nine-year old Craig Tamanaha was arrested on the spot and was naturally released without bail shortly afterwards.

tree

Friday

Pen Vogler

Cold turkey: is a Christmas tradition coming to an end?

When I recently asked younger work friends about the prospect of turkey for Christmas dinner, it was greeted with grim fatalism. Nobody said that they liked it (though the accompaniments and the leftovers got some enthusiastic thumbs up). One cosmopolitan European colleague even said she felt like ‘the Grinch who stole Christmas’ after suggesting to her horrified British in-laws that they have goose instead. For how much longer will the tradition of eating turkey last? A sense of heritage keeps it, for now, on the Christmas table, particularly in rural Britain. But our cities are younger, more multicultural, and it isn’t uncommon today for some families to have turkey alongside dishes from other national traditions, or eschew it altogether.

Olivia Potts

The ultimate turkey curry

Turkey curry, as a means of using up festive leftovers has become something of a joke: the turkey curry buffet in Bridget Jones is the true low point of Bridge’s festive calendar. The prospect can strike fear into the most Christmas-spirited of souls. But actually, on boxing day, or the day after, the last thing you really want is the same meal you’ve been eating for the past two days, looking a little tired and fridge-worn, all the best bits gone. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll be first to the table for cold roast meats and my fifth serving of stilton in 48 hours, and if you hesitate for a moment, you won’t see that final portion of trifle for dust.

Thursday

Michael Warren Davis

Live like it’s Christmas every day

From our US edition

Every December 24 — while dad builds the fire, mom preps the salmon loaf, wifey makes the eggnog, and I “test” the brandy — a wail goes up from the Davis house. It’s Elvis Presley, crying: “O why can’t every day be like Christmas? Why can’t that feeling go on endlessly?” And we answer him, no less soulfully: “For if every day could be just like Christmas, what a wonderful world this would be!” It’s a great song. But, hey, doesn’t the man deserve an answer? Why can’t every day be like Christmas? Granted, we can’t all spend our days opening presents and eating sugar cookies. It might work for Tom Hanks, but some of us have work to do. And yet, whatever the cynics might say, I don’t think Christmas cheer has that much to do with presents.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Time for a national snow day

From our US edition

The world in wintertime (at least where it snows) is a different place. Here in rural Pennsylvania, a distinct, sulfuric musk — a most nostalgic and comforting scent — wafts through my little hometown, lending an antiquated charm that reminds us of bygone days when coal was king (and proves it’s still very much in the royal family in these parts). While the natural world dies, hibernates, and goes dormant, our human spirits are rejuvenated. When the temperature drops, there’s a communal mood change, the effects of which tend to be a contagious energy and a marked softening of mankind. People let down their guards, exchanging prank gifts at office Christmas parties while wearing elf ears and silly, ugly sweaters bedecked with jingle bells.

Matt Purple

I’m dreaming of a ‘problematic’ Christmas

From our US edition

A new edict has just been handed down by our woke betters. According to an article at the Huffington Post, it is now forbidden to use the (distinctly holiday) phrase "let's work off ___," as in "let's go to the gym and work off those seventeen snickerdoodles and entire burlap sack of peppermint bark we ate yesterday." Per HuffPo, such fat-shaming, "while surely intended as a lighthearted joke, is seriously problematic, according to experts." It's the "according to experts" that always slays me there. And while I don't want to pit the authorities against each other, the doctors I've talked to have all warned that one consequence of engorging on sweets is that eventually you do turn into a lardass.

Tuesday

Addison Del Mastro

The Christmas carol canon that could have been

From our US edition

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.

commander biden dog major cat
Cockburn

Bad boy: Bidens dump dog week before Christmas

From our US edition

They say a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. Clearly that’s another old adage Joe Biden no longer remembers, as this week his White House announced the unsanctimonious jettisoning of Major, the president’s German shepherd, in favor of Commander, a younger, friendlier pup. “Welcome to the White House, Commander,” a tweet from the official POTUS account read. The president’s social media flacks then posted a video of the new First Dog playing with Biden. In the clip, Commander sits in order to earn a treat from the president: clearly an upgrade in the behavioral stakes. https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1473057147017744390 Major, you may recall, was a rescue taken in by the Biden family in November 2018.

Olivia Potts

The secret to making a Yule log

I watch a lot of Great British Bake Off. I’d like to say it comes with the baking territory, but the truth is, I’m simply hooked. I love all of it: the triumphs, the disasters, the crap jokes, the obscure technicals, all of it. My dedication to GBBO has taught me a couple of things: the Hollywood handshake has been so devalued in recent years as to be completely worthless; it’s probably worth breaking down and having a cry over your macarons just to get a hug from Noel Fielding, and swiss rolls are a bloody nightmare. They’re fiddly: they require whisking the yolks and whites separately, and then gingerly folding them together, before turning the whole thing out onto a tea-towel, doing some kind of weird pre-roll to set the shape, and then rolling again.

Monday

Esther O'Reilly

Seventy-five years of It’s a Wonderful Life

From our US edition

Frank Capra was almost too embarrassed to pitch his greatest film to Jimmy Stewart. At the time, both men were veterans in a post-war slump. Capra was losing his first confidence in a shelved Cary Grant vehicle-that-wasn’t, a script that had been torturously adapted from a short story by a fractious committee of writers. He stumbled through the premise for Stewart, trying to explain that the story starts in Heaven, and it’s about this fellow who thinks he’s a failure in life, so an angel named Clarence has to come down and stop him from jumping off a bridge, except Clarence can’t swim so the fellow has to save him… Here Capra paused, mopping his brow to confess, “This doesn’t tell very well, does it?

wonderful life
Steerpike

Four times Boris said this Christmas would be better than last

'It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...' Or it certainly was until Omicron intervened. For the latest Covid variant has raised fears the government will be forced into a Groundhog Day style re-run of the awful events of last December, when Boris Johnson 'cancelled Christmas' less than a week before the big day. What followed was somewhere between Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the evacuation of Saigon as thousands of desperate Londoners stampeded through stations to get home before restrictions took effect. Twelve months on and with most of Britain double or triple jabbed, there were hopes such scenes could be avoided this year.

Alec Marsh

The death of ‘Father Christmas’

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the F-word is vanishing.  It’s been insidious, but where once perhaps 20 or 30 years ago it was ubiquitous at this time of year, now – well – you can hardly find it. In fact, look carefully, and you’ll see that Father Christmas is disappearing quicker than an ice cap. That’s because Father Christmas is being supplanted by a stronger, altogether better-resourced foreign invader: Santa Claus. Browse the shelves of Tesco, Morrisons, Asda and yes, my friends, even Waitrose, and you’ll find dozens of ‘Santa’ themed products – but hardly anything associated with Father Christmas.

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

Why do so many Americans believe in the Devil?

From our US edition

Early in our marriage, my wife vetoed the idea of celebrating Christmas in the Alpine tradition: by having Santa Claus accompanied by Krampus, your friendly neighborhood ice-demon. Of course, Mrs. Davis was amenable to the idea of a horned monster beating our children with birch rods. At least when they’re naughty. Then she realized that, since neither of us are Swiss, it would technically be cultural appropriation. That was the end of that. Speaking of demons, here’s a little Christmas meditation for you: more Americans believe in the Devil than in God. According to a recent survey, 56 percent of us believe that “Satan is not merely a symbol of evil but is a real spiritual being and influences human lives.” That’s compared to 51 percent who believe in an all-powerful Creator.