Christmas

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

The truth about Christmas card virtue signallers

If there is one thing to raise the spirits at this time of year, it’s the sound of a letterbox rattling open and the satisfying thud of post on the mat. Along with the creditors’ letters, there is quite likely to be a few envelopes pleasingly suggestive of robins and snow scenes.  Yep, the Christmas cards have arrived, from the organised, as early as the beginning of December, to the ones delivered on Christmas Eve, plainly as a response to the one you sent the recipient a couple of days before. All are cheering, all suggestive of goodwill, all more or less reflective of the personality of the sender. Obviously they’re environmentally unsound, even if they’re recycled, but stuff it. A card for birthday and Christmas isn’t going to deforest Britain.

Monday

Ameer Kotecha

Six global alternatives to Christmas pudding

The traditional Christmas meal takes on different guises around the globe. Our festive table groaning under turkey and all the trimmings would look quite unrecognisable to many. For Jewish people living in the US the tradition at Christmas is to eat Chinese food. And in Japan come Christmas you’ll find everyone eating KFC. Seriously—you have to be sure to order your friend chicken weeks in advance to avoid disappointment. I don’t suggest looking to Japan for Christmas culinary inspiration, but there is the odd thing we might want to borrow from abroad. Namely, dessert. Call me a heretic but I’ve never much liked Christmas pudding. Too dense and heavy; packed full of nice things but somehow underwhelming.

Saturday

Fiona Mountford

Women need to take control and take the wheel

There is a Saudi Arabian film that I love. It is called Wadjda and is about a young girl who longs to have her own bike, so that she can play outside and ride wherever and with whomsoever she likes. Yet Riyadh’s restrictive patriarchy frowns upon women having agency over their means of transport, even bicycles, ensuring that they are forever at the mercy of capricious and often irascible male drivers.  I have thought about this film and its message a lot this year, when the many benefits of having our own independent methods of transport, primarily cars, have been amply highlighted.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The magic of Anthony Powell

Every few years I’ve picked up one or other of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series and laid it aside after a few pages. Too wordy. Earlier this year I glanced again at A Question of Upbringing, the first of the 12 novels. A light came on and I was captured — providing yet another example of a novel repelling or attracting according to age, circumstances or mood. After that I tittered my way through the series, wondering at my previous humourlessness. I had one volume to go when I went into hospital last week for a minor operation, Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), which I packed with my pyjamas. I received my discharge papers on a Friday afternoon.

Martin Gayford

On the trail of one of the first artists to paint ordinary things

There are many marvellous things to be seen in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Dijon. But when I paid a visit a couple of years ago (in those days you could just step on a train and do such things), it was a little picture of the Nativity that particularly caught my eye. Its date, artist and original owner are all uncertain, but its beauty and originality were clear at a glance. Here, for almost the first time in European art, the appearance of ordinary things and people were the subject of close, rapt observation. Not of course that there was anything ordinary about the Nativity itself, which was a miraculous, world-changing event — signalled in the painting by the bright golden sun rising over distant jagged hills.

Andrew Sullivan

The joy of a cancelled Christmas

Among the greatest bores right now are those friends who insist on telling you, usually as if it’s some kind of state secret, that Covid lockdown hasn’t changed their lives very much. They work from home, anyway, you see. They were practising social distancing before it was cool! They’re not terribly social at the best of times. How lovely not to have to endure another dinner seated next to some tedious stranger or, worse, a drunken office party at this time of year. And I have to confess that I am one of those bores. Yes, I miss people a bit, or at least being around lots of people. But an excuse to be without them for days on end? I have every intention of taking full advantage of it until the vaccine.

The Spectator

Do divorces really increase after Christmas?

Now and then Were households allowed to mix at Christmas during the plague? Samuel Pepys’s diary entry for 25 December 1665: ‘To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding… which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition… thence to my Lord Bruncker’s by invitation and dined there…’ Festive fights Do divorces really increase thanks to Christmas? Divorce lawyers often say they’re especially busy after Christmas, as couples seek to untie the knot after a fractious time.

Charles Moore

The Darvell marvel has brought joy to a Covid Christmas

Many ingenious ways of evading Covid-19 have been devised to assist commerce, fewer to assist worship. In our next-door village, however, is Darvell, a large, longstanding Bruderhof community, part of a worldwide Anabaptist movement. Always welcoming to neighbours, they normally hold a carol concert in Advent. This year, such a thing is forbidden. Instead, the brotherhood devised a ‘Christmas Drive Through Darvell’. I slightly feared a gigantesque version of the dropsical Father Christmases and reindeer which people stick on their roofs, but I was wrong. At dusk on Saturday, we arrived with three generations of our family. The drive stretches well over a mile before exiting into another lane.

Taki

It’s been a tough year for socialites

New York Here we go again, the annual holiest of holies is upon us, although to this oldie last Christmas feels as though it was only yesterday. Funny how time never seemed to pass quickly during those lazy days of long ago, but now rolls off like a movie calendar showing the days, months, years flashing by. I wrote my first Christmas column for this magazine 43 years ago, sitting in my dad’s office on Albemarle Street. I remember it well because I used every cliché known to man and then some (patter of little feet… children’s noses pressed against snowy windows). The then editor, Alexander Chancellor, said nothing to me but later told a friend that however bad it was, it was better than the Greek political stuff I had been filing.

Tanya Gold

Food to absorb alcohol: Christmas hampers reviewed

There is straw inside the Fortnum & Mason Christmas Treat Hamper (£100). As the straw drifts through the house, it begins to resemble a stable. I like this. Hampers are dependent on plants for their mystery: without them they would be just a carrier bag full of food. Restaurants are closed to those who live apart, unless you are in Cornwall or the Isle of Wight. So, this is the Christmas of hampers; of alcohol, sugar and baked and dried goods. There are gin hampers and beer hampers and vegan hampers. There are hampers for dogs (‘woofly good’) and hampers for cats (‘the hampurr’). There is a Branston Pickle hamper, which is mostly Branston Pickle, plus socks with Branston Pickle written on them. I think that’s excellent.

Martin Vander Weyer

My fateful appearance at the Bank of England’s Christmas drinks

Tidings of comfort as the vaccination programme advances, but shortage of joy. That’s my summary of a season in which there’s no Spectator Christmas bash for the first time in my 29 years on the magazine; in which my panto-dame ball gown hangs forlornly as a decoration in the foyer of the theatre where social distancing has made it impossible for us to mount a show; and in which I can’t even offer my customary restaurant tips, because there have been so few opportunities to eat out anywhere and, apart from a brief French escape in July, no chance at all to travel abroad. Nevertheless I count my blessings, the greatest being is that I’m still here writing for you.

Theresa May

Theresa May’s recipe for Christmas cake

This recipe was given to me years ago by an old friend — hence the imperial measurements — and I have been making it ever since. Sadly, since my diabetes, I can’t really eat it any longer although I still make it for my husband and for friends (although not this year, I’m afraid, due to the limit on how many people we can see). While the recipe is for the cake itself, I recommend covering with marzipan and icing. What you’ll need3lb mixed dried fruit4oz glace cherries8fl oz rum8oz butter8oz plain flour8oz soft brown sugar5 medium eggs, separated5fl oz clear honey What to do 1. Soak dried fruit in rum overnight2. Set oven to 170°C3. Cream butter and sugar, then add egg yolks one at a time with a spoonful of sugar with each egg4.

Justin Welby

How to find hope in a year filled with despair

This year we might sing the words ‘Tidings of comfort and joy’ to one another with poignancy. ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ differs from many other well-loved Christmas carols in one respect: despite being a hopeful song, it’s written in a minor key. There is a sense of melancholy, perhaps a touch of darkness; a feeling that not all is sweetness and light. It holds together the tension of joy and sorrow. How do we explain the comfort and joy of Jesus Christ in a year when things aren’t comfortable and they definitely haven’t been joyful? We have an image of Christmas — idyllic, pretty, like the front of a Christmas card. We have our expectations of an ideal holiday.

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: The politics of Christmas trees

To say that the past nine months have been tough is like saying a hurricane felt like a spring shower. For many people it must have been utter hell, particularly those who own hospitality businesses. I simply cannot imagine how they could plan and manage ahead when our government refused to give anyone a clue whether either of the lockdowns was genuinely going to end. It all reminds me of the silly children’s game Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which players attempt to creep up behind ‘Grandmother’. If she turns and catches them moving, they must return to the beginning. We always seem to be returning to the beginning. Lockdown all over again. Except the rules of Grandmother’s Footsteps are at least clear.

Mick Fleetwood

Mick Fleetwood: Why Peter Green was the greatest guitarist

In a normal week, I would jam with local musicians, but that stopped in March and we musicians miss the road and our crews. There have been some good things to come out of this awful year, though. A new world was revealed to me on TikTok, an app that lets people upload clips of themselves lip-syncing or dancing. And out of TikTok came Nathan Apodaca, a man from Idaho who recorded a video of himself skateboarding to work while sipping from a bottle of cranberry juice and singing along to our song ‘Dreams’. More than 70 million people have watched Nathan’s video, and we have since spoken and he is the sweetest man. A lot of people out there are struggling, and Nathan’s ‘Dreams’ video is a great celebration of joyfulness and being in the moment.

Ian Rankin

I Live Here Now: a short story by Ian Rankin

Ever since his daughter’s death, John Bates had all but given up. Eunice had been 17, bubbly and surrounded by friends, keen to leave school behind to study history at university. She’d been a passionate cook and hockey player, not yet ready for a steady boyfriend, and loved absolutely by both her parents. But then one night she had consumed almost an entire bottle of vodka before climbing on to a parapet and leaping into a river swollen by over a week of near-constant rain. John and his wife Emily had sat numbed for days on end as relatives and neighbours passed through the house, offering solace and paying tribute. Now, six months on, Emily was back at work at the florist’s, increasingly busy as Christmas approached.

Tom Holland

The anxieties that long ago shadowed Christmas are back

Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own. It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots.

Susan Hill

The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun. Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys. Home was Scarborough: the bracing sea air and howling gales where I missed the coal dust smell, though it brought back the cough I had had since nearly dying of whooping cough, aged two — the cough that has never really left me, so that many a Christmas since has smelled of Vicks, camphor, Friars’ Balsam.

Lloyd Evans

Deserves to be a permanent winter fixture: Potted Panto at the Garrick reviewed

Potted Panto is a 70-minute parody presented by two burlesque comedians. Jeff is a tall, playful bungler and his colleague, Dan, is a squat, dour authoritarian who likes to see everything done efficiently. They leap on stage and declare their plan to present a compendium of the best-known Christmas shows. ‘All six of them,’ says Dan. ‘No, all twelve,’ contradicts Jeff, unfurling a list that includes classics from the TV schedules like A Christmas Carol and Das Boot. He insists that these non-pantos are included in their panto rundown. And so a war of opposites begins. Jeff is all appetite and instinct while Dan stands for reason and method. Or, in shorthand, Jeff is an infant and Dan is an adult.

James Walton

A romcom with very little com: BBC1’s Black Narcissus reviewed

In Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, five nuns set off for a remote Himalayan palace in 1934 to set up a convent school. The palace, donated by an Anglophile general, used to be a harem and was still adorned with erotic paintings. It was also where the general’s sister, Srimati, had committed suicide and where, just a few months previously, a male religious order had tried to establish a school too, before retiring defeated for mysteriously undisclosed reasons. The nuns’ main helper in practical matters, a British expat called Mr Dean (Alessandro Nivola), possessed an overwhelming maleness that expressed itself through such attributes as a chiselled jaw, an Indiana Jones hat and a handy way with a spanner. So what could possibly go wrong?