Christmas

Anthony Fauci's rolling audition for Dancing With the Stars continues. Fauci this week appeared in yet another interview on CBS, where he was asked about the possible impact of the coronavirus on the holiday season. He replied that it was 'too soon to tell' whether Americans would even be able to gather safely for Christmas. Which got me wondering: how far are these seasonal COVID restrictions supposed to go? I have no problem, for example, socially distancing by a factor of 10 from anyone who orders a pumpkin spice latte. But double-masking the Indians in a Thanksgiving play could prove more than a little historically insensitive. Is Fauci serious? Think of the demographics most likely to flout COVID restrictions: Texans, barflies, Democratic governors.

‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be blith; oh how this festive joy / Stirs up my fury to revenge and death.”’ ‘Very Christmassy,’ he agreed. The lines came from a series of five plays by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Heywood, in which he canters through classical mythology. Here Althea is commenting on her plan to kill her own son Meleager at a feast by consigning to the fire the piece of firewood that magically preserves his life. He feels as though the fires of Etna were in his bosom and dies. It was not of course a family Christmas, which was yet to be invented.

The great Joan Collins, this paper’s occasional diarist, was quick off the mark in putting up her Christmas decorations… around November, I recall. But the really sane and sensible thing to do is to go retro and be late taking them down. Today is, I need hardly say, the Twelfth Day of Christmas when the three wise men turned up at Bethlehem with their gold frankincense and myrrh. Happy Epiphany. But in happier days, viz, before Christmas was commercialised last century, and in even happier times before the Reformation, the season didn’t turn out like a light. It went into a kind of slow-burn right down to Candlemas on 2 February, forty days after Christmas — viz, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.

Does Christmas send a shiver down your spine? It should. We seek at this time of year to reclaim the magic of Christmases past. We think of snow thick on the ground. Rosy-cheeked children skating on frozen ponds. Carol services by candlelight in draughty churches. In 2020, there has been very little magic and wonder. Instead there has been sickness, death and a ban on seeing our loved ones; lost jobs and lost hope. To compensate, we feel more urgency this Christmas to seek out the magic, to find those spine-tingling moments, to reach beyond the humdrum and the daily grind. But, lovely though the fairy lights and colourful baubles might be, we need look no further than the nativity itself to discover the real magic of Christmas.

Truly great songs that are as emotionally powerful as ‘Fairytale of New York’ are very rare indeed. ‘Fairytale’ is a lyrical high-wire act of dizzying scope and potency, and it rightly takes its place as the greatest Christmas song ever written. It stands shoulder to shoulder with any great song, from any time, not just for its sheer audacity, or its deep empathy, but for its astonishing technical brilliance. One of the many reasons this song is so loved is that, beyond almost any other song I can think of, it speaks with such profound compassion to the marginalised and the dispossessed.