London, Christmas 2011
I grew up in America. I’d been living in the UK for eight years when a friend suggested that we go to see a pantomime. I thought I was unshockable, but I was almost crying, I felt so uncomfortable. I looked at the programme and could see the actors had done really good work, they’d gone to RADA, but now they were doing this?
The onslaught of it! A gay man, dressed as a woman, alludes to anal sex in a room full of 5-year-olds! I tried to leave at the intermission but my friends persuaded me to stay and I almost came out in a rash. How is this a beloved British Christmas tradition? I mean I get the idea of celebrating the fact that you’re a bit tacky and you have a dark sense of humour, but why would you bring your children into that? It was weird. Everyone seemed to love it, so it was obviously more to do with me and my sensitivities. I was just too American for it. I felt really alienated because everyone was having such a great time.
J. E.
For the British, pantomime is immune to analysis. If we start to question why certain things are happening – why baddies always enter stage left, why the dame is a man, why ‘Oh Yes It Is, Oh No It Isn’t’ can continue for two minutes and remain enjoyable, why a pantomime cow is a paid job for two humans, why risqué jokes about ‘sucking on a fisherman’s friend’ are deemed suitable for kids – the whole concept starts to feel very shaky. But the cumulative historical weirdness of panto can’t be reversed; even if we consider it to be artistically grotesque, we’re stuck with it. It’s part of the Christmas deal.
‘There was definitely a sense of “Oh God, has it come to this?”,’ says Annabel Giles, who played Cinderella in Leatherhead in 1991 and Maid Marion in Bournemouth in 1993, and didn’t mind reliving the experience when I asked her about it. ‘You’d have this big band of people on stage, all there for different reasons. There’d be twenty dancers playing the part of thirty peasants or whatever, having a whale of a time. You’d have vaguely famous people doing it for the money, and then proper thespians, who justified it by reminding each other that this would be the first trip to the theatre for many children. “It’s an introduction, darling,” they’d say, “and if this is what it takes, then fine.” As if the kids were immediately going to go off and watch Twelfth Night! But I loved doing them.’
“And then came three wise men, Melchior, Balthasar and Batman.”
Some of the children attending panto may have trodden far less-hallowed boards a few days earlier when they participated in their school nativity play, an annual event characterised by tantrums, violence and, if apocryphal stories are to be believed, an innkeeper telling Mary and Joseph that there’s plenty of room at the inn. Attempts to rework the Christmas story to involve as many children as possible can result in an imaginative expansion of the stable’s guest list; British children have been known to play the parts of a snowflake, a policeman, a cowboy, a breakdancer, a flame, a grandfather clock, a box, a door and Winnie-The-Pooh. Although not all in the same nativity play; that would be ridiculous.
Peckham, Christmas 1982
I was 8 years old. My primary school teacher was a very severe Scottish man who everyone was terrified of. Our Nativity play that year was meant to be about ‘Christmas all over the world’ and my teacher, for no apparent reason, decided that we were all going to play the part of ‘Chinamen’.
It was an awful stereotype; we were all given pointy hats, we had our faces painted yellow with black lines around our eyes to make them more ‘Chinese’ and these Fu Manchu moustaches made out of black tissue paper. I also had thickly painted black eyebrows, which emphasised my mood. It was hugely racist. I have no idea what the plot was. Worse still, the paint wouldn’t come off my face afterwards. I was beside myself and cried all the way home. My siblings said that opening the front door to a small Chinese man in tears made their Christmas just that little bit more magical.
L. D.
Our enthusiasm for Christmas excursions can sometimes be tempered by the British weather, which for most of the year is ‘changeable’ but at Christmas is just ‘cold and wet’. It certainly doesn’t help our mood when we’re making the ritual journey home for Christmas, laden with excess baggage. On the railways, the networks take advantage of the sharp drop in passenger numbers on commuter routes to implement a range of thrilling new engineering works just as you’re attempting to get to Frome to see your gran. Thanks, Network Rail! On the roads, meanwhile, there’s gridlock on the A422 while Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ is played almost sarcastically on the radio. I’m all for Rea’s attempt to romanticise a journey that’s a massive pain in the arse – to be frank he does a very good job of it – but hearing him acknowledging in song that it’s ‘gonna take some time’ because we’re ‘top to toe in tailbacks’ can feel, in the heat of the moment, as if he’s taking the piss out of Britain. The only consolation we have in that situation is that it’s not snowing. Motorists will, in that moment, give thanks that white Christmases are exceedingly rare.
Over a number of decades we’ve been brainwashed by Bing Crosby (and, to a lesser extent, Keith Harris and Orville) into believing that white Christmases are the ones we ‘used to know’, but their appearance is about as infrequent as outbreaks of Legionnaire’s disease. The Met Office keeps a historical list of what they describe as ‘white Christmases’, stating that the chances of having one is about 50–50, but their definition of a white Christmas is ‘one snowflake to be observed falling in the 24 hours of Christmas Day somewhere in the UK’. This, I hardly need to point out, is no guarantee of a picture-postcard scene. It’s telling, I think, that Irving Berlin’s famous song doesn’t go: ‘May your days be merry and bright / and may a single snowflake fall at an automatic weather station just outside Ullapool’. The Met Office definition seems to be largely driven by the needs of bookmakers to collect bets on whether Christmas will be ‘white’ or not – and collect them they do, and pay out they do, to people who haven’t actually seen a snowflake on Christmas Day since 1995.
I originally planned to write a section of the book about how we all go out sledging and tobogganing over Christmas, but then I realised that we don’t, so I didn’t bother. The nearest we get is probably the Boxing Day walk, a puritanical Christmas tradition that stems from our realisation that moving about might be a good idea after chowing down on 6,000 calories the previous day. Yes, we are allowed to have Christmas, but if we don’t want to end up with gout then we have to punish ourselves by going on a massive hike. Some of those punishments, however, can end up being unexpectedly brutal.
Dorset, Christmas 1994
My parents had just bought a very old house from a woman called Mrs Kirk. This was in a part of the world with a lot of wooded areas, pine forests and bracken. My sisters and I had found out that Mr Kirk had died in the house, so we’d freak each other out by imagining the ghostly things that Mr Kirk might do. This, combined with the fact that the heating in the building wasn’t great, meant that we were cheerier about going for a Boxing Day walk than we might have been. But I remember Mr Kirk’s wellies were still in the house, and my dad, who’s quite a gung-ho character but not necessarily prepared for long walks, said, ‘These are perfectly good wellies’, and put them on, making a joke about being ‘possessed by the dead man’s boots’.
We set off. After about two and a half hours of walking we were starting to get quite cold, and I expressed my discomfort. I remember my mum saying, ‘Shut up, come on, we haven’t been out for that long’, and in retrospect, that’s when my parents both knew that we were lost. They didn’t say anything to us – in fact they probably wouldn’t have admitted it to each other – but soon it started to get dark, we’d not seen any other people walking for ages, we evidently had no idea where we were, and we had no torch. Mum had half a bag of toffee eclairs in her pocket, and it was when those were all gone that we started panicking. It was eight o’clock by the time we found our way back. We’d been walking for five hours. It was really harrowing. I think Mr Kirk m
ight have had something to do with it.
D. B.
The lack of snow and concomitant23 romance can prompt some Brits to head for colder climes in late December to achieve that authentic Christmas vibe (although, given that Morecambe and Wise are unlikely to be on telly in an Austrian chalet, it’s not going to be that authentic, is it). It’s understandable: throughout our childhoods we’re bombarded with images of Christmas that can feel like a form of snowy propaganda, particularly if you live in the balmier areas of southern England, where choirs of children sing ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!’ with extremely hopeful looks on their faces.
Norway, Christmas 2002
I grew up in Cornwall. I remember that a few local kids would have sledges, and some winters you might hear the mournful sound of metal runners on tarmac as they tried to make a go of it on a patch of ice on the pavement. I had a yearning for snow – I think it was tied up with wanting the sort of Christmas other people had, the ones I’d seen on telly.
So one year I decided to go to Norway on my own. When the plane landed in Oslo they played ‘White Christmas’ over the speakers. I got a bus to a farmhouse somewhere north of Lillehammer, run by a lovely elderly couple. There was a one horse open sleigh WITH JINGLE BELLS, and we went for a ride across the frozen lake. For Christmas we danced round the big Christmas tree and sang traditional Norwegian songs, and finally I went on a sledge for the first time, at the age of 28. It didn’t really live up to the hype – it kept rotating, so I was going down the hill backwards – but it was all the snow and all the Christmas fantasy I’d ever dreamed of.
T. R.
In theory, a logical pursuit of the Ultimate Christmas might take you to the birthplace of Jesus. But with the Foreign Office website currently warning of ‘numerous violent clashes between protesters and security forces’ within a few miles of Bethlehem, you’d be forgiven for deciding to remain in the relative tranquility of Ipswich. Even during calmer periods of recent Middle Eastern history, the Christmas trip to Bethlehem wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, according to writer Suzanne Moore. ‘The place where he was actually born,’ she wrote of the trip she made in the mid 1990s, ‘was a kind of cellar full of mad singing Korean nuns. There was nothing to buy, just a sad portable building called The Christmas Tree Cafe. Christmas dinner ended up being some falafel next to some young Israeli conscripts with enormous guns, which were handled with frightening nonchalance.’
It’s all too easy to sit still at Christmas, and I admire anyone intrepid enough to put on a woolly hat and reach for the door handle. But with the best will in the world, a lack of forward planning and a hope-for-the-best attitude can wreck anyone’s best-laid Christmas excursion plans. Maybe it’s safer to stay indoors.
France, Christmas 2003
It was the first Christmas after I’d left home to go to university. My mum and dad had just filed for divorce, they were living separately and family relations were pretty tense. My dad, in an attempt to give us something to look forward to, managed to get a cheap deal for us to go skiing. Very early on the morning of 22 December I remember sitting on my mum’s couch while my brothers and sisters were running around getting ready. My dad arrived and asked my mum where the passports were. She said, ‘You’ve got them.’ He said, ‘No, you’ve got them.’ There was a huge argument. My brothers and sisters were gutted, my mum and dad were really mad with each other, and suddenly my dad made the decision that I would fly to France alone and they would follow a day or two later when they’d found the passports.
He drove me to Gatwick. I wasn’t keen. I remember thinking that this was all really weird. I only just made the flight, and eventually arrived at this chalet in Méribel, checked in on my own and just sat there. The next day my dad called and said, ‘We can’t find the passports, we’re not going to be able to come.’ It was a long, lonely week of bread and cheese and fending off the advances of this pervy guy in his mid-twenties from Stoke who took every opportunity to crack on to me. On Christmas Day there wasn’t even anything to do because the ski lifts weren’t even running.
N. B.
Eight Channels Hopping
While shepherds washed their socks by night, all watching BBC
The Angel of the Lord came down and switched to ITV
British playgrounds, 1960s–present
I usually arrive at my parents’ house on Christmas Eve afternoon, just as the sun sets over Mount Elbrus in the central Caucasus, but also over Dunstable Downs, which is where they live. I ring the doorbell in the middle of Deal or No Deal, walk in, sit down, and spend the next 15 minutes railing against the premise of the show while my parents ponder whether the contestant should have accepted the banker’s last offer.24 The show has now been axed by Channel 4, but until 2016 this was a family tradition that was rooted in our many differences. I’d no more have Deal or No Deal on my TV at home than they’d watch a feature-length documentary on Russia’s toughest prisons, but hey, I dig the gulag and they don’t. That’s just how it is. So, when Noel Edmonds referred to someone randomly choosing a box as ‘making a manoeuvre in live play’, I would say, ‘I’ve had enough of this’ and leave the room, tutting. Christmas had, at that point, truly begun.
Despite becoming the host of a long-running game show that I didn’t like, Noel still has something of the spirit of Christmas about him, and not just because his name is basically French for Christmas. In a 15-year period between 1984 and 1999, with shows such as Live Live Christmas Breakfast Show, Christmas Morning with Noel and Noel’s Christmas Presents, he became closely identified with Christmas Day telly. (We should note, here, that the idea of surprising British citizens with gifts that they weren’t expecting wasn’t Noel’s idea; shows such as A Spoonful of Sugar and Meet the Kids were broadcast from British hospitals in the 1960s, with Michael Aspel or Max Bygraves bringing Christmas joy to children who weren’t able to spend Christmas at home. Under such circumstances, said children probably considered Michael Aspel or Max Bygraves to be something of a tonic.)
Even if you’re the kind of person who resents being emotionally manipulated by benevolent celebrities and sentimental music, you’d have to begrudgingly admit that Noel managed to corner the market in forcing people to shed a tear against their will on Christmas Day. The most celebrated example of this was the 1994 episode of Noel’s Christmas Presents, when spina bifida sufferer Brian Stubbles received Noel in the hallway of his home and was led into the back garden, where his favourite band, The Hollies, was performing a rendition of ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ on a makeshift stage. As Brian’s sister Wendy stood alongside him while he emitted a choked ‘thanks a bundle’ to Noel, a nation pretended not to blub, excused itself from the room, went to the toilet, bawled its eyes out, composed itself, came back in and asked if anyone might like a cup of tea.25
There’s a particular structure to Christmas Day television in Britain which has been shaped over many years and pivots around H M The Queen, who appears at 3 p.m. on BBC One and ITV1 to wish us a Happy (but most definitely not a Merry, see Eleven Sherries Swigging, page 37) Christmas. Ever since 1970, a special Christmas edition of Top Of The Pops has served as The Queen’s warm-up act. Indeed, in 2009, viewers having difficulty coming to terms with seeing Rage Against The Machine at Christmas number one witnessed Reggie Yates announcing that ‘the Queen’s next!’ as if she was Nelly Furtado or Pixie Lott, which she most certainly wasn’t (and isn’t).
At the time of writing, Top of the Pops still gets an annual Christmas Day airing on BBC One, despite being absent from our screens for the rest of the year because of widespread public indifference to the ups and downs of the singles chart. Just like Noel Edmonds or Morecambe and Wise, or even The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Top of the Pops presents us with a loose connection with our past, and allows us to finally understand why our parents showed their distaste for pop music on Christmas Days gone by. ‘It’s a bloody mystery to me, I’ll tell you that much,’ they may have compla
ined as Toyah galumphed about the stage in 1981, or maybe they just sighed in despair in 2000 as S Club 7 jiggled about innocuously to ‘Reach’. But as we get older we can echo their bewilderment at modern culture, staring bemusedly at an anodyne performance by Clean Bandit and feeling nostalgic for the uninhibited passion of Renée and Renato.
Fashions change, but the Queen’s Christmas message doesn’t. She’s never been one for whipping us into a frenzy with impassioned rhetoric, sticking instead to quiet, hypnotic cadences which have the power to send us into a turkey-tinged slumber. It’s a common false memory that she shocked Britain to its core in 1992 by describing a year of royal scandal as ‘annus horribilis’ as we were digesting our Christmas pudding; she actually said this during a different speech a month earlier and merely reminded us of it on Christmas Day. ‘As some of you may have heard me observe,’ she said, gravely, ‘it has, indeed, been a sombre year.’ So the one thing we remember from many years of royal Christmas messages is something she didn’t even say. Nevertheless, her address is an integral part of Christmas Day; some may watch with reverence and patriotism, some with mild boredom, some with annoyance that they’re being made to sit through it. Some, of course, don’t watch it at all.
Sheffield, Christmas 2002
I’d just dropped out of university and was enjoying the freedoms of adulthood. I shunned the family Christmas and decided to host Christmas Day with nine or ten friends at our grotty house-share. Proper turkey dinner, all the trimmings, real tree. The giddiness of Christmas, mixed with the transgressive feeling of not being with our families, was intoxicating. We drank vodka while opening our presents and passed a spliff round the dinner table. When 3 o’clock came round, someone suggested replacing the Queen’s speech with a porn DVD left behind by a previous housemate.
I pressed the play button. For about five minutes, the atmosphere was raucous, with everyone making jokes. Then, slowly, the comments died down, and we found ourselves watching in silence. It was as if we were paralysed by the wrongness of the situation, and nobody wanted to be the one to point it out. There was an unspoken but tangible consensus that a joke had gone too far. Eventually we adjusted our paper hats and sheepishly tried to bring the Christmas spirit back, but it cast a pall over the rest of the day.
A Very British Christmas Page 7