A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  B. S.

  When Morecambe and Wise left the BBC for ITV after their 1977 special, The Two Ronnies filled the gap that was left on Christmas Day, with much-loved skits such as the crossword puzzle on a train in 1980, the bad-mannered eater of 1982 and the Alice in Wonderland sequence in 1985. But old-style variety shows were already making way for Christmas specials of much-loved comedy series. The Good Life’s ‘Silly, But It’s Fun’ episode from 1977 is a peach: a furious Margo Leadbetter, deprived of her classy Christmas luxuries because of a failed department-store delivery, ends up having a whale of a time playing ridiculous party games on a budget at the Good’s house next door, where self-sufficiency is the watchword (and where there definitely isn’t a telly). ‘Christmas doesn’t come in a van,’ she finally recognises, wistfully and poshly. ‘It can’t be delivered. You have to make it yourself.’

  Only Fools and Horses made 18 Christmas specials over the course of 22 years, including the very final episode of the sitcom in 2003, when Rodney and Del became a father and a grandfather respectively. The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family were specialists of the genre; the 1999 Christmas episode of The Royle Family featured (once again) the birth of a child, with a tearful Denise and her dad Jim sitting on the bathroom floor after her waters had broken, and Jim asking, ‘Are you definitely sure it wasn’t just a great big piss, love?’ (It wasn’t.)

  Other shows just took the aforementioned piss out of Christmas. Blackadder’s Christmas Carol upturned the Dickens story, with Ebenezer Blackadder realising the error of his benevolent ways and transforming into a complete bastard (‘I’m going to have a party, and no one’s invited but me.’). Father Ted’s 1996 special saw distressed priests trapped in the lingerie section of a department store, while Peep Show’s ‘Seasonal Beatings’ (2010) featured possibly the most excruciating family Christmas dinner ever portrayed on British television, culminating in Mark furiously feeding his turkey into the cross-cut paper shredder his father had bought him as a gift.

  Our nostalgic feelings about Christmas television are destined to fade. There’s been a steady decline in ratings ever since EastEnders on Christmas Day 1986: 26 million watched Hilda Ogden’s departure in Coronation Street in 1987, while 21 million tuned in to the Only Fools and Horses Christmas special in 2001. The highest-rated show in 2016, including all the catch-up viewing, was Call the Midwife with just 9.2 million viewers. That shared national experience, whether real or imagined, just isn’t as intense as it once was, and the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board is no longer able to give accurate figures on what all of us are getting up to on Christmas Day. But even if we’re not all watching the same television, you can be pretty sure that we’ll be staring at screens in one way or another. Christmas is, after all, a time for sitting.

  Seven Parties Dodging

  You can make anyone feel racist at Christmas. If somebody comes up to you and says ‘Merry Christmas’, you go, ‘Why would you assume that I celebrate Christmas?’

  And if they come up to you and go, ‘Merry Chr– Oh, no! Do you celebrate?’ you go,

  ‘Why would you assume that I don’t celebrate Christmas?’

  It’s wicked, man.

  Romesh Ranganathan, Live At The Apollo, Christmas 2016

  For some people, Christmas just doesn’t happen. The holiday season ticks past without incident, tinsel or mistletoe. They might have a massive aversion to it, making herculean efforts to opt out by barricading themselves into their homes, folding their arms and refusing to turn on the television. People of non-Christian faiths might regard the whole thing with bemusement and feel relieved that they have no obligation to wear fake antlers for a laugh. Others might love it but be unable to celebrate because they’re stuck at work, or their personal situation makes Christmas impossible, or they find themselves in North Korea where the head of state is so incensed by the idea of Christmas that he sees the placement of a Christmas tree on the border by South Korean authorities as an incitement to war. Christmas might be thought of as a great unifier, a blowout that bonds us all, but it only bonds some of us. It’s hard to put a percentage on the number of Brits who end up not celebrating Christmas, but I’ve decided to devote a entire chapter to people who either don’t do it or don’t want to do it, so if you’d humour me for a while I’d appreciate it.

  Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and Dr Seuss’s Grinch are the two preeminent anti-Christmas archetypes. Both of them despise the merriment they see going on around them, which they see as an unnecessary concession to fun that should have been resisted far more stubbornly. ‘If I could work my will,’ says Scrooge to his upbeat, cheery nephew, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’ Few people have as violent an opposition to Christmas as Ebenezer, but anyone daring not to throw themselves completely into the Christmas jamboree runs the risk of being labelled as a miserable bastard.29

  The most Grinch-like objections to Christmas are rooted in a disbelief that we could be taken in by something so ridiculous. The writer Christopher Hitchens once likened it to the kind of mass obedience you see in authoritarian states. ‘The official propaganda is inescapable,’ he wrote in the Sunday Express in December 2008. ‘The identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations […] the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures […] Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader’s birthday, and so you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring.’ I can only imagine what Christmas might have been like at Christopher Hitchens’ house, but I’m guessing it might have been quite similar to February or March at Christopher Hitchens’ house.

  Doncaster, Christmas 2011

  I dread Christmas. I hate being told what to eat and who to eat it with and where to be. I wonder if my hatred of it came from growing up as an only child. I got toys, but there was no one to play with. And if we went round to another house where there was more of a buzz, our own Christmas felt quite grey and disappointing in comparison. I have a big family around me now, but I still can’t bear the forced jollity, the heavy expectation that you have to have a great time.

  One Christmas my father was very ill in hospital, so we cancelled our usual Christmas and headed up to Yorkshire where my parents lived. We put the tree up on Christmas Eve, spent Christmas Day visiting him in hospital and going to see elderly relatives, and then came back to eat some slow-roasted pork that turned out to be inedible. But it was the most memorable Christmas I ever had, because the expectations were so low. What happened didn’t really matter, as long as we had the bare minimum and we could make my dad a little happier. It was grim, but it was somehow much more meaningful.

  J. T.

  Bearing in mind the stereotypical British resistance to expressing emotion, it’s surprising that we have any tolerance of the ‘forced fun’ of Christmas at all – but the Christmas bulldozer is sufficiently mighty to demolish most of our cynicism. For every person who dismisses Christmas as a ‘cult of sentimental mediocrity’, there are several thousand who still equate it with euphoria and elation; they’re swept along by the sparkly December crescendo to a point where the idea of not participating would be unthinkable. If you live in Britain but grew up in another country, this can be a bemusing spectacle to witness.

  “In conclusion, I believe that your so-called Father Christmas faces a logistical impossibility.”

  I spoke to illustrator Viviane Schwarz, who spent her childhood Christmases in Germany and her adult ones in the UK and still has trouble coming to terms with all the fuss we make. ‘It’s this massive, arcane thing that I don’t really understand,’ she says. ‘When I was in Germany, our family Christmas started on the night of the twenty-fourth and a day later it was over. But even as a child I didn’t buy into the mythical side of Christmas. One year my sister’s boyfriend dres
sed up as Father Christmas, saying, “Ho ho ho, if you’ve been bad I’m going to put you in this sack”, and I remember thinking, “Here’s a grown man telling me to comply with his wishes or get put in a sack.” I punched him in the gut, ripped off his beard and legged it. So I don’t do Christmas. I don’t hate it, I just don’t get it. One year I shared a tetrapak of red wine with my landlord and his dog, neither of whom did Christmas. It was great.’

  Human beings are unpredictable creatures, and there’s no guarantee that every (or indeed any) Christmas will go as well as we might hope. If your childhood Christmases were riven by argument and blighted by dark moods, those miserable associations can stick around for years. As the myth of the perfect Christmas is largely constructed around nostalgia (‘just like the ones I used to know’), anyone who doesn’t feel wistful about Christmases past can feel cast adrift by the celebration. They may seem like party poopers, but there’s nothing Grinchy about keeping Christmas at arm’s length if it’s synonymous with stuff you’d rather not think about.

  Doha, Christmas 2016

  Part of me hates Christmas. My parents split up when I was a kid, and it was such a stressful time. My dad would be trying to outdo my mum by buying me some flashy thing that I didn’t want, and I felt so guilty about that. Christmas should really be a family time, a time of peace and joy, but it wasn’t like that for me.

  Last year I worked in Qatar. In June I decided to fast through Ramadan because everyone in my office was doing it and I wanted to fit in with the team, and at the end a Muslim colleague bought me a present to congratulate me. So when Christmas was approaching I asked him if he’d like a Christmas stocking in return. He didn’t know what it was, but I told him that if he put a carrot outside his flat for the reindeer, there’d be a stocking for him in the morning. I got up at 6 a.m. on a warm morning, ate half the carrot he’d left out, hung up his stocking and went to work. In the evening my colleague came over to unwrap his presents, and we had a dinner of potato smiley faces and poached eggs. It was odd; in the UK I was always striving for the perfect Christmas, but in Qatar I didn’t have to get stressed about it, and you know what, it was really nice.

  K. G.

  For people who struggle with depression, Christmas can be particularly burdensome. ‘The expectation to have fun is crippling,’ explained writer Dan Dalton in 2015, ‘but guilt suffocates. Guilt at being the only one not having fun. Guilt because you feel you’re dragging everyone else down.’ I asked Dan how he copes30 over the festive period when the going gets tricky. ‘If there’s anything I’ve learned,’ he said, ‘it’s to be a little kinder to myself. Rather than spend weeks exhausting my finite supply of enthusiasm, I save my energy for Christmas Day itself. This takes the pressure off a little. So I try to make Christmas as short as possible, and try to enjoy just spending time with my family, rather than making it the best Christmas ever.’

  The reserves of energy Dan talks about are finite for us all, and can be quickly depleted if the pressure is on you, as a homemaker, to create a perfect Christmas atmosphere. In 2014, Times columnist Janice Turner wrote about the way we’re urged to make Christmas magical, transforming it into a competition ‘whose judging criteria are originality, technical merit and achieving the ecstatic happiness of everyone you love in the whole world for a single day.’ If you’re a single parent, all that stuff can become magnified. My pal Sharon, whose describes her childhood Christmases as really raucous (‘people dancing, singing, playing instruments’) finds those memories hard to live up to. ‘I don’t think people understand that being a single parent is quite lonely,’ she says. ‘You’re not on your own, but you do feel lonely. You’re buying the presents on your own, wrapping them and doing all the preparation on your own. The pressure is on you to make it fantastic, so you don’t really enjoy it. And because you don’t have a partner, you don’t get that shared joy in your kids’ pleasure.’

  The plight of those who feel lonely over Christmas was recognised in 2012 by comedian Sarah Millican, who began a social media tradition that’s as popular as Ed Balls Day31 but, crucially, doesn’t involve Ed Balls. ‘If circumstances mean you’re on your own today,’ she tweeted on Christmas Day, ‘remember, you’re not! We are here. I’ll post up what I’m up to and join in if you like. Let’s use a hashtag: #joinin.’ Thousands of people who have lost (or lost touch with) family and friends have joined in over the years, making connections with people in similar situations and helping them to dilute, if not entirely eradicate, that feeling of loneliness. Meanwhile, other people have the enviable ability to close the door, take the metaphorical phone off the hook and reshape Christmas the way they’d like it to be.

  When I was little I loved Christmas, but around the age of 14 my family pretty much stopped doing it. These days I spend them on my own and don’t really do Christmas at all. I remember children’s entertainers coming to our school when I was 7 or 8, and me thinking how artificial the whole thing seemed. To me, that’s what Christmas is like.

  So I never have a tree. I might have a couple of cards up, and that’s about it. But Christmas Day is just lovely! I have my own routine; I’ll watch films that I want to watch, maybe a horror film at 3 p.m. And I’m a bit of a cat wizard, so friends of mine will ask me to do cat sitting. And I’ll eat something with chips, and not feel guilty about not having vegetables. And it’s wonderful. It’s really not long enough! So although I don’t like the traditional Christmas, in a perverse way I really look forward to it.

  G. S., Kinross

  If you’re prepared (or even eager) to bypass Christmas, there are many employers out there who quite literally can’t get the staff. As many as a million people in Britain work on Christmas Day, from nurses to journalists, chefs to security guards, hoteliers to clergy. If you’re contractually obliged to work over Christmas, it can be a drag; it doesn’t just skew your own festivities, it affects those close to you, too. ‘I remember that as soon as I was given my rota,’ says psychiatrist and author Joanna Cannon, ‘I’d always see if I was working at Christmas. It’s horrible when you are, because all you can do is pick another day. So your family have to either wait, or have two Christmases. Two Christmas dinners! And the fact that no one else is celebrating on the twenty-eighth, or whatever, is a bit of a letdown, because it’s the communal nature of Christmas that makes it special, the fact that we’re all doing it on the same day. You feel a bit of an odd one out.’ Not everyone, however, has that letdown feeling; some of us seize the opportunity of being paid double or triple the daily rate to stay the hell away from our families and exercise our God-given right not to pull crackers.

  ‘You’d think that you might escape Christmas on the International Space Station, wouldn’t you.”

  Liverpool, Christmas 1995

  My relationship with my folks wasn’t great in the 1990s. Any excuse not to do Christmas was just fine by me. I worked for a computer games company, and my job was games testing, which was mostly good fun. Indoor work, no heavy lifting! So when I was offered triple time over Christmas, I took it. I explained it to my parents and they didn’t mind.

  But on Christmas Day the job was more about fielding technical support calls from customers, and I wasn’t prepared for how awful it would be. There was a particularly harrowing type of call where irate parents complained that their new PC games didn’t work, often with children screaming in the background. Most technological solutions would be beyond the caller, so we’d have to post out discs (with the inevitable delays, because it was Christmas), which would make them even more angry. On one occasion a cockney guy threatened to ‘come raahnd and crush (me) like a beetle.’

  C. S.

  Defeating Christmas completely, however, isn’t easy. Some people attempt to make a run for it, jumping on an aeroplane to a part of the world you wouldn’t normally associate with Jesus, Santa or Noel Edmonds. But the twin forces of globalisation and commercialisation can make Christmas pop up in the unlikeliest of places. If you head to Taiwan, where
Christmas Day isn’t a public holiday, you’ll still see the odd bus displaying a Merry Christmas message, a few people wearing Santa hats in glorious sunshine and department stores co-opting Western sales techniques. From festive markets in Delhi to shimmering lights in Tokyo, Christmas seems to lurk everywhere, even in states where Christianity is not the official religion.32

  Riyadh, Christmas 1998

  For six years I lived on a compound of about forty houses in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a very inclusive, friendly community, but very few people celebrated Christmas, and the thing I remember most is that you couldn’t buy decorations. The last year we were there, we heard that the Riyadh branch of IKEA had got Christmas baubles, and they were selling them as red and green glass ornaments. I don’t know if that was a calculated decision on the part of IKEA or a mistake, but the rumour spread around, and it felt almost like prohibition – ‘Oh wow, IKEA has got Christmas decorations!’ I remember us going there and buying boxes of them. We were jubilant, like we’d just snapped up the newest iPhone.

  Of course, when we got back to the UK, where you can suddenly get twelve baubles for a quid, a lot of that excitement went away. In fact, it suddenly felt a bit much, with so much pressure on families to ‘perform’; if you don’t have a magical elf sitting on the shelf dispensing a handwritten note to your kids, you’re the crappiest parent ever. It was such a contrast from Saudi, where Christmas wasn’t something we were supposed to celebrate, and as a consequence felt really exciting.

  T. B.

  Every Christmas you’ll see a right-wing British newspaper describing a perceived attack on our beloved Christmas holiday. They pin blame on politically correct councils or companies toning down Christmas in case other faiths get offended, and particularly Muslims, who are portrayed as being permanently affronted and aggrieved. You see stories about the holiday period being referred to as Winterval, Christmas lights as Winter Night Lights, mince pies as Winter Delicacies, and Christmas itself as End Of December. Whether these are true or not, the impact of them on the British Christmas is, without question, nil, nothing, zero – but the more credulous among us still believe that it’s under threat. A front-page headline of The Sunday Telegraph in September 2016 screeched ‘Political Correctness A Threat To Christmas’, but failed to note that the only body to have ever banned Christmas in the UK was a British parliament in 1647, when it was declared to be a ‘time of fasting and humiliation’.33 That year, clergy were taken into custody for daring to preach on Christmas Day; that’s something which manifestly did not happen in 2016, or 2015, or 2014, or any time in living memory, not even a little bit.