It was 1994 when my now husband bought me the perfect silver necklace that let me know he was (a) interested, and (b) tasteful (phew).
The best one so far (see, a Christmas optimist) was 1997, when my first child was a few weeks old and we “wrapped” her in colorful things and lay her gently under the tree, to take the first twenty of the twenty thousand Christmas photographs we now have of her.
But there was this one year…
You first need to understand that my mother is a Christmas nutter. We’re talking Christmas-o-rama in every room. In the 1980s there were definitely multicolored glitter-ball things stuck to the living room ceiling with Blu Tack. There were salt dough choirboys teetering back and forth on sideboards (also requiring Blu Tack). Every year we had a two-foot-tall cardboard Santa, which my mum made, with a cotton wool beard and rather flat cardboard arms secured with those brass pins that splay out; he lived next to the television (the one that always showed The Wizard of Ozand The Sound of Music). It was a really big deal. My older sister has inherited the rogue gene that allows you to believe that erecting a large polythene Santa-with-sack on the side of your house in late November is acceptable behavior. I, myself, did not escape completely, although I like to think of myself as altogether more stylish. More Shaker, less Bollywood. I start making my lists in October. What to buy. What to cook. What to wear.
Since I married eight years ago, I have had to eradicate all my husband’s own familial Christmas habits. Opening presents in pajamas. Eating red cabbage flavored with cinnamon. Stockings in the bedrooms. That all had to go. When it comes to Christmas, I’m a “my way or the highway” kind of a girl.
My brother once saw Santa Claus. He was certain he’d seen him in his room one year. He continued to believe this until he was quite old. I’m not actually sure he still doesn’t, and that he might just have said he didn’t to avoid being beaten up. I don’t know how he copes now; he married a Dutch girl, and has to do the whole thing at the beginning of December, with entirely different foodstuffs.
It’s not our fault, this slight seasonal dolallyness. It’s a hereditary condition. My grandmother was the original sinner. My mother (a real war baby, born at Christmas in 1940, after my grandfather had gone to fight with General Montgomery and the Desert Rats in Africa) grew up in a village called Sixpenny Handley (yes, really), in Dorset, in a kind of postwar austerity, which meant that they never had any money (or ever saw bananas, which is a weird thought). But sure enough, each year my grandmother would go into epic debt with this mythical character, the tally man (who, in my childish imagination, always looked a little like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but who was very probably a quite ordinary bloke making a living, albeit off the dangerous dreams of the poor), in order to buy each of her children their one new outfit a year, and the gifts that she would spend the next eleven months paying off. My mother and her brothers were sent to the market late on Christmas Eve to buy cut-price clementines. If you think this is sounding a little Dickens, I totally agree. You can hear the poignant violin and the scratching of Tiny Tim’s crutch now, can’t you? But I think rural England in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a bit like that if you were working class, which they were. Once on a family holiday, we went to a pioneer village, the kind where all the staff dresses in crinoline. My mum and dad spent the whole time saying, “We had one of these,” and “This is how we used to do the washing/light fires/iron clothes.” It was mortifying.
We did the same thing every year. Come mid-December, my mum dressed the fake tree, which, at least, was green—we knew someone once who had an electric pink one, to match her living room (scary)—and the rest of the house to within an inch of its life. My birthday is the twenty-second of December, a real source of contention. With my mum being a late-December baby herself, I grew up thinking that my parents had been grossly irresponsible the previous March. It did not help when my mother told me I had been conceived—very deliberately— on Mothering Sunday, what to Americans is known as Mother’s Day. My birthday was the day my grandparents would arrive. They watched a lot of television, as I remember. On Christmas morning, my father would go down to make tea and “check” that Father Christmas had come, and then we would all have to wash and dress, to a rousing soundtrack of high-pitched choirboys squeaking carols, before we were allowed to file downstairs in order of age (very von Trapp). Christmas lunch was served after the Queen’s Speech, and that, too, was always exactly the same. Same flavoring in the gravy, same vegetables, nothing mucked about with: no slivers of almonds in among our Brussels sprouts, and absolutely no maple glaze on our roast parsnips, thank you very much. And brandy butter, not sauce, and not made with brown sugar or vanilla sugar or anything other than white icing sugar and unsalted butter. Oh, and thick, viscous egg nog on Christmas Eve. Which was just exactly how we all liked it, once every three hundred and sixty-five days.
My point is this: Mum created this incredible, ritualistic, comfort blanket of a Christmas, which, approaching adolescence, I was deeply rude about but, secretly, completely addicted to.
In fact, approaching adolescence, I was deeply rude about pretty much everything. I was sort of angry about everything, too. When I was eleven, we moved from England to Toronto, Canada. Blue skies and snow at Christmas, after years of gray, damp, inclement weather. But, nevertheless, uprooted without consultation, I found the whole thing the most wonderful opportunity to be both angry and rude, on a large scale. I’d been happy where I was, and I was damned if I was going to be happy there. I’d show them. They’d jolly well think twice before giving me opportunities they’d never dreamt of and an exciting, adventurous life in a staggeringly beautiful country ever again. Oh yes.
Actually, I don’t know how they didn’t kill me. I threw a serious strop about having to go to the Rockies, when all my friends were going to Florida. “Some people like mountains, and some people don’t.” And some people should probably have been sent home immediately to some Dotheboys Hall–style detention center for the terminally ungrateful.
I was ever so plain as a teenager. My mouse-brown hair clung greasily and lifelessly to my head. My teeth protruded—a long way. I’ve got the kind of face that frankly is never going to win prizes but looks a hell of a lot better when it’s smiling and happy—I can sometimes, on a really good day, almost sparkle. But there wasn’t a lot of that going on. Add to that the fact that I didn’t speak properly—how I hated my English accent—or dress properly (I remember wanting a Lacoste T-shirt, Jordache jeans, and a LeSportsac handbag more than life itself), wasn’t Jewish (long story—it was a very Jewish neighborhood, and I wanted Hebrew lessons and a Bat Mitzvah), and couldn’t get a volleyball back over the net if it was thrown to me from three feet away—those things bruise.
At least I’d have Christmas, hey?
Apparently not. We were going to spend Christmas Day at the home of friends. Huh! “Friends” wouldn’t want to mess up your English Christmas. It was bad enough that we’d had to go out into the state, eat donuts, and drink hot chocolate, then wade through snow and chop down our own flipping Christmas tree. What was wrong with the fake one? But, no. Yet again, my parents had taken a major family decision without consultation. One of Mum and Dad’s friends ran the Opera Company in Toronto, and he was planning a major celebration at his home for all the touring waifs and strays who couldn’t get home for the holidays. And for us, who could have stayed at home.
We were not happy, my brother and sister and I. We moaned and railed. We extracted a promise from Mum that we could have a “proper” Christmas Day on Boxing Day. With the right routine and the right food. And then grudgingly agreed to go. Mum made a huge crepe-paper Christmas cracker to take (it took two people to hold it), with a small gift for everyone inside, but we were not so cheaply bought.
The day started badly when I opened my Christmas present. Sitting in a tiny box under the Christmas tree, it did not look like either designer gear, a voucher for braces, or a copy of the Torah,
so expectation was not running high. It was a gold-plated travel alarm clock, engraved with my name and the date. Oh dear. I’d like to say I won an Oscar for my performance as grateful teenager. But you wouldn’t believe me, would you, and you’d be right. This Christmas was not going well.
I must admit the people were interesting. European, Middle Eastern, North American. Singers, makeup artists, directors. All theatrically expansive, warm, engaging. I had never been around people like that before, and it was exciting. And I’d have been quite happy if I’d been watching them from afar, undetected. But they were being nice to me, trying to talk to me. I’d never felt so out of place, and so uninteresting, and so far away from being the kind of grown-up that they were, that I wanted to be. I was miserable and wretched, and I just wanted to leave.
At lunch I was seated near a set designer. I remember him exactly—how he looked, how he was dressed. But I don’t remember the lunch. I still have a framed drawing of the set he designed for La Belle Helene.
His name was Thierry. He smiled at my sister. (Here you should know that my sister was born blond, with round curls and big blue eyes and peachy skin. When I followed sixteen months later, scrawny, with spots and straggly black hair, people apparently used to approach my mother on the street, cluck, and smile at my beautiful sister, seated majestically on the seat attached to my mother’s big Mary Poppins pram, then peer in at me and find themselves curiously at a loss for words. This, I feel, may have done damage.) Then he said to my sister, in his exotic, enchanting French accent, “I look at you, and I am reminded of a Gainsborough painting.” Now, I’m not so sure that either my sister or I knew our Gainsborough from our Jackson Pollock at this point, but we both knew, from his tone and the look in his eyes, that this was good. Very good.
My heart sank. Well, that figured. Could this day stink any more?
Thierry turned to me. I thought again of the pram. What would he manage to come up with? Surely he’d manage something. He practically made a living out of telling women who weighed twenty stone that they made convincing romantic sylphlike heroines, didn’t he? I remember holding my breath.
“But you…” BUT! Where was he going with this? “But you, you remind me of a woman with whom I was once very much in love.”
And so delivered pretty much the best Christmas present that I ever got.
Postscript: The utter selfishness of my parents has continued, I’m sad to report, since those days. Next thing they did was move to Australia, which meant several Christmas Days spent at vast barbecues, eating with twenty or thirty people on long trestles tables besides the pool, under the blazing sun. Dreadful. And now they’ve “downsized” (read: made their children take back all the textbooks, old school photographs, collection of dolls-around-the-world that had hitherto happily lived at the old family seat) to a flat that, collectively, we do not fit into; now they seem to think it’s the turn of their children to provide Christmas for them. This year, they didn’t even have a tree. “So much nicer, isn’t it, darling, to be in your own home, once you’ve got children?” Frankly, no, it isn’t. What is the sight of your children’s incredulous faces, as they sit beneath your magical tree (do you know it’s a real one, and we chopped it down ourselves?) opening treasured gifts, compared with Christmas dinner cooked correctly by your own mother?
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Writer and performer MIKE ALBO prefers that thinner, Atkins Diet version of Santa who appears in European imagery. His second novel, The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (written with his longtime pal Virginia Heffernan), comes out in paperback in spring 2006. Check out his website: www.mikealbo.com.
LOUIS BAYARD finds Christmas the ideal occasion for pondering the sodden wreckage of his past and for repeatedly viewing the Marlo Thomas remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, which he considers to be shamefully undervalued. His most recent novel, Mr. Timothy, was a New York Times Notable Book. His next novel, The Pale Blue Eye, is due out in March 2006.
STANLEY BING is the author of Sun Tzu Was a Sissy: Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War; Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up; and What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness, and he reports on corporate life twice monthly in Fortune magazine. He is a veteran of many corporate holiday parties and is proud of the fact that he has not disgraced himself at one since Christmas 2002, when he didn’t eat enough hors d’oeuvres to offset the effects of that last tumbler of Glenlivet.
ROGER DIRECTOR is a writer-producer living in Santa Monica. His first novel was A Place to Fall. He is at work on a new book. And the most beautiful Christmas he ever had was on the beach in Hawaii, watching the hula to “White Christmas.”
Come Christmastime, VALERIE FRANKEL works part-time for Santa, designing matching bra-and-panty gift sets that are always a hit with the ladies. Her ninth novel, Hex and the Single Girl, comes out in March 2006.
ANNE GIARDINI doesn’t like to complain, but she hasn’t received a memorable Christmas present since she was ten years old. Her novel The Sad Truth About Happiness was published by HarperCollins in the spring of 2005. She is working on another novel, Nicolo Piccolo, when she is not practicing law and the violin in Vancouver.
CYNTHIA KAPLAN is the author of several books, only one of which, Why I’m Like This: True Stories (Morrow, 2002), has been written and published. Her work has appeared in many newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies, and she is the co-writer of the film Pipe Dream. Kaplan is also an actress and comedian and performs in the infamous What I Like About Jew Christmas shows at the Knitting Factory, in NewYork City. Her second book is due out soon, or so they say.
MARIAN KEYES spends Christmas worrying that seasonal high winds might take hold of Rudy, her splendid, life-size illuminated reindeer—the envy of the neighborhood—and whisk him off her roof and into someone else’s garden. Her new novel, Anybody Out There?, will be published in summer 2006.
BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM no longer kicks over the Christmas tree intentionally; the last three times were accidents. Her most recent novel, An Almost Perfect Moment (Ecco/ HarperCollins), is out in a paperback edition.
JOHN MARCHESE is the author of Renovations: A Father and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other, and is at work on a book about violin making.Since beginning his writing career with the Lubbock [Texas] Avalanche-Journal, he has written for dozens of newspapers and magazines. Though he lives in New York, he spends more time in Texas than is good for him.
CATHERINE NEWMAN is the author of the award-winning memoir Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family (Penguin, 2005) and of the child-raising journal Bringing Up Ben & Birdy at BabyCenter.com. She is a contributing editor for FamilyFun magazine, and her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including in the New York Times bestseller The Bitch in the House (HarperCollins,2002) and Toddler (Seal Press, 2003). She braves the holidays in snowy, hot-cidery, hack-down-your-own-tree-and-love-it Massachusetts.
ELIZABETH NOBLE no longer has time to bitch about having a Christmas birthday (which was how she spent her first thirty Christmas Days). She’s too old, and too busy recreating the magic she remembers from her own mother’s home for her two daughters, Tallulah and Ottilie, who make believing believable. She’s the author of The Reading Group. Her next novel, The Friendship Test, is due out in January2006.
ANN PATCHETT has never put up a Christmas tree and immediately regifts all the ornaments she receives. Her latest book is Truth & Beauty.
NEAL POLLACK, a Bar Mitzvahed son of Abraham, spends his Christmas pretending to enjoy Christmas with his Protestant family-in-law. His memoir, Daddy Was a Sinner, will be published in the fall of 2006.
Successfully deprogrammed parochial-school survivor JONI RODGERS practices a self-important woowoo religion called Jewbuddhistianity but still finds herself craving Tater Tot Hotdish and other exotic Protestant comestibles during Ad
vent. Her fifth book, The Secret Sisters, comes out in spring 2006. For more on all that, visit www.jonirodgers.com.
AMY KROUSE ROSENTHA is the author of Encycopedia of an Ordinary ifeand of severa chidren’s books. She ives in Chicago. This concludes the worst “no L” joke ever.
MITCHELL SYMONS is a Brit who likes Americans— yup, he’s the one—except when they invite him to spend Christmas with them. His latest book is This Book of More Perfectly Useless Information, and in the absence of anyone else doing so, he thoroughly recommends it.
CINTRA WILSON likes to spend Christmas Day going from friend’s house to friend’s house just enjoying all the colorful pills in their medicine cabinets. The paperback of her latest book, Colors Insulting to Nature, was released in June 2005. She is currently at work on a novel purely devoted to the spirit of Christmas, entitled The Yule-Log Archipelago.
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Credits
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Jacket photographs: Christmas tree by Siede Preis/Getty Images;
reindeer © Debra McClinton/Getty Images;
coal by Harry Taylor/Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images;
red bow by Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
Copyright
THE WORST NOEL. Copyright © 2005 by HarperCollins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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