Christmas Days

by Jeanette Winterson

  In they came, one and all, great and good, self-satisfied and vain, and they enjoyed their usual tour of the accommodation: they were shown the rooms where the MINTOs slept, where indeed there were eiderdowns and bears, but they were not shown the rooms where the orphans slept, where the bedclothes were made of sacking and the pillows stuffed with straw, and never a fire blazed in the boarded-up hearth.

  And they were shown the children’s dining room, set out with delicious food – jelly and cakes and a steaming bird – but they were not told that all this food would soon be whisked away and that Christmas dinner for the orphans was a thin soup made of bones and peelings and some beef spread on coarse bread.

  ‘Somewhat cold in here for small children,’ remarked a kindly gentleman with a gold watch. He was new to Soot Town. Mrs Reckitt realised she had forgotten to have the fire lit.

  ‘Oh, my! Yes! Bless me! We have all been so busy playing Christmas games and decorating the tree that I quite forgot! It shall be lit at once.’

  And with that she firmly closed the door.

  ‘Where are the orphans?’ enquired the kindly gentleman. ‘I should like to give each one of them a silver sixpence, in honour of the day.’

  ‘They are putting on their best clothes,’ said Mrs Reckitt, ‘after all the excitement of the games. But do not worry. If you give the sixpences to me I shall give them out in my happy guise as Mother Christmas.’

  ‘They are indeed fortunate children,’ said the kindly gentleman.

  The fortunate children were at that very moment shovelling coal from the coal house into iron wheelbarrows to be wheeled to the great furnace that warmed the house and heated the hot water.

  The children were so black that they could not be seen at all against the black sky and the black coal.

  ‘Ah, listen to them singing!’ cried Mrs Reckitt as upstairs Dr Scowl put on the phonograph recording of a long-dead children’s choir singing ‘The Holly and the Ivy’.

  And, warmed and touched by happiness and deception, the great and the good of Soot Town went in to dinner.

  It was not long into the first course of jellied eel that one of the ladies took a drink from her water glass and screamed and threw the contents over her neighbour. Her neighbour stood up in silk-drenched fury to find that her shoes were missing. The gentleman on her left agreeably got up to help her and fell flat on his face into the trifle – out of which exploded like the plagues of Egypt dozens of tiny frogs.

  A lady clutched at the curtains and found her hand shimmering with frogspawn. She fainted. A gentleman bent to help put her head on a cushion and saw that her wig was leaping alive on her head.

  Mrs Reckitt, reaching to ring the bell for reinforcements, saw, or thought she did, a determined frog clinging to the clapper. Ring as she might, mightily, no sound sounded. She threw the bell in a rage onto the fire and did not see the agile frog leap out of the bell and onto her fox-fur, where he sat quiet as a brooch.

  The ladies were all hysterical by now, especially without shoes, and, thanks to Reginald, there was not a gentleman whose shoes were not tied together, except for Dr Scowl.

  ‘Those evil orphans!’ shouted Mrs Reckitt. ‘This must be their idea of a joke! I’ll give them a joke! I’ll bury them up to their underfed necks in stinking sewage.’

  The kind old gentleman new to Soot Town was taken aback by this outburst, and privately wondered if all at the Villa of Glory was as it was advertised. No one else seemed to care about Mrs Reckitt’s threats to her charges; the guests were too busy fighting off frogs and managing their footwear.

  At length, and after being served copious amounts of champagne, everyone was at last settled again and tucking into the excellent roasted meats, without incident.

  All except Dr Scowl, who had taken it upon himself to tour the orphanage.

  In the quiet of the hall, he heard a loud croak. Croak? Surely not? Then he heard it again, coming from the Christmas tree. Perhaps there were frogs living in the tree? Tree frogs? Did tree frogs live in Christmas trees? Perhaps the orphans weren’t responsible after all. They would still be punished, of course. But perhaps Mrs Reckitt could sue the lumber-yard. Misfortune meant money.

  Dr Scowl poked himself deep into the tree.

  ‘Now!’ said the Silver Frog, who was sitting on Maud’s lap surrounded by a hundred-thousand froglissimos.

  As one, they LEAPT, and the doctor, in his black tails, found himself with a frog tail, and a frog body and froggy arms and legs as the rapid froglissimos covered him like pins on a pin-board.

  Dr Scowl fell on all fours, unable to see as two determined frogs held down his eyelids. He opened his mouth to cry out and five warm, wriggling frogs jumped inside and sat on his tongue like a lily pad.

  ‘Take him to the pond and throw him in!’ said the Silver Frog.

  And, by a miracle of frog-motion, the doctor began to slide along the polished wooden floor on what looked like silver castors.

  ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘Now, Maud, go and find every orphan you can and bring them out of their dark, damp, shivering holes and sit them around the Christmas tree.’

  Back in the dining room, the guests declared themselves so exhausted by unexpected events that they elected to take their crackers and Christmas pudding into the warm, comfortable sitting room that opened off the dining room.

  No sooner had they vacated than a thousand froglets whisked away the ham and turkey and roast potatoes and conveyed all these to the orphans gathered in the hall.

  The frogs grouped themselves into what looked like shining silver plates – on legs – and in this way everything was easily managed. Reginald crawled out from under the table, several silver shillings richer from where the guests had upended their pockets.

  In the hall the children tucked into such food as they had never eaten before and felt the good, wholesome warmth in their empty stomachs. They started to smile, and some laughed, and they talked to each other, not in whispers any more, and everyone shared what they had and no one took too much and the smaller children hoped that when they grew up they would marry a roast potato dressed in gravy.

  In the comfortable sitting room the guests were calmed by pudding and Mrs Reckitt comforted herself with thoughts of punishment and revenge. No child would be given food for a month and all would be required to sleep in the garden until at least half were dead – as an example to those who remained.

  It occurred to her that she had been too kind to the children. If they were dead they would be cheap to feed. From now on she would only take dead orphans.

  As she ate her sixth helping of Christmas pudding the kind old gentleman new to Soot Town proposed a toast, followed by crackers pulled in the traditional way – in a circle, hands crossed to your neighbour.

  ‘To the founder of the feast – Mrs Reckitt!’

  ‘Mrs Reckitt!’ returned the company, glasses high and brimming with port.

  Mrs Reckitt blushed, one imagines – her face was too red to allow blushing – but she did murmur her thanks, profoundly, while hinting that further funds would allow her to expand – not referring to her waistline; the iron-corseted ladies tittered.

  ‘But where is Dr Scowl?’ wondered Mrs Reckitt.

  The doctor, who had trained as an undertaker, taken a course in body-snatching, made money and returned to civilised society with a title he did not own, was stationed by a kind of levitation at the edge of the pond.

  Frogs from every garden, every woodland, every bog, every stone, every ditch, every heap, every cellar, every fairy tale were gathered round in silent, crouched concentration. They were gathered in the name of the Croak.

  The pond had frozen over again but that would be no challenge to a mortal as fleshed-out as Dr Scowl.

  ‘Dispatch him,’ ordered the Silver Frog.

  It was just at the second when the crackers were
to be pulled that Mrs Reckitt heard what sounded like a very large object entering water. But her grip was tight round her own and her neighbour’s cracker and, as she was determined to win whatever was inside both, she closed her little eyes and pulled with all the strength in her fat fists.

  WEE – KE-BANG – POP – CRACK – OW!

  And in a flare of gunpowder everyone laughed and then

  SCREAMED!

  The little frog-bombs leapt from the crackers square into eyes, nostrils, mouths, décolletages, trouser bottoms, trouser tops, and wriggled and squirmed and jumped and waited and waited and jumped.

  The great and the good of Soot Town ran out of the parlour into the hall, and there their yelling stopped, as it must, because sitting around the tree, cross-legged and ragged, were the orphans, the real ones, not the postcard offerings and exhibits.

  They were lost. They were neglected. They were broken-hearted. They were dirty. They were thin. They were tired. They wore tatty clothes and odd shoes and their hair was either not cut or all cut off. They were children.

  Their eyes were big through staring at the dark and they no longer expected something to happen. But today something had happened.

  And the kind old gentleman said, ‘How dare you, madam?’ And some of the ladies started to cry.

  And Maud stood up and said (as the Silver Frog had told her to say), ‘Please come this way.’

  And the Christmas guests saw the peeling dormitories and the bare beds. And the cold rooms and the empty toy box. And there had been a bear, but the smallest children had shared him, so that one had a leg, and another an arm, and his head was passed round to anyone who had been punished that day so that they could hold his gentle head against their hurt hearts.

  And they found the children still shovelling coal into the furnace. And the children asleep in the straw in the hen-house. And the children outside under the moon.

  Mrs Reckitt was packing a carpet bag with valuables. She didn’t notice the brooch on her fox-fur twitching or the frog’s legs stretching. She didn’t know that this frogarina, a princess among frogs, was a tiny live alarm for a cohort of silver soldiers.

  And they came. And they waited. And as she set off, cloaked and secret on her turkey legs, the frogs were like ball bearings, everywhere at once, random, underfoot, and Mrs Reckitt was sliding and falling and clutching and rolling, and the Silver Frog opened the front door and out she rolled, bang, bang, bang, down the steps.

  And she was never seen in Soot Town again.

  Is that the end of the story?

  No! It’s Christmas.

  The kind old gentleman took over the orphanage and the children were looked after, and fed, and they had lessons and playtime, and warm clothes and beds and bears.

  And every year the Christmas tree decorated the hall, and instead of a star or an angel they put a silver frog on top – though this one had wings.

  Maud grew up and became the matron of the orphanage, and every child who went there, sad though the circumstances might be, found a home, and love, and was never shut out in the cold.

  Reginald ran the woodwork classes, and taught all the boys and girls how to look after their home from home, and he even built a special ladder that could reach right to the top of the Christmas tree.

  And some time later Reginald and Maud got married, and the Croak herself came to their wedding and gave them, so the story goes, a bag of silver coins that never ran out.

  And in return Reginald and Maud dug a series of ponds for the frogs, who were never again trapped under the ice in winter, and who sang with the best of us on Christmas Day.

  ew Year for most of us means the calendar new year that starts on January 1st.

  The Romans named January after Janus, god of doorways, deity of time and transitions. He has two faces because he looks backwards and forwards.

  I don’t make New Year resolutions – instead I have a psychic clear-out. What would I prefer not to repeat?

  It’s not just History with a capital H that repeats itself; it’s our personal history too. It’s hard to shift negative patterns and negative thoughts. It’s hard to do things differently, to stop destructive and self-destructive behaviours, to stop colluding with our own worst ­enemy: ourselves.

  I prefer to have a New Year’s Day party than a New Year’s Eve party where everyone gets drunk and sings out of tune.

  For me, New Year’s Eve, like Christmas Eve, is an opportunity for reflection.

  And it’s a time to remember.

  Memory doesn’t happen chronologically. Our minds are less interested in when something happened than in what happened, and who happened. Getting the year or the month wrong seems less important as time goes by. We can’t always say when, but we can always say, ‘This is what happened.’

  Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side – there’s an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling.

  Remembering isn’t like visiting a museum: Look! There’s the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn’t an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We’re not liars or self-deceivers – OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it’s a fact that our memories change as we do.

  Some memories, though, don’t seem to change at all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can’t shake free of their effect.

  There’s a great term for that – the old present. These things happened in the past, but they’re riding right up front with us every day.

  A bit of self-reflection on New Year’s Eve is no substitute for the all-over detox that going to therapy makes possible, but a bit of self-reflection on New Year’s Eve can help us look at our mental and emotional map – and see where some of the landmines are.

  And some bad memories are really other people’s baggage but we drag them along as if we’re working for a diva who always packs several trunks but can only be seen carrying a purse.

  Why am I portering this shit? It’s a good New Year question.

  In the Jewish tradition Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, falls ten days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I am married to a Jew, who tells me that the whole period between the New Year and the Day of Atonement is a period of reflection – a time for starting again, and a recognition of what needs to be atoned for. Judaism is a practical religion. You don’t just wring your hands and wail ‘oy vey’; you do something about it.

  I like the idea of atonement – a practical response to where we know we’ve done wrong. Maybe others won’t atone for the wrong they’ve done us, but maybe we can atone for the wrong we do ourselves; the self-harm.

  And, as Freud so brilliantly understood, you can go back in time, you can heal the past. It may be fixed as a fact – what happened happened – but it isn’t fixed in the ongoing story of our lives.

  Memories can be tools for change; they don’t have to be weapons used against us, or baggage we have to drag around.

  And memories, sometimes, are places we go to honour the dead. There’s always that first, terrible New Year when our loved one won’t be here.

  It’s good just to sit quietly in that place of loss and sadness, and let the feelings be the feelings. Those memories are liquid; we cry.

  And good memories, happy memories also need to be honoured. We remember so much of the bad stuff and we are so careless with the good stuff. Remember the year for what it brought. Even if there was precious little, that little is precious.

  But, you may say, what has all this got to do with cheese crispies?

  Whether it’s for a New Year’s Day party or a little personal party for you and the cat and dog on New Year’s Eve, these b
iscuits are the best.

  I love them with a cold, dry, salty sherry from the fridge or a vodka and soda with chunks of lime. If you want red, try a light red you can chill, like a Chiroubles, a Gamay or a Zinfandel or, if you are adding extra Parmesan, a Dolcetto d’Alba. Just lovely.

  I started to make my cheese crispies when I noticed my favourite Dutch brand were putting palm oil in their biscuits. Palm oil isn’t good stuff, for humans or for the planet.

  My golden rule is: don’t buy foodstuffs that contain ingredients you’d never use yourself if you were making the same kind of thing.

  Cheese crispies don’t need shelf-life – they get eaten in ten minutes max.

  So try these. Quick. Simple. Fun. And a bit of self-reflection deserves a biscuit.

  YOU NEED

  ½ lb (225 g) good salted butter

  ½ lb (225 g) organic plain flour

  ½ lb (225 g) cheese mixture

  Salt to taste

  About the cheese mixture: unpasteurised cheddar should be your staple here – but I also mix in Gruyère and Parmesan. Yes, all ­unpasteurised. I could write a long essay here about bacteria, but it’s Christmas, and bacteria aren’t that festive. I don’t blame them; it’s just not their way. So look up the pros and cons of pasteurisation once we’re past Twelfth Night, and see if I ain’t right . . .

  On the choice of cheese, well, you can’t use blue cheese or cream cheese, but if you have a hard cheese you like, one that’s local, or some old thing in the fridge you need to use up, then experiment. You’ll soon find the flavour you like best, and I bet cheesy biscuits were invented the usual way – needing to use up a surplus of something – or because something was past its eat-me date. In this case, whiffy cheese.

  (Author’s note: dogs are also a good way of using up whiffy cheese.)

  METHOD

  Rub the butter and flour in a bowl until it looks likes breadcrumbs – you can whizz it in the food processor if you want to.

  Add the cheese until the whole thing is a nice, doughy mixture. If it’s too dry add a bit of milk or an egg.