Life and times

The writer on Christmases past, present and future (including mince-pie breakfasts and a bit of bling)

Writer Jeanette Winterson

I LOVE CHRISTMAS. When I was a child my mother was permanently depressed except between 21 December and 6 January, when magically her mood lifted and she turned our tiny two-up two-down terraced house into a cross between Santa’s Grotto and Heaven on a Budget.

She and I spent hours making paper chains to hang from the corners of the room to the centre light. We glued cotton wool into the windowpanes – which at least stopped the draughts. She made a Christmas pudding, hard as a cannonball and speckled like a bird’s egg.

Mysteriously, on Christmas Eve, she put on her best coat and hat, went out, and returned with a goose, its slack head lolling from her basket. This goose had to be plucked by me, the feathers used to stuff whatever needed stuffing – usually pillows. Some of the feathers we dyed red as decorations for the presents, string-wrapped in cheap white grocers’ paper. I guess that would be chic now. Back then, I longed for a roll of wrapping paper from Woolworths.

My mother never went to bed on Christmas Eve. She sat up all night playing carols on the piano until six o’clock when she baked a batch of mince pies. About 7am, we ate them, with scalding mugs of tea and the coal fires lit, and Mrs Winterson reading the Bible – ‘Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger…’

THIS YEAR’S GREAT excitement for me is a trip to Stratford-upon-avon to see the RSC’S A Christmas Carol, adapted by David Edgar. I think it is important to make our own traditions at Christmas, and one of mine is to read

Christmas Carol, in parts, ending on the morning of the 25th, sitting up in bed eating mince pies of my own. I don’t use lard like my mother did, but I do use Nigella’s vodka recipe. She’s right; vodka does make the pastry crisper.

Thank God for a Jewish Christmas. Where would we be without Winter Wonderland, Santa Baby, Let it Snow, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer , and

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire –all by Jewish songwriters?

My wife Susie Orbach is Jewish, and we have blended together our cultures

Ato create our own kind of Christmas – good food, good music, lots of people (her), solitary walks (me), a bit of bling (me), making sure no one is left out (us), oh, and reindeer ears for the dog (me).

I RECENTLY TRAVELLED to Vienna to open a literary festival and spent some time talking to our ambassador to Austria, Leigh Turner. Affable and well read, he could not, of course, discuss his views on Brexit with me, so we talked about Christmas instead – something the Austrians do very well.

I had some time to wander round the Christmas markets and drink rum punch with cherries. There were skating rinks and trees alive with twinkly lights. The mood on the streets was good-natured – though my hosts told me that liberal Austrians are dismayed to see the far-right Freedom Party in parliament once more.

Freedom from what? Immigration, certainly. All of Europe faces that dilemma. It is difficult though, at Christmas of all times, not to wish for a world that could be inclusive, and not divided, as we are, by so many fears and hatreds. I watched small children learning to skate by holding on to ingenious plastic penguins. Others ate gingerbread reindeers or made light-up lanterns. They were all playing together, regardless of race or religion. Sometimes it seems so simple – and isn’t that the Christmas message? Unto us a child is born.

Perhaps the next generation will manage the world better.

My mother never went to bed on Christmas Eve. She sat up all night playing carols on the piano