Country Mouse
Mary and I have very different attitudes to Christmas, each shaped by our childhood experiences.
Mary’s life in Northern Ireland moved at a pace around 20 years behind that on the mainland. We both remember pre-climate-change snowdrifts around Christmas. But Mary also remembers ‘goodwill to all men’: children singing carols at the door, a Dickensian salon de refusés of lonely oldie patients of her GP father, and a euphoric atmosphere of austerity-led anticipation.
‘Unlike today, when people worry about how they can get out of eating too much,’ she recalls, ‘we daydreamed about Christmas dinner for weeks. And we actually needed the presents we got.’
When she was four, as part of the school’s carol service, the kindergarten girls lined the stage, each dressed as a Virgin Mary cradling a doll representing baby Jesus.
Mary, the only girl who didn’t yet own a doll, had to go onstage with a bundle of rags but she has never felt the need to bleat about this to a therapist.
Comically, she remembers the Christmas that coincided with the end of painful Bronco and Izal toilet sheets. Continuous, soft-tissue loo rolls had just been invented and someone, mistaking one of these for a Christmas decoration, duly draped it onto the tree.
When the streamer’s true function was revealed, the consensus was, ‘Ah! Sure no one would know it was meant to be lavatory paper. Doesn’t it look very well in any case?’
By contrast, the only Dickensian aspect of our own Christmases in Greenacres, a little brick villa down a country lane only two miles from Keele Services on the M6, was my father Godfrey’s channelling of Scrooge.
One year, his present to my mother was two £5 notes, stapled onto a piece of card with the greeting, ‘Buy yourself a pair of trousers.’
But my grandmother always came over to Greenacres bringing gifts. The Beatles had just come out, and one year she brought four hideous, rigid, plastic Beatles wigs which you put on over your own head like a bathing cap, one for each member of the family. Her card read, ‘To the Greenacres Moptops’.
Another year, granny gave my sister a doll’s house with working lights which we both found absolutely enchanting.
I have no complaints about my un-dickensian Christmas childhood. My problem is with my Christmas adulthood where I have to do all the work: fires, cooking, scullery-maiding, driving… And I no longer ‘want’ anything in the way of presents and believe no member of my family is ‘needy’, either.
These days I resent Christmas – not only because of the haemorrhaging of scarce funds but also because, thanks to climate chaos, there is no snow and it’s usually very warm with sunlight blazing.
The idea of gathering winter fu-el or skating on frozen ponds and making snowmen is absurd because the cold snap doesn’t usually come till March.
And the Christmas dinner means nothing now that we are gorging on viands all year round: in my case from Lidl; in Mary’s from Waitrose, because she’s so extravagant.
As for presents, no one will thank you for giving them more tat which will go straight to landfill. And Midnight Mass? Just like a drunken cocktail party with everyone double-kissing each other.
Mary always likens the Christmas Eve cocktail party given by kind-hearted neighbours to the final crowd scene from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. But I always find it too shouty and I don’t like being reminded of how old I am by seeing people of my own age looking as old as befits their vintage, and even older the following year.
Moreover, I would challenge any reader to try going to a drinks party where everyone else is plastered and your own challenged liver can’t process more than two units.
I enjoy staying with Mary’s family, all three of whose members are professional mathematicians. That means they give ‘sensible’ presents such as calendars, torches and tins of shortbread. But this year, we are going to stay with an extravagant family in Worcestershire, and Mary claims we are expected to choose and give a present to each one of them. With four of us and five members of the host family that means my family will have to dole out an absurd combined total of 20 presents.
I will pick up free chlamydia testing kits from the surgery for the female guests and harvest ‘novelty’ walking sticks of corkscrew willow from my plantation for the males.
In a surprise development, Mary has had a brainwave that may shed some light on why I myself now tend to channel Scrooge at Christmas.
‘It’s because, although you always say you can’t process more than one bottle of beer per day, you always do have more than one at Christmas. And you do have more than one chocolate – and many more than one mince pie…
‘Your childhood Christmases were happy because you didn’t drink alcohol as a child nor were you allowed excessive amounts of sweet things.’
She might have a point. As an adult who can help himself to whatever he wants, the obvious result is that, after years of excess, I have come to conflate the whole Yuletide period with dyspepsia.
Sometimes, the answers to mysteries are so simple they are staring us in the face.