Christmas Notebook | 12 December 2012

I used to spend a small part of every Christmas season worrying that perhaps that year, the particular year in which I was worrying, wasn’t quite as Christmassy as all the others. Generally speaking, I can take all the cinnamon and cloves and ching-chingy shop music you can throw at me, even the colossal seasonal uplift in general wassail-ment, without so much as a prickle of Nowell-feeling making itself known in my breast. Don’t for a minute think that I’m any kind of non-Christmas person — nothing could be further from the truth. The season of roaring fires, mince pies, seeing your breath, carols, frost, shooting, presents, booze, decent telly, family and more booze combines the very things I was put on this planet to enjoy the most. It’s just that Christmas Day will inevitably dawn unremarkably, averagely overcast and — just to make its point — at about room-temperature. There’ll be no angel choirs (I predict) and the walk to church, or to the bottle bank, or to fill the log-basket, will feel very much like any other day.

I daresay I could hire small itinerant groups of scarved Edwardian carol singers and dot them about the place under swinging lanterns (which I imagine they’d supply themselves), but even this wouldn’t do it. The truth is, it’s only ever in looking back on Christmas that it takes on any magic, only then do the headaches of ill children and underslept nights get swept away by the prevailing sense of triumph: we negotiated the coldest and darkest recess of the year, warm, well-fed and in good company, and we filled the wintery silence with loud and happy noise. And you don’t get that view of Christmas until you’ve rounded the bend of January.