Christmas without God in the Appalachians

Christmas: without being grand and Proustian, this is a season when time present inevitably takes one back to time past. When we are very young, despite the grown-ups’ best efforts to promote moral uplift, Christmas means presents. I remember being given King Solomon’s Mines when I was nine or ten. No book has ever thrilled me with more sensual pleasure and I devoured all of Rider Haggard’s related oeuvre. The other day, I came across a shelf-load in a friend’s house. They did not work. The magic could not be reconjured. For me, the Haggards ride no more (though at least the Rudyards have not ceased from Kipling). But I hope that today’s boys will still follow Allan Quatermain and Umslopogaas, and be awed by She. It should be part of a gradus ad Parnassum.

When I was five, there was a Roman coin in my stocking. What a delight. That gift went on giving: the beginning of a lifelong flirtation with numismatics. So I have just bought a denarius for a bright four-year-old. I look forward to his excitement. Time present also leads on to time future.

The other day, someone asked his fellow diners an amusing question: what was the most irreligious Christmas we had ever spent? I had to think hard. There has always been some tincture of Christianity, if only the King’s College choir. But there was one exception: in the USA, oddly, and not because I was becalmed among liberals. For journalistic reasons, I spent the Christmas of that great year, 1980, in Washington, and was invited to a house party in the boondocks of North Carolina. My hosts owned a sprawling farm complex, in part antebellum. They were delightfully right-wing. The outgoing president, Jimmy Carter, had once been a peanut farmer, a post within his competence. The paterfamilias had produced a bumper sticker: ‘Roast Jimmy’s nuts.’