The spirit of Christmas past

This book, an excellent history of Christmas, made me think of a Christmas cartoon strip I once saw in Viz magazine. There’s a couple. It’s Christmas Eve. The man goes out to buy the woman a present. On the way, he steps into a pub for a few drinks. Much later, drunk, having missed the shops, he tries his luck at a petrol station. But too many people have had the same idea; the only thing left to buy is engine oil. This, anyway, is how I remember it, ending deliciously with the man in a terrible dilemma.

Why, you might ask, would this genteel book about the history of Christmas, with its sections on carols, and Christmas trees, and the choir of King’s College, Cambridge — why would all this remind me of a drunk in a petrol station? I’ll come to that in a minute. But let me first say that, if you are going to be sitting among relatives at Christmas, one of the things you’ll be talking about will be Christmas itself. Christmas this, Christmas that. And if you do find yourself doing it, having read this book would be an enormous boon.

Christmas cards. Christmas food. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’. At the very start of this book, there’s a list of Christmas songs, or lines from Christmas songs, and I pretty much guarantee that one of these will trigger a Proustian rush of memory. I used to think the Wizzard song was actually about addiction, about someone wanting the same thing over and over to the point of self-harm. Others will be transported by the words ‘A Partridge in a Pear Tree’, a lyric that might have arisen from Anglo-French confusion: ‘The French word for partridge is perdrix (pronounced ‘peardree’).