Christmas

Tuesday

Clarissa Tan

The Visit – Shiva Naipaul Prize, 2007

The 2007 Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize was won by Clarissa Tan. The prize, named after the late Trinidadian author, is for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer’. The judges that year included William Boyd, Matthew d’Ancona (then editor of The Spectator) and Mark Amory (literary editor of The Spectator). Clarissa is now a staff writer at The Spectator. To find out more about the Shiva Naipaul competition, and how you can enter, click here.   The Visit Clarissa Tan I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Mr Dickens’ ghost story

It is the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth in February, and Christmas Day today; so a sterling occasion to reproduce The Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol from the archives. It was written for our issue dated 23 December 1843, and differs from most modern reviews in quoting extremely liberally from the text, to the extent that there is more Dickens than Spectator in what follows. But, on this morning of all mornings, I thought few would complain about that: ‘The object of this seasonable and well-intentioned little book is to promote the social festivities and charities of Christmas, by showing the beneficial influence of these celebrations of the

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Mark Steyn’s Christmas film selection

To help that Christmas lunch go down, here’s a sprinkling of Christmas films selected by the incomparable Mark Steyn in 2004. To see more of his writing for The Spectator click here. Otherwise, just read on…  Christmas Classics, Mark Steyn, The Spectator, 18 December 2004 ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house/ Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. At which point, Sylvester the cat looks up from his long fruitless vigil outside the mouse hole in the baseboard and sighs with feeling to the narrator, ‘You’re not jutht whithlin’ Dickthie, brother.’ I saw Gift Wrapped after four hours of grim slogging through a couple of this year’s charmless

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: What do you mean ‘Happy Christmas’?

A more scientific view of proceedings, courtesy of a Yale professor writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue in 1994:What do you mean ‘Happy Christmas’?, Robert Buck, The Spectator, 17 December 1994 It is the time of year when the pursuit of happiness is at its most frantic. People believe they should be happy in the holiday period because they are surrounded by tradition, mercantile enthusiasm and a desire to return to childhood, where, for the most part, it did not require an effort to be happy. Is the experience of happiness only psychological? We know that the reductionist trends of science must be leading towards a molecular theory of practically

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Merry Christmas Everyone

Hope y’all have a splendid day that delivers all you want or, more reasonably, could sensibly hope for. Here’s the best (non-religious) Christmas song of them all:

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: The Christmas truce

Christmas is but a day away, and with it a chance to remember when British and German troops clambered out of the trenches to declare impromptu ceasefires in December 1914. CoffeeHousers are no doubt familiar with the specifics: how the Germans started by singing carols, and finished off (according to some letters from the time) by beating our soldiers 3-2 in a game of football. But I thought you still might care to see how The Spectator wrote it up a week later. So here is the brief report that appeared in the ‘News of the Week’ section of our 2 January issue, 1915: ‘The news from the western theatre

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Jeffrey Bernard does Christmas

By way of a Christmas aperitif for CoffeeHousers, here’s Jeffrey Bernard enduring the festive season for his Low Life column in 1988: Eastern Promise, Jeffrey Bernard, The Spectator, 17 December 1988 Speaking as a man with little faith I find this whole business of Christmas one hell of an inconvenience. It must be even worse for a turkey. One of the things that annoys me is the fact that I can hardly find a table in any of the restaurants I use because of the number of wretches who only seem to eat and drink once a year. Where the hell are they in, say, August? I spent one Christmas

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Happy Christmas | 23 December 2011

A brief post to let CoffeeHousers know that the blog will be going a bit quieter over the next few days. We hope you have a very happy and peaceful Christmas. Coffee House won’t fall completely silent, though. Tune in over the weekend for the occasional post and selections from The Spectator archives. And there’s our ongoing Christmas competition here. We’ll be back, proper, early next week.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Snowgoating Christmas

Snowgoat: [noun] Inclement weather blamed, expediently, for the failure to be at all organised. Especially in the matter of sending Christmas cards, purchasing proper presents, etc. [verb, trans], Make a snowgoat of. Derivatives: snowgoater, snowgoating, snowgoatism. eg, Florence was unimpressed by her uncle’s attempt to use a snowgoat this Christmas.

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

The rising cost of Christmas dinner

While we’re talking Christmas, how about this release from the Office for National Statistics today? It reveals how the cost of certain ‘Christmas shopping basket’ items has risen over the past year. We’ve put them into a table below — but let’s just say, you might want to start stocking up on carrots.

Jonathan Jones

Christmas by numbers

Keen-sighted Spectator readers may have noticed that there was no ‘Barometer’ column in our Christmas double issue. The weekly column, which features topical, little observations and statistics, had to be pulled because of space restrictions. But no such restrictions on the Internet, of course — so we thought CoffeeHousers might care to see some of the festive factoids we had poised to print. Among them were the poll findings shown in the chart above: only 12 per cent of people regard the religious significance of Christmas as its most important component. And here are more for you to mull over, collected from various YouGov surveys: This Christmas, 31 per cent

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

What do CoffeeHousers want for Christmas?

Quentin Letts certainly wants a lot from good ol’ Father Christmas. In the festive double issue of The Spectator he pens a wish-list that contains no less than 56 items. Here are some of the highlights: A referendum on Britain’s future in Europe… Or, a Linguaphone course to brush up my German. A protest march through Islington by striking taxpayers. An announcement from David Cameron that he is scrapping the Ministerial and Other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991, which granted pay-offs to Cabinet ministers. (The Act was also responsible for setting the Commons Speaker’s indecently generous pension. Double bingo!) Less windbaggery from Speaker Bercow. And if we taxpayers must shell

Tuesday

Clarissa Tan

Spectators of Christmas Past

One December in the 1930s, with Britain reeling from the Depression, Lord Wakefield of Wakefield House took out a full-page announcement on the cover of The Spectator. It was an appeal to ‘all men and women of goodwill’ to help 3,693 boys and girls in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage.  ‘For many of them it will be their first Christmas without their fathers and mothers,’ wrote Lord Wakefield. ‘Five hundred guineas would meet the costs of Christmas Day for the entire orphanage.’   That was our Christmas cover of 1933, and it’s just one of the Spectators of Christmas Past that we’re featuring on our new Facebook page this

Monday

The Spectator

Oh come, all ye Speccie readers

A brief post to alert CoffeeHousers to The Spectator’s carol concert, which is taking place next Wednesday in the beautiful St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street. It promises to be a suitably Christmassy affair. There will be carols from the choir of St Bride’s; readings from Jeremy Clarke, Rod Liddle, Rory Sutherland and the Mary behind ‘Dear Mary’; as well as Winter Pimm’s, mince pies and hot chestnuts served outside the church. All that remains is for you to buy one of the few remaining tickets. It would be wonderful to see you there, so please do get a-clicking.

Saturday

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 12 November 2011

A further selection of our reviewers’ favourite reading in 2011 Richard Davenport-Hines Amidst the din, slogans and panic of modern publishing, my cherished books are tender, calm and achieve a surpassing eloquence by dint of tightly controlled reticence. Anthony Thwaite’s Late Poems (Enitharmon, £10) are written by a man of 80. Each of them is word-perfect: some recall dead parents; others foreshadow Thwaite’s death; and throughout there is the clear, crisp wisdom, pensive sadness and absence of confessional self-pity that show a mastery of language and feeling. Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life (Chatto, £12.99) is set in an Israeli pioneer village which is being chi-chied with boutique wineries as

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

A paean to the people

There’s so much junk on the box at Christmas that yesterday I tweeted a link to a seven-minute video that I thought would be much more memorable: an American’s film on England in Christmas 1940. The film is above, and speaks best for itself. The great thing about Twitter is the response: positive and negative. And while many people retweeted the link (one guy said he’d forced his kids to watch it), it provoked fury from one David Walker. His words: “@frasernels – this Tory dares extol this film – a paean of praise to the state and common sacrifice. What hypocrisy.” This is David Walker, co-author with his partner

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A sign of the Times

Yesterday, The Times produced its first Christmas Day edition for more than a century – since, that is, newsagents started taking that day off. The jewel in that edition was a wonderfully spirited piece from my Spectator colleague Matthew Parris about the importance of paywalls. I fervently believe in them, and regard them as the only hope for this sharply contracting industry. But over to Matthew: “‘Sorry, I can’t read you anymore, but I refuse on principle to subscribe now that there’s a paywall,’ these muppets whine. ‘On principle?’ I reply. ‘What principle?’ As they fumble for an argument, I interrupt: ‘Look, maybe the money is a bit tight at

Saturday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 December 2010

Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by ‘snail mail’. You need the card (whose choice is also a complicated matter), the envelope, the addresses, the stamp, the pen, the post box, and the energy to write your name hundreds of times. This all seemed worthwhile when one had confidence in the postal system. But ever since the abolition of the ‘second’ post

Neil Tennant

Winter in Poland

Wrocław in Poland was Breslau in Germany until 1945. We’ve travelled here to record the orchestral parts of the music we’ve written for a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, which opens at Sadler’s Wells in March. It takes me several days to work out how to pronounce the Polish name of the city. Some foreigners call it ‘Vratslav’ but apparently the correct pronunciation is ‘Vrotswaff’ (I think). Actually no one seems to mind. We’re recording in the old Große Saal des Polnischen Rundfunks built in Breslau in the Nazi era as a concert hall for radio broadcasts. A team from Berlin has set up hard-drive recording equipment and the English