Jeanette Winterson - Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

CHRISTMAS
DAYS

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

The Passion

Sexing the Cherry

Written on the Body

Art & Lies

Gut Symmetries

The PowerBook

Lighthousekeeping

The Stone Gods

The Gap of Time

Weight (Myth)

The Dayligh t Gate (Horror)

CHRISTMAS

DAYS

12 Stories and 12 Feasts

for 12 Days

JEANETTE

WINTERSON

Grove Press

New York

Copyright Jeanette Winterson 2016

Cover illustrations copyright Katie Scott

Lines from Do not go gentle into that good night from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)

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Printed in the United States of America

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2016

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-2583-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-8974-5

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

T o the loved ones in my life who really can cook.
M y wife S usie O rbach and my friends
B eeban K idron and N igella L awson.
Y ou cant beat a J ewish C hristmas.

Contents

( Or: No More Fruit in Main Courses )

225

CHRISTMAS-TIDE

ise men trekking across the desert following a star. Shepherds in the fields with flocks by night. An angel, fast as thought and bright as hope, turning eternity into time.

Hurry! A baby will be born.

Believers and unbelievers know this story.

Who doesnt know this story?

An inn. A stable. A donkey. Mary. Joseph. Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh.

And at the heart of the story, the mother and child.

Until the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century, the Madonna and Child was the Christian image everybody would see every day; stained glass, statue, oil painting, carving, and the homely shrines people made for themselves.

Imagine it: most people cant read or write, but their minds are vivid with stories and images; images are more than the illustration to the story they are the story.

When you and I go into an ancient church in Italy or France or Spain, we cannot read the myriad scenes in the vaulted ceilings, or the frescos, or the hung paintings, but our ancestors could. We stand with our guidebooks looking for clues; they threw back their heads and saw the mystery of the world.

I love the written word Im writing it now, reading it now but in societies that are not literate but are culturally alive the image and the spoken/sung word are everything. Its a different kind of liveliness of mind.

After the Reformation, Mary, who had been treated like the fourth member of Godhead, was demoted. The Reformation wasnt good for women; we soon hit the Europe-wide witch burnings, and of course the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were Puritans of the most uncompromising sort cue the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.

In New England the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in 1659 and that law wasnt repealed until 1681. In England, under Cromwell, Christmas had already been banned since 1647, and remained so until 1660.

Why? Too pagan in its origins, as well see later, too party-time, too pleasurable (why be happy when you could be miserable?) and too dangerous to let Mary back out of the kitchen and into the starring role.

What ordinary people missed most about the break with Catholicism was the cult of Mary.