Table of Contents
For Alfie and Eliza
Thanks
It is impossible to put together a book of this nature without a great deal of help from a great many people. My first thanks must go to Susanna Wadeson, my editor, who came up with the idea for the book and, as ever, was so imaginative and helpful in her original suggestions and feedback. Thanks too to the production and sales teams at Transworld, especially Deborah Adams, Manpreet Grewal, Fiona Andreanelli, Sheila Lee, and Geraldine Ellison, and to Lucy Davey who produced the lovely design for the cover. I owe a further debt of gratitude to the unsung archivists at the Imperial War Museum and their equally helpful cousins at the British Library in St. Pancras and the newspaper library in Colindale, London. Thanks once again (for the eighteenth time now!) to my agent, Araminta Whitley at Lucas Alexander Whitley. Long may her advice continue to be even more sensible than her shoes.
Love It or Loathe It
Introduction
IT IS A GREAT PARADOX OF CHRISTMAS THAT IT SHOULD PROMISE US all a period of tremendous harmony, peace, and fun, and yet, to a minority in our midst, it somehow manages to deliver nothing but anxiety and ill-feeling. For the Christmas grumblers, the annual winter holiday is not a generous gift in lifes stocking, its a lump of coal; a holiday period so intolerable that a return to the drudgery and routine of the workplace in the dark days of January never comes soon enough. These curmudgeons are the direct descendants of the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, whose feverish denunciations of the festive season always came speckled with a shower of froth: I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas, the Irishman spat. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralizing subject.
With his long white beard and dancing eyes he may well have looked like Santas skinny younger brother, but no one in history has despised Christmas quite as intensely as Shaw. Not even the seventeenth-century Puritans, who went so far as to ban its celebration for fifteen years. Nor the billions of non-Christians, who choose to ignore it, tolerate it, or look upon it from a distance with a mildly bemused indifference. (The Japanese, bless them, even join in the celebrations.)
As a socialist, Shaw was riled by the materialism and consumerism of the holiday period and what he saw as an all-too-brief flash of middle-class charity toward the poor and less fortunate; as an atheist turned mystic, he must have been repelled by the overtly Christian dimension of the holiday; as a radical rationalist, he will no doubt have been appalled by its superstitious pagan elements and the absurdity of Father Christmas and his airborne reindeer. As a serious dramatist and man of letters, he was horrified by the immense silliness of the Christmas pantomimeand all the other quaint, unintellectual, sentimental, and indulgent aspects that the season brings us by the sleigh-load. As a devout vegetarian and teetotaler, perhaps it was his physical disgust at the thought of all that roasted animal flesh and booze that excited his bile.
No one has articulated their scorn for Christmas quite as powerfully or wittily as Shaw, but there has always been a very vocal minority who share at least some of his views on the subject and no doubt there always will be. In a strange way, the Christmas moaners have become as much a feature of the season as a turkey dinner or a well-decorated tree. Somehow it wouldnt be quite the same without them.
There is, of course, another type of Christmas extremist, an altogether happier chap for whom the annual winter holiday is a perfectly smashing, absolutely fantastic occasion. He is the Christmas fanatic who will beat you over the head with turkey drumsticks until he pops out of his Santa suit if you so much as whisper a word of weariness about the worlds largest religious festival. He is simply nutty for Nol. (I say he advisedly because these crazy Christmas cavorters are rarely female.) You can spot a Nol Nutter from 100 paces. He will be the one at the Christmas party wearing some combination of the following: (a) a sweater or tie with a pattern of reindeers mating; (b) comedy glasses which squirt snow and then wipe the lenses with built-in wipers; and (c) a revolving bow tie.
In all likelihood, the Nol Nutters front lawnand probably his roofwill be crammed with every imaginable item of Christmas kitsch: an eight-foot-high light-up inflatable snowman, a Santa sleigh with a full set of reindeer and faux presents, several thousand outdoor lights, and a road sign reading Santa Stop Here! Christmas Moron, I think, is the proper scientific term for this species, and Im not sure Id invite him around for a Christmas drink any sooner than I would the whiners in the Shaw camp. To some extent, the Christmas Moron is the very reason why the Shavian moaners come over all gloomy and break out in a rash each December. Remove the Moronand all who encourage and sell to himand you remove a great deal of the reason to dislike Christmas.
Somewhere in between these two groups of extremists who have unwittingly joined forces and done their best to despoil the image of our ancient winter festival, you will find the rest of us: a vast global population of people living in predominantly
Christian cultures for whom Christmas remains, by and large, and if celebrated properly, a truly joyful period of the year.
On a superficial level, Christmas is a time when the ordinary rules of daily life are suspended for a week or two, when the tools of work are laid down and the workplace vacated, when scattered families and old friends gravitate to each others homes to exchange gifts and greetings, when miserable diets and boring exercise programs are abandoned and we can eat and drink ourselves daft, when strangers treat each other with greater kindness and civility, when fireplaces, candles, and decorations bring some warmth and cheer against the cold and bleak landscape outside, when a sense of brotherhood and kindness toward the less fortunate is roused, when television and theater try even harder to entertain us, when fair-weather and lapsed Christians can enjoy going to church without feeling a little uncertain as to whether or not they should be there. For the truly devout among us, the Christmas period is of course a wonderful and highly significant time in the calendar, even without any of the above. Falling where it does, the Christmas holiday period also has the virtue of drawing a line under one year and stirring up promise and hope for another, wiping clean the slate of our experience, and allowing us to start all over again and take another stab at getting our lives right. Christmas also acts as a milestone, or a marker, in our family lives, tracking our development and relationships over the years.
