Midnight Mass at the Brompton Oratory, 2013. As the celestial music and voices swirled to ever-loftier heights to brush the blue and gold of the dome, the baby began to move inside me. I leant against my husband, overcome with a sense of serenity and calm.
Later, after what would be my last Christmas morning lie-in to date, we would host Christmas in our first home together, a tall Victorian townhouse swathed in greenery and mistletoe. We would serve champagne and goose to the in-laws and my largely estranged father (the last time I would spend Christmas with him, as it turned out), then gently send them on their way with Fortnum’s chocolates and trinkets. We retrenched and regrouped, having established our own Christmas, our own traditions, our own family.
And throughout – even when the goose refused to fit into any of the ovens on the new Rangemaster cooker I had chosen because (as a sucker for that apocryphal tale) it matched Pamela Mitford’s eyes – I tried to hold onto that exalted sense of peace and joy and childlike anticipation I had felt in the Oratory. It sat somewhere in my sternum – slightly above where the baby performed eurythmics to Bach’s Ehre sei Gott.
You see, this delicious excitement and wonder wasn’t something I had felt since a very young child – young enough to be oblivious to my mother’s deep, entrenched unhappiness in the marriage she was unable to escape. Christmas became something to be endured as we children waited – with entirely the wrong type of anticipation – for Mum to go “pop” and suffer another breakdown, for our father to drink too much and the festivities take on the character of a method rehearsal for the new Mike Leigh film – or the Christmas Day episode of EastEnders, depending on your preferred cultural reference.
Later, after my mother’s untimely death, there followed the miserable years of trying to do Christmas for my younger siblings. These were the years when my father, like some monstrous Victorian throwback, ordered my sister and I not to cry in front of him.
And then, once I had largely severed those ties, there was the decade of either working the shifts no one else wanted in the newsroom, or driving around the country to crash other people’s Christmases. I joined in with their traditions, whether that involved the insanity of an annual sea swim or a stuffed Portobello mushroom instead of turkey and pigs-in-blankets in a vegetarian household.
But Christmas, I learned in the Oratory that night, can be recalibrated. Ghosts of Christmas past can be laid to rest, joy can be rekindled, nurtured and kept burning. I have cherry-picked the good parts from my own childhood: we read The Story of Christmas with Margaret Tarrant’s exquisite illustrations, watch The Box of Delights on DVD which – even with its now-clunky special effects – thrills and terrifies my children as it did me, back in 1984. (I am very mean and make them watch an episode a week, as we did then; they sit in slack-jawed horror when I explain there was no such thing as on demand viewing or DVD players.)
But the bitter recriminations of my childhood Christmases have no place here. Yes, there will be shouting – but usually because someone has trodden mud into the house or attacked the ham untidily or left a net of chocolate coins within reach of the puppy, which has been regurgitated on the doormat — not because of deep-seated unhappiness and resentment.
There was shouting, too, last weekend when we attempted to take a jolly Christmas card picture of the children with their donkey, Mouse. The tricksome middle child chose this time to have an existential meltdown (his jodhpurs were “wrong”, apparently). There was not a single usable picture from the 300-plus exposures taken by my husband. We settled for one where a waggling donkey ear was largely obscuring the face of the festive saboteur.
Here, deep in the Norfolk countryside, we are spoilt for Christmas decorations: our greenery comes from the hedgerows rather than the White Company, as it did during the London years. Most of the components of Christmas lunch come from fields within a five-mile radius. And though I miss the elevated splendour of the Oratory’s liturgy, the twinkling candlelit carol service at the otherwise disused North Barningham church is so atmospheric, it may induce me to leave a bottle of homemade damson gin on the doorstep of the neighbour who complains about “horse riders” failing to dismount to pick up after their mounts.
And if I am struggling to find that peace and joy, as I scrawl the umpteenth card to someone I don’t like all that much who, due to the laws of Christmas, will stay on my list until one of us dies, I return to the words of another afficionado of Norfolk churches, John Betjeman:
“No carolling in frosty air… / Can with this single Truth compare – / That God was man in Palestine/ And lives today in Bread and Wine.”
I read this to my squabbling children. They think about it.
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