Christmas starts for me on the 13th of December. This is a recent tradition. Within the last ten years, the date has become a pot that holds all sorts of precious things. St Lucy’s day – lux, lucis, light in the darkness – was midwinter’s day in the old calendar. And this is also the birthday of someone who is lost to this life but who is still with me every day. A time for reflection, memories, peace, stillness, greenery, solemnity. But no matter how much I want it to be a day of bright sunlight and full frost (I think I must be mixing it up with St Agnes’ Eve – ‘Ah, bitter chill it was!’ – because St Lucy’s Day also has a poem, Donne’s ‘Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day’ – ‘It is the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s’), it is almost always pouring with rain and blowing and blowing, and I find that I like that too.
I read somewhere that Russian women used to a carry a ‘perhaps bag’, an extra in case they bought or were given something they needed to stow away. I have a ‘perhaps shelf’. It sits by my bed, filled with favourite books in case I wake in the night with a fever, or needing solace or comfort. None of those things happens very often, and the books there tend to gather dust, but to know that they are there is like knowing there is someone you can call on who will do anything for you and never ask the reason why. Around about St Lucy’s Day, my shelf gets its Christmas stocking(-up).
My Christmas books, like most people’s I suspect, are often about tugging me back to childhood, whether it was mine or one I’ve happily borrowed from a story. If I am feeling brave, I will read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and travel with Will Stanton as the snow descends and he discovers his ancient powers to fight for the good. If I want something quieter, and especially if it is Christmas Eve, then The Children of Green Knowe is what I reach for. Tolly Oldknow travels across the fens to meet his great-grandmother, whose beautiful, ancient house is full of lovely, sad secrets:
‘His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her. She was wearing a soft dress of folded velvet that was as black as a hole in darkness. The room was full of candles in glass candlesticks, and there was candlelight in her ring when she held out her hand to him.’
And if I need something even more soothing, then I sink into Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit’s Christmas, where lost sledges and lost baby hedgehogs will always be found, where Little Grey Rabbit will always fill the stockings ‘with sugar plums and lollipops’ and tie together ‘little sprays of holly’ in the kitchen, and where the woodland creatures will always pad across the snowy fields to marvel at the candlelit tree. ‘It’s Christmas. Eat and drink and warm yourselves.’
To these favourites, I have added later stories that are the opposite of solemn, ones from a time of social silliness and social propriety that remind me why I avoid Christmas gatherings (and not just this year). I’m not sure that Nancy Mitford and Angela Thirkell are exactly fashionable now. Snobbery abounds in both, and diversity is a word neither would have recognised. But you can forgive a lot for a biting wit and a love story that turns out right. My usual ‘perhaps shelf’ has copies of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate that are so read that they are becoming almost unreadable, with cracked spines and pages that drop out if you don’t hold the book at exactly the right angle. Christmas Pudding is one I came to later, when a wonderful friend gave it to me for, you guessed it, Christmas. And though it isn’t as funny as Mitford’s other books, it still has bits that make me burst out laughing. As Lady Bobbin’s Christmas house party gathers (‘Not one moment of its enjoyment was left to chance or the ingenuity of her guests’) and the cocktails flow, misunderstandings and mismatches abound, along with a child who manages, by means of deceit, to eat far too much chocolate (‘The consequences, which were appalling, took place under the dining-room table at a moment when everybody else was busily opening the Christmas post’). Thirkell’s High Rising is similarly light and clever, with dress fabric and social fabric happily mingled. Both books are perfect for the moment that you want them and then, when you’ve finished them, you happily forget every word.
To read on Christmas Day itself, if you have the time, it has to be Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days. This blends together two of my favourite things about Christmas – stories and recipes – and Winterson understands that what matters most is the idea of Christmas. Not how much it costs (‘Look, you could do this with a pot of tea and a piece of toast’). Not how many lists we’ve made (‘Ritual isn’t about multitasking’). But that
‘ritual has an anticipatory relevance – we prepare for it, practically and psychologically; that’s part of its benefit… Ritual is time cut out of time.’
Tolly’s great-grandmother knows it. Little Grey Rabbit knows it. And every year, around St Lucy’s Day, I begin to know it too. This time of year brings ‘A quintessence even from nothingness’.
