‘Those are the three kings,’ he says solemnly.
‘NO! They’re the three wise men!’ said Freya, in a tone that brooks no argument.
‘NO! They are KINGS!’
‘WISE MEN!’
‘KINGS!’
‘MUM!!! FREYA SAYS SHE KNOWS MY STORY BUT IT IS MY STORY!!!’
‘IT IS MY STORY!’
‘It is,’ I say, ‘everyone’s story. It is one of the most famous stories ever told. Nearly everyone you will ever meet will know a little bit about this story.’
Wallace thinks about this for a bit.
‘No. It is just mine. Grandma sent it to me.’
Sometimes I feel like Charlotte in Sex and the City, having one last Christmas tree before she gives it all up for Judaism.
I take the boys to Christmas-morning mass—where my mother is playing the organ—but they don’t know when to sit or stand, or what to do, and I am unaccountably nostalgic for a life I never wanted.
Christmas, as a practising Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church. We were constantly told that Easter was the more important festival, but Easter is relatively speaking, RUBBISH. Yes, there’s a chocolate egg, but six weeks of no sweets plus Stations of the Cross on Wednesdays, Good Friday mass, confession and the Saturday vigil (HOURS long)—the trade-off is, frankly, just not worth it. Though the palms on Palm Sunday are quite good.
Christmas, on the other hand, is just normal amounts of church (except, alas, that totally gruesome year it fell on a Saturday and we couldn’t believe we had to go again the next day), but also school parties, the Blue Peter advent ring, the calendar, going to Woolies to buy your mum a tiny bottle of Heather Spirit cologne (69p), and the glorious bellowing of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’—a song more than a thousand years old—all serving merely to heighten the crazed, overwhelming anticipation that could only be sated by a pack of thirty felt-tip pens, graded by shade, yellow in the middle, and getting to eat lots of very small sausages.
But there is another story too, I know, to tell my little ones; perhaps not quite as immediate, but wonderful in its own way, and it starts:
‘In the northern parts of the world, the winters are long, and cold and dark, and people would get sad and miserable. So they have always in the very depths of winter, from the beginning of recorded time, celebrated light, and life, and the promise of renewal and new birth, just when they most needed cheering up.
‘And they would store food, and eat, and drink and be merry. And, in time, different cultures and creeds passed over the world, and changed and added to the stories about why we were celebrating, and said that perhaps we were celebrating because of a green man, or Mithras, or Sol, or that the Baby Jesus was being born, or because Santa Claus is flying over the world—look here, NASA even tracks him by satellite (www.noradsanta.org).
‘And now, like all the millions of people who lived before us, we too use midwinter to see our family and exchange gifts, and feast and be merry and carry on traditions from our ancestors.’
And they will say, ‘Why?’
And I will say, ‘Because we love you.’
And I will wonder, as I often do, why we love our children—our own children, not a chimera wrapped in swaddling clothes and found in a manger—so very, very much, and wishing, as atheists, that there were slightly more reassuring, less genetic, cold scientific reasons that we could give for why this is so.
And then I will probably just say, ‘Shall we sing “Little Donkey” again?’, knowing that they will immediately rush off to fetch their sweet Christmas bells.
A Child Was Born on Christmas Day
EMERY EMERY
Being born on December 25th, I often found myself quite melancholy around the holidays. As a child it was simply not possible for my family to give me the special attention that most enjoy on the hallowed day of their birth. For children unfortunate enough to share their birthday with Jesus, Christmas is an unholy day of disappointment and loneliness.
Every birthday party I attended was clearly a day set aside specifically to celebrate one person’s most important life event—emerging from deep within their mother’s womb and surviving the ordeal. I had survived, but as it turns out, the Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin on December 25th and they deem it a miracle. How can any kid compete with that?
My grandmother raised me for my first ten years, and she tried her best to make me feel special every Christmas. She would bake a cake just for me. One year it was in the shape of a snowman and another it was Santa’s face. I especially enjoyed the Santa cake because I was allowed to take a knife to good Ol’ Saint Nick. There was a cathartic quality to it. I don’t remember any Jesus cakes, but that would have been nice as well.
Even though Grandma tried to make Christmas just a bit more about me, her efforts always fell short as throngs of family poured into the house to exchange gifts with each other and give me my two-birds-with-one-stone presents. ‘Happy Birthday & Merry Christmas’ was often written on the gift tags. I recall plotting to give people birthday gifts that said ‘Happy Birthday & Merry Christmas’, and I would then make a conscious decision to not give them anything on Christmas Day. But somehow, I just couldn’t go through with it.
During one of my early teenage years, in a conciliatory effort, my mother decided my birthday would be celebrated on the half-year, June 25th. I thought this was a really great idea, and I was insanely excited. I ran to my room and marked it on my calendar. Sadly, Mom was not very good with follow-through and, while she may well have marked a calendar herself, she had forgotten to check it. June came and went without any fanfare. Needless to say, my disappointment grew even more profound.
Every year that passed brought another Christmas that left not just me unfulfilled, but my sister as well. She had been born on Christmas Eve, one day short of a year after I was born. Just as I suffered the unfortunate side-effects of being swept aside to make room for a grand celebration of the birth of Baby Jesus, my sister endured the same profound injustice. Not only would our day not be ours, it would be everyone’s. Both my sister and I had to split what tiny amount of birthday we were able to cobble together.
One particularly lamentable Christmas, my sister received two identically wrapped packages from our mother. She unwrapped one to find a single, fairly cheap earring. As she unwrapped the other box, revealing the matching earring, Mom exclaimed, ‘One is for your birthday and the other is for Christmas!’ I wish I could report that my sister let loose with an impressively long string of absurdly creative expletives, but I have no memory of this particular event. I suspect I was sitting quietly next to the tree attacking the manger with GI-Joe, as was a common, seasonal private practice of mine.
One year, according to my mother, she had done everything she could to give us a classic birthday. She had planned a huge party for my sister and me. She invited all our friends and scheduled the party for December 23rd, which fell on a Saturday that year. While not all my friends were able to be there with holiday travels and family gatherings pre-empting our party, many of our friends were indeed present, and I am told we had a great birthday party.
While I have no doubt that my mother remembers it that way, I do not have any memory of this amazing party. Any psychologist worth his or her weight in Freudian dogma may be able to explain why I would have no memory of it or why my mother would remember it so clearly, but what I know for sure is that I have no recollection of any Christmas that is fond. This party may have happened and my mother may have had an amazing time, but I was not present at any such event.
Through most of my childhood,