Because there are people who don’t like Christmas, and I wanted to hear from them too. Rev. Martin Turner gave a Christmas service at London’s Methodist Central Hall in 2014 where he talked about the lost and the lonely. ‘Guilt weighs them down,’ he said, ‘work wears them out, poverty imprisons them, lack of direction confuses them, the struggles of life agitate them, relationships come and go and hurt them, there seems to be no rest from the pressures of life, no still place, no Silent Night, no Holy Night.’ Many of us battle with these things on some level, and it’s all felt more acutely at Christmas. So you’ll find sad stuff in this book, too, things about love, and loss, and dashed hopes, and breaking your arm while trying to stuff a turkey. That kind of thing shouldn’t be glossed over, so I haven’t.
‘I’m not sure this book would have been commissioned in the US,’ said an American friend of mine the other day, ‘because people consider Christmas to be such a precious and magical thing. Americans have awful times at Christmas, too, but the idea that the awkwardness would actually be acknowledged is ridiculous.’ However, ridiculousness is perfectly acceptable in my book (literally), so I’ve tried to acknowledge all the weirdness of the winter holiday, all its idiosyncratic splendour and all the magnificent flaws dotted throughout it like sultanas in a Christmas pudding. I apologise for rather predictably dividing Christmas up into ‘twelve days’ (as we know, Christmas seems to run for more like fifty or sixty), but across those twelve chapters our cultural icons will be saluted, our national customs dissected, and the people who’ve eaten all the turkey and lived to tell the tale will tell us those tales. Tidings of discomfort, tidings of joy.
Dawn: I love Christmas, I love birthdays. I get more excited about watching people open their presents than they do.
Director: You don’t seem to have bought much, Lee?
Lee: No, I don’t buy into it. It’s a con. What I usually say to Dawn is work out what she’s spent on me, and take it out of my wallet.
The Office, Christmas 2003
Nothing says ‘I love you’ like eighteen stock cubes in a limited-edition tin. It may not seem that way when you unwrap it and wonder why you’ve been earmarked as the perfect recipient of some dehydrated broth, but you have to remember that gift giving doesn’t come naturally to everyone. The combination of an obligation to buy presents along with a lack of imagination and an immovable Christmas Eve deadline results in high-pressure situations, with people getting shower mats they don’t want and being expected to show gratitude for them. The random selection of items that pile up under the average British Christmas tree is testament to our erratic emotional intelligence; we can be pretty good at giving the right things, but where we truly excel is giving completely the wrong things and then being told in passive-aggressive style not to worry about it because ‘it’s the thought that counts’, when it evidently isn’t.
We’ve been giving gifts at Christmas for many years. The recipients inevitably give us gifts in return, and so the following year we have to give them gifts again, and so it continues, for ever, in what French sociologist Marcel Mauss referred to as a ‘self-perpetuating system of reciprocity’, but in French. The whole thing has now escalated to a point where a truly desperate person can (and will) spend a meagre sum on an ‘I’m A Twat’ mug for their great-uncle. This is something that Dickens’s Ghost Of Christmas Future could never have foreseen.
In 1996, a Canadian academic called Russell Belk came up with six characteristics of the perfect gift, and it’s worth listing them here, if only to observe how few of those boxes are ticked by an ‘I’m A Twat’ mug:
1. The giver makes an extraordinary sacrifice.
2. The giver wishes solely to please the recipient.
3. The gift is a luxury.
4. The gift is something uniquely appropriate to the recipient.
5. The recipient is surprised by the gift.2
6. The recipient desired the gift and is delighted by it.
Number four is critical. Choosing a gift that’s carefully tailored to the needs and wishes of a friend or relative requires levels of insight and empathy that are beyond many of us, and that’s where luxury bath salts come in. But for those who feel embarrassed every time they buy luxury bath salts, inspiration can be sought from businesses such as The Present Finder, set up in 2000 by Mark Ashley Miller. ‘I always enjoyed finding unusual things for people,’ he said to me, ‘and I’d like to think that I’m good at it. For example, my wife likes to wash her hair every other day, but she can never remember whether she washed her hair the previous day or not. So last year I got her a personalised gift, Fiona’s Hair Wash Day, which she can put up in the shower and move a token along each day so she knows if she washed it or not. She uses it every day; it’s really useful, and it’s unusual. It ticks all the boxes.’
“I haven’t a clue which one of these he might like.”
Whatever skill it might take to come up with something as spine-chillingly practical as Fiona’s Hair Wash Day, I don’t have it. I’m rarely able to detect a need that someone has and then satisfy it with something clever tied up with ribbons. I’ve had a couple of brilliant flashes of inspiration in my time, but only a couple, and my persistent inability to think of decent gifts for others is mirrored by a failure to come up with ideas for things I want for myself. Every year my mum asks me and I never know what to say; one year I remember her ringing me for the fourth time with a note of desperation in her voice and saying, ‘Cutlery?’ (The threat of cutlery, or worse, ‘surprises’, forced me to come up with some ideas which, in retrospect, probably weren’t as good as cutlery or ‘surprises’.) This trait is shared by many people, and particularly men, according to Mark. ‘Everyone seems to struggle with buying things for men,’ he says, ‘because typically a man says, “I don’t need anything, and if I did want something I’d buy it myself.”’
Blackburn, Christmas 1988
One Christmas I bought my dad a Remington Fuzz Away. Not unusually, it was very hard to buy presents for him, but he absolutely adored this thing. He used it on all his shirts, other people’s clothing, furniture. He would look you over, notice any pilling on the fabric, and ask if you wanted him to remove it. He told everyone about the Fuzz Away and used it until it fell apart, and then he worked out how to hold it together so it still functioned. I never saw him as keen about anything, ever, let alone a Christmas gift.
S. S.
In 2008, a company called Life of Jay responded to the apathetic shrugs of British men in the lead-up to Christmas with a product called Nothing, consisting of a clear Perspex ball full of air. At a stroke, the company fulfilled the specifically stated wishes of several thousand men; they asked for nothing, and they received Nothing in return. Nothing (or ‘Nothing’) wasn’t what they really wanted, of course – but it’s their own fault for never expressing any delight at small things over the course of the year, and instead developing secret desires for ridiculously big things like yachts, or expensive Bang & Olufsen speakers