Christmas doesn’t bring out the sanity in me. I like total immersion. I practically stud myself with cloves. No cereal packet goes undecorated. Punchlines like Frankincense Sinatra abound. I go all out for Christmas both in theory and in practice. The Christmas tree’s branches become my autobiography, crammed with ornaments dating back 40 years. I shop with the belief that good presents transform people’s lives. Emotions come at me in rapid currents: half the year’s turnover of feelings in 10 days. If I don’t have at least tonsillitis on Boxing Day – sharp scissors at the back of the throat – there is the sense I haven’t tried.
When I was little and fretful and a bit forlorn, Christmas came to my rescue without fail. It wasn’t the world as it was but the world as it should be: the colour of things turned to the highest setting, shimmering with promise and possibilities. There were rewards for good deeds and hard times, gifts that would lighten and safeguard the future, mountains of food, on white plates with green dragons, with overeating – my weakness then – a requirement, not a crime. Chocolate money and tangerines for breakfast; pudding served with the heavenly quartet of brandy butter, cream, custard and ice-cream. My mother was a single parent to five children. Our circumstances were straitened in ordinary times. But at Christmas her best friend, Anne, and her husband intervened, taking us in and filling us up to the brim. There were towers of presents taller than I was. Donkeys called Sir Isaac and Josephine. I felt like the people on the Quality Street tin. I was so happy, the comfort and joy remaining in my system for months and months…
When it comes to Christmas I’m feudal in my loyalty. I won’t hear a word against it and when people talk it down I feel a spur to violence. Yet as each year passes I can’t always achieve the heights I crave. I want the sharp frenzy of old that is one part sherbet, two parts falling in love and three parts having your stitches removed; but the feeling I get is closer to winning the red-wine vinegar in the school tombola. I give Christmas my all. I wind the banisters with spruce and red satin. I make three kinds of stuffing and at least four sauces. I plant tubs of paperwhites, dust the mantel with fake snow, convince myself that stilton and fruitcake make a sensible sandwich, design a placement for the parcels in the stockings creating wild crescendos interspersed with sensible lulls. I pour capfuls of pine essence into the bath, emerging invigorated with queasy Hulk-hued limbs. I watch Meet Me in St Louis and On the Town on a loop, trying to lasso the perfect mood as I wrap. I’m not complaining, it’s my honour to do these things. And yet the mood can be harder to pin down than a cloud. It comes when it wants. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
I don’t need Christmas to rescue me any more – perhaps that’s the problem. I’m no longer a huddle of needs to be scooped. The result is there’s a measure of estrangement between me and Christmas now. We’ll never be to each other what we once were. Sometimes I feel like a chapter in an earnest (s)elf-help volume, entitled Women Who Love Christmas Too Much.
Some years I feel Christmas itself rolling its eyes at me, embarrassed by the lengths to which I routinely go. “She won’t be told,” it shakes its head. Perhaps elves at the University of Alaska like to research strange cases: “She needs to dial it down,” do they conclude, pointy-chinned? “I mean, who is she actually doing it for?” But in my mind Christmas’s allure and glamour are irresistible. Christmas shimmers into view like a 1970s stunt motorcyclist, fresh from soaring over 22 buses, and ambles over with toothy grin and beseeching eyes, shaking out its curls, and I know I should resist, my resolve is high and all I need to do is turn away politely, because I’m not going to put myself through it again this year. I’ll embrace a low-key approach and cut corners and simply aim for warm soft jolly calm. But before I know it I’m up in the small hours, melting Fox’s glacier fruits in a double boiler to make stained glass windows for the gingerbread house.
Forget all your nonsense and just think of little children, people chide me, but I’m not the only person who finds the season unwieldy. I know citizens of six years old who feel mournful that Christmas doesn’t make them feel as it did when they were four.
How to let none of this infect the Christmas dinner? Christmas cooking can bring out the worst in us, certainly. A friend came into the kitchen and asked her brother-in-law what she could do to help. “I’ll tell you what you can do, you can fuck off,” he said. It’s good to keep the cascades of emotion out of the saucepans. No one wants their parsnip puree garnished with regret, or sorrows in blankets or wry potatoes. Jokes help, of course, they always do. Katharine Hepburn said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that he gave her class and she gave him sex appeal, and I’ve sometimes wondered whether the same could be said of chestnuts with sprouts. (It’s a stretch.)
The danger with Christmas cooking is the stakes are so high. Food and love are inextricably linked, but never more so than at Christmas time. It’s the top-heavy equations that tip people over. We all know a good square meal has the power to raise the spirits immeasurably. By natural extension it’s hard not to believe that a spectacular Christmas dinner might just reward and compensate the family for all the difficulties of the passing year. This is doubly true this Christmas when so many of us couldn’t be together last time. Christmas as medicine, salve and suite of medals seems more necessary than ever.
It doesn’t help that we look to Christmas to measure how we’re doing. It marks a reckoning of the family’s successes and strengths, its compassion and compatibility, its basic fitness as an institution. How does it treat its weakest members? How quickly can its conflicts be resolved? And most painful of all, how do we bear the fact that not everyone is still with us? The misery of the empty chairs. It’s natural to want to pour a bit of Mum out for everyone with the gravy, but where’s the recipe for that? And we’re seeking profound consolation from bread sauce and red cabbage? In that case it had better be exceptional. Before you know it you’re not cooking so much as offering yourself as sacrifice.
And yet, the provision of a splendid Christmas dinner in tough times is always a heroic act. Single people who allocated themselves all the trimmings last year, when Christmas was cancelled, had good cause for pride. It stood for something. Hope, I think. Even if it felt like rearranging yule logs on the deck of the Titanic.
In my latest novel Loved and Missed a devoted mother invites her estranged daughter over for lunch on 25 December, but the daughter will only agree to a walk. The mother wants a park with swans and a bandstand – it’s Christmas! – but the daughter suggests a littered roadside strip of green. Undeterred by the dearth of cheer the mother holds her nerve and unpacks the Christmas dinner on a park bench, why not? “I got my courage up and spread three red-checked dishcloths on the old bench, placed some gold paper plates in a triangle, unwrapped the turkey sandwiches I had made, the meat half white, half brown, still warm, the butter glistening. I had chestnut stuffing wrapped in foil and I crumbled it over the meat, smeared on cranberry sauce from a coffee jar with the back of a spoon. I set down a paper cup full of sprouts on the bench. My hand was shaking. “Christmas vitamins,” I mumbled wryly, but they looked slightly fraudulent, as though they might have been pretending … I had a box of six crackers with robins on them in a carrier and I laid two next to each plate. I had forgotten the paper napkins with the holly sprigs. I propped a tall red candle in an eggcup and lit the wick, sheltering it with the curve of my hand, the flame hot on my fingers until the fucking wind blew it out.”
No one says anything. Almost nothing is eaten. The meal almost takes on notes of a sacrament.
When I have fears that Christmas will undo me I sometimes reread James Joyce’s short story The Dead. It captures the power a meal has to redress things, almost as though a big white cloth might be spread over difficulties, not to hide them, but as a way of asserting the value of harmony, order and plenty, whatever harsh or sad things may come after or before. The idea that things can be both strict and lavish appeals to me hugely – a good spread should call out to be captured in oils. In Joyce’s magnificent tale, the fat brown goose sits at one end of the table and at the other “on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley lay a great ham … peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam…”
I love the seriousness of this table. It is rare to see a feast that is as dignified as a fast. After the great pudding, a whole subsidiary course of “raisins and almonds and figs and apples and oranges and chocolates and sweets” follows. I always think a festive meal should have a series of false endings as though the table itself keeps calling out, “Encore!”
The first Christmas dinner I cooked was when I was 28, newly married, and a grown-up life had landed on my head. I had 18 to cook for and new saucepans in descending sizes, but the whole day was cauterised by two strains of sadness: one brother in prison, the other in hospital. I felt the pressure mounting; streams of anxious calculations. It was clear to me that if only my roast potatoes were crisp enough, golden enough, fluffy enough, they would take the pain away for everyone.
The funny thing was, they did a little bit.
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
