Christmas tales 2007: our favourite writers rant, reflect and reminisce

We spent every Christmas morning, along with a gathering of local families, at the home of our closest friends, who also happened to be Jews, more religious than us, but with a bigger tree and better presents (every family finds their own compromise). The local group was a cosmopolitan mix of Jewish, Christian and Asian, and the Christmas- morning gatherings continued for almost 20 years, eventually becoming the once-annual contact point for childhood friendships that had otherwise faded to nothing.

It was for this, more than anything, that I looked forward to Christmas – the coming together of the community I was brought up in, one day a year, in the house of a family that had been part of my life since babyhood. That family recently left the area, and my old friends these days mostly have children, and other places to go on Christmas Day. I now have a four-year-old son of my own, who has been looking forward to Christmas since August, and I enjoy his enjoyment of it. But when he's a teenager, I hope we'll be going for a Chinese.

William Sutcliffe's new novel, 'Whatever Makes You Happy', will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2008'

The Letrasetter

By Julie Myerson

Christmas 1986, and in my job as a publicist at the National Theatre I was working on the early evening Platform Performances (the shows that go on before the main show). For several months I'd been working with a young assistant director who'd written and directed a couple of these. I didn't know him well, but the little I knew, I didn't like. He was extremely annoying – a bossy perfectionist whose imperious manner verged on rude. Not only that, but he was critical of my Letrasetting. In those pre-computer days, I had to design and create each A4-sized poster single-handedly at my desk, then run them off on the photocopier. He had the cheek to ask me to redo one of his because the title words weren't quite perfectly straight.

But now it was the holiday season, the evening of 23 December, and I was in the Green Room. The place was packed and everyone was drinking – next day the theatre would be closed and, as each show came down, actors and staff were off home to places up and down the country. I don't remember who I was sitting with that evening. All I know is that once whoever I was talking to had gone, I found myself next to the annoying young assistant director and it would have been impolite not to talk to him. I remember the exact corner of the room that we were sitting in – the angle of the seats, the distance from the bar. I remember tinsel and lights and perhaps a Christmas tree, and the haze of loud faces and voices all around us. And the way they all seemed to dim and slip away as we talked.

He had paint in his hair and he looked exhausted. He was eating a stale-looking cheese sandwich, gobbling it down much too fast as theatre people do. He told me that he'd been married briefly but it didn't work out. That his father had just died after a long, sad illness. That he'd been trying to decorate his house, painting the walls late at night after the theatre and he didn't think he'd ever get it finished. He told me he had two kittens at home – that two cats was better than one if you were out all day, because they kept each other company. I don't know what I told him. All I know is that two hours later we were still there and we knew each other's life stories and I'd changed my mind about him completely.

He asked me if I'd like to go and get something to eat. I told him I'd love to but I couldn't – I was having dinner with an actor (an actor we, in fact, both knew) and had to meet him soon, when his musical in the West End came down. He shrugged and said in that case, he'd drive me there.

It was about 10 o'clock, a raw, cold evening – little drifty flakes of snow squeezing themselves out of a black sky. We got in his car and he drove me to my date. The actor wasn't my boyfriend. He was just part of the fun I'd been grimly forcing myself to have ever since someone I'd loved a lot had broken my heart. And if this had been a movie, I'd have probably stood the actor up, left him waiting in the cold outside the Duke of York's, and allowed the evening to take me wherever it would. But I didn't. I was a good girl and I stuck to my plan. The young assistant director – who now felt like an intimate friend – stopped the car and stared at the steering wheel.

"Happy Christmas then," he said.

"Happy Christmas." I kissed him on the cheek. Just before he drove away, he rolled down the window.

"Come round for dinner some time after Christmas!" he shouted.

"OK," I said.

After Christmas, he smiled at me a couple of times in the lift, but said nothing. I waited for an invitation but none came. Finally, catching him lingering at the photocopier outside my office without anything to copy, I reminded him of what he'd promised. "Come tomorrow," he said straightaway.

I don't know what date it was – a Friday some time in early January 1987 – but I know the snow was thick and deep in Clapham that night. It had started snowing in the afternoon and hadn't stopped. As I walked up that long, lamplit street to the young assistant director's small, half-decorated terraced house, snow squeaking under my boots, I was stupidly imagining there might be other people there at dinner. But I was wrong. I was the only guest. Just him and me and the two kittens. And as he opened the door and I went in, I remember the feeling of walking straight into another life, and in a way, I was. The life I live now.

A few years and three babies later, he gave me a present. It was a framed copy of one of the posters I'd Letrasetted for his shows. It was completely embarrassing. I couldn't believe the crudeness of it. The photocopier had clearly been low on ink that day. And the lettering was just all over the place.

Julie Myerson's novel 'Out of Breath' will be published by Cape in February 2008

Have you seen our chicken?

By Jim Crace

If it's roughly 2pm on Christmas Day and the roast is almost ready to be served, then you can guarantee that yet again I will emerge none too briefly through the smog of sprout steam to stand at the kitchen door and bore my famished family with the parable of the disappearing chicken.

It was Christmas 1952. I was just a kid, overexcited by that year's present of a model, gold Coronation coach and a full Colour Party of Coldstream Guards, only two inches tall but equipped with rifles, flags and detachable plastic busbies. Throughout that morning, I had arranged them marching across the lino of our flat on the Pilgrim estate in Enfield, north London; I'd had them laying siege to last year's plywood castle; I'd had them marching in the lavatory towards the Queen's enthronement underneath the bath. So I was reluctant to abandon these battles and parades (and my sling of chocolate coins) to go across the entry for our usual Christmas-morning drink with the Bancrofts.

Charley Crace, my admirably taciturn dad, had already made his escape, of course. He was socially ham-fisted, and so had done us all a favour by rushing off to his allotment to pick the sprouts and curly kale. Couldn't I be taciturn, as well, and stay at home? But my mother, Jane, made it clear I had no choice. "Be neighbourly. Wipe your face," she said, "while I check the chicken and put the potatoes round." Ever the caterer; there was nothing she enjoyed more than feeding us. I could not imagine a Christmas roast prepared more lovingly than hers.

Except this year, I was dreading lunch. I knew that chicken personally. It was Ferdinand, north London's quietest cockerel . He had been pecking round the wire cold-frame in our shared garden for two years, growing fat and complacent on our leftovers. He had been, therefore, an uncomplaining bird, and cunning, possibly, determined to survive. He'd never upset our neighbours with any doodle-doos. He'd never pecked aggressively. In fact, he let me and my older brother, Richard (pictured with me, right), stroke and cuddle him. We loved and fed him like a dog.

And so, although he'd been fattened originally for the 1951 Christmas table, it had been no surprise when Dad, armed with a length of twine, a hatchet, a knife and a shaking hand, chickened out as it were and granted Ferdinand a stay of execution until 1952. He told our neighbours that we'd reprieved Ferdie for the eggs. "And for the milk," I used to add. So, for another year, our dinner pecked around our garden, living it up on Mum's best food. We'd bought him in the first place to save money. But Ferdinand – too plump to move far, too spoilt to make do with toast crusts and dried porridge – was costing us a fortune by now. I used to raid the fridge for him, behind Mum's back. This cockerel was very fond of corned beef, I discovered by experiment, and slices of tongue. He was not fond of tinned salmon or pickles.

Now 12 months on, as Ferdinand's second Christmas approached, Dad worked hard to feel ashamed of his previous soft-heartedness – this was only a table bird, after all – and finally plucked up courage. One late December morning when we were at school, he stepped into the cold frame with a sack and took Christmas dinner – protesting noisily for once – down to the shops where Ansell the butcher was happy – for half a crown – to do what Dad could not. By the time we got home Ferdinand was slaughtered, plucked, trussed and gibleted, and sitting cross-legged in the fridge.

The Bancrofts' Christmas present for me that year was a white Dinky ambulance. I'd hoped for a police car or a fire engine or at least a khaki military ambulance with a red cross on its side. "It can go behind the Coronation coach," I said, putting a brave face on my disappointment. "It can have the dead king inside." My successful joke only partly lifted my mood. I'd been dragged from my toys and my chocolate, I'd been forced to wipe my face, I had been given the world's worst Dinky – and Ferdinand, dear Ferdinand, was crisping up for lunch.

I cheered up, though, when we got home. Again Mum checked to see how dinner was getting on. I can remember it exactly: the Cannon cooker leaking smoke, my mother opening the mottled blue-enamel door in her new oven gloves (my uninspired gift), her cry of baffled disbelief when she discovered that Ferdinand had disappeared – and that he'd taken all the spuds, the stuffing and the roasting tin along with him. Dad was at the door by now, with his trug of winter greens. My parents knelt down on the kitchen floor and peered in at the oven flames. They even checked the oven with a torch, as if the half-cooked bird could have found a hiding place. But no – glad tidings of great joy – Ferdinand had definitely gone. We wouldn't have to eat our pet. Hosanna in excelsior.

Now, losing Christmas dinner was no small matter, especially in a one-income working- class family such as ours. A show of anger would not have been out of place, or a 999 call. Some tears, even. This was the meanest of crimes. But all my father did was laugh and wash the sprouts. And all my mother said was, "Never mind." She only wished that whoever it was that had walked in through our never-bolted door, whoever it was who had risked their fingertips to steal our Christmas dinner, and carry it piping hot away from the flats, really needed it: "I hope it's gone to someone poor."

An image almost out of Dickens came to me – still comes to me, whenever I remember Christmas 1952: it's Ferdinand and our potatoes, lit by candlelight, surrounded by a throng of street urchins, about to have their first good meal. They're holding wooden spoons. Their mouths are watering. Oh, how I loved my Mum and Dad right then. How proud I was of them for their calmness and their charity. How I love them now – though both are dead – when Christmas comes and I can tell my family, as we prepare to eat, about the darling cockerel and what he signifies.

What did we eat that day? I hardly want to tell you, because it weakens everything I've told you up to now, everything except the love I felt. "I've got a bit of cold tongue," Mum suggested finally. "That'll have to do." Sprouts, curly kale and tongue. She went to get it from our big gas fridge. And once again, I heard her cry of baffled disbelief. We thought the fridge had been burgled, too. But, no, she'd discovered Ferdinand. "Be neighbourly," she'd said, as we'd prepared to go into the Bancroft's flat, an hour previously. "Wipe your face, while I check the chicken and put the potatoes round." She'd checked the chicken, yes. She'd put in the spuds. But then – to borrow Gerard Hoffnung's celebrated phrase – she "must have lost her presence of mind" and confused the oven with the fridge.

We all sat round our galvanised kitchen table not quite sure if our enjoyment had been saved or squandered, whether we would feel mean or generous to tuck into our meal. We certainly were smiling, though. And then I can't remember anything. Dad must have finally taken a knife to Ferdinand and filled our plates. My brother says he can't "recall the eating". Nor can I.

Jim Crace's 'The Pesthouse' (Picador) is out now

Comfort, joy and 'Kill Bill'

By Joanne Harris

Christmas. Each year I await it with dread. Bad light, grey weather, the mounting pressure of expectation, the promise of tensions within the family, the garishness of the shop displays, the return of Phil Spector's Christmas Album and the tawdriness of the advertising world, promising us the magic of Christmas in such questionable forms as: plastic toys, frozen prawns, cushions, air freshener, CDs and gardening implements – and all for low, low prices!

And this is all supposed to be fun? The magic of Christmas? Don't make me laugh. Never has magic been so debased. Never has the gulf between reality and dream been so cruelly exposed. And as someone who prefers a small gathering of friends to a large, formal dinner party, Christmas Day can be a disappointment, too often dominated by the inevitable stress and bickering that comes of bringing together too many family members with too much bottled Christmas cheer...

The truth is, we do these things because we feel we must. And to be obliged to do anything – even something we enjoy – is to take away much of its charm. I like the traditions of Christmas. I like giving presents; I like to cook; I like to see my family and friends. But I also like spontaneity; I like to feel I have a choice. Which is why I find myself, year after year, wishing I could do something else.

Last year, Christmas was cancelled. It wasn't a deliberate move, but a combination of tight deadlines, bad planning and crises within the family meant that, for the first time in over a decade, nothing was organised that year, and the three of us – my husband Kevin, our daughter Anouchka and I – spent Christmas Day at home, alone. Several well-meaning people commented that it must have been "rather grim". In fact, it was the best Christmas that I can ever remember.

I had been working hard for the past four months, trying to finish my new book on time. It still wasn't finished; and I'd been regretting the promise I'd made to my publishers that it would be ready by January. All my energy went into work; I could hardly remember what it was like to take time out with my family. But I'd promised Anouchka that at least we'd have Christmas Day together, and that this year we'd do whatever she liked.

I just want it to be fun, she said.

Fun? OK. I can live with that.

I got up early that morning and worked until the others got up. Then I put my laptop away and made cups of tea for everyone. We all sat around the tree – the tree is my favourite part of Christmas – and opened our presents to each other. There weren't many, but they were well-chosen – besides, I'd rather have a single present that means something to me than something expensive and meaningless, bought in haste, to impress. Then Anouchka made lunch – Mexican enchiladas, which she'd just learnt how to make in cookery that term – and a big dish of nachos and cheese, which we ate in front of the TV, like slobs, swigging Coke out of the can, watching Kill Bill on DVD (it is, for some reason, Anouchka's comfort movie). Then we played a game of table football before going back for Kill Bill 2 – and if all of this sounds very dull and ordinary, then maybe that's the point. Maybe we should face the possibility that the idea of the ready-made, one-Christmas-fits-all doesn't work for everyone.

We didn't see anyone that day. We had no expectations. Everything was spontaneous. There wasn't a single moment of stress. We laughed like crazy all afternoon – though I couldn't tell you what about. And there was definitely something in the air – call it magic if you like – because that was the happiest Christmas that any of us could remember, which makes me think that perhaps, like luck, magic is something we can make for ourselves. It isn't something you can buy. It doesn't come as standard. And you don't need to plan, or to overspend, or to wrack your brains trying to come up with some extraordinary way to celebrate. Because sometimes it's the little things that bring us the greatest pleasure. That's why, once again this year, we'll be making up Christmas as we go along. It may be nothing like last year. It may even be better. And if it's not, at least we'll be doing it ourselves. And if it's magic, so much the better. If not, I'll settle for just having fun.

Joanne Harris's latest novel is 'The Lollipop Shoes' (Doubleday)

Cold coming, cold going

By Ian Duhig

During my first Christmas in Leeds after moving here in 1974, friends and I held an informal contest to find the most verbally brutal line from the city's notoriously cutting barmaids. My own entry (from Sweaty Betty of The Pub With No Name) was deemed too poetic, her description of term-time's ubiquitous scent of patchouli-over-damp-Afghan-coat as "just like freshly turned graves". The victor worked in Gipton's Brown Hare, an area where Rottweilers go around in pairs. Her entrant had visited this establishment during the season of good will and, detecting an atmosphere as icy inside as out, had attempted to break it with the neutral remark, "Looks like being a cold Christmas again!" Winningly, she replied, "Well, it's not my fucking fault." '

Despite the profanity, there are echoes of Leeds' Puritan heritage in her response, which is from the same springs as the shoemender's to John Taylor in 1646 when he made a similarly mild comment on the time of year, he reported that he was told "...it was pitty that ever Christmas was borne, and that I was a Papist, and an Idolatrous Brat of the Beast" and so on. Incomers sometimes think such hostility encountered in Yorkshire is reserved for them, but once you learn a little of their language and ways you realise they let each other have it just as readily. One soft soul, slipping too easily into the familiar "thee" (cf French "tu") was slapped down with: "Don't tha 'thee-tha' me; tha 'thee-tha's them as 'thee-tha's thee." In Meanwood, where poet and translator from the Irish, Robin Flower, was born, the Working Men's Club has a sign at its urinal specifying the minimum distance men should keep apart. This is not an institution frequented by tourists.

With mythering outer as well as inner weather, local coldness became mythic. Resident here, the poet Martin Bell wrote, invoking Marlowe: "Leeds is Hell, nor am I out of it!" Never in it, Patrick Kavanagh (author of the schmaltzy "A Christmas Childhood") felt able to describe despair as "like winter alone in Leeds". It is certainly a place more for a Yeatsian withering into the truth, but I remember my mother telling me that one of the things she was happiest to leave behind in Ireland when the family emigrated was her fellow-villagers' superficial friendliness which often masked nosy intrusions. She often translated for me her favourite Irish proverb into "The truth is bitter", should I complain when she told me I'd a belly like a cow, looked like I'd put my clothes on with a pitchfork, couldn't carry a tune in a wheelbarrow or what have you. We will be toasting her memory with sparkling vitriol on Christmas Day as I cut us all another slice of Tiny Tim, before we sit down to replay the videos of Richard Dawkins setting about the spiritual arguments of some hapless cleric like the Rue Morgue ape with Occam's razor.

But the weather isn't what it used to be. Autumns have grown long and gaudy. Snow and ice are rare. Winds like Meanwood skinners' knives are balmy zephyrs. Dante in his Purgatorio mentions "giorni di merla" ("blackbird days") in January when, according to the Lombardy proverb, that stupid creature sings out at the first flash of New Year sun, "Lord, I fear Thee no longer: spring is come!" Global warming has made the blackbird's song sound louder and less stupid every year. Soon we'll be living in some kind of bloody Paradiso, our white rose become the Rosa Candida. What a thought! God bless us every one.

Ian Duhig's latest poetry collection is 'The Speed of Dark' (Picador)

A Christmas visitor

By Matt Thorne

I spent last Christmas at home with my wife, my son, my brother-in-law and my friend, Bob. We'd enjoyed Christmas lunch, listened to a selection of novelty Christmas CDs and were sitting down to watch a DVD of 'R Xmas, Abel (Driller Killer) Ferrara's 2001 film about a yuppie coke-dealing couple who have the misfortune to run into Ice-T on Christmas Day, when the doorbell rang.

I went downstairs and found a Hasidic Jewish man on my doorstep. We live in an area populated by a high number of Hasidim, and I have often found myself being invited into Jewish homes during the Sabbath to turn on their lights and ovens, as they are forbidden from doing anything that might count as physical labour during this period. But this was the first time anyone had come to my home.

He was standing shyly by the wall. He had very black hair, a pair of thick glasses and the mandatory long black jacket and hat. "I'm sorry to disturb you," he said, "but I have a somewhat strange request. It is one of your special holidays today, I believe?"

"Christmas."

"Yes," he said, "Christmas. I have always wanted to witness what goes on in your homes on this day."

"OK," I told him, "come in, I'll show you."

He seemed surprised. "Really?"

"Of course."

I took him upstairs. Bob and my brother-in-law sat up immediately when the man entered our lounge. They looked as shocked as if I'd brought Henry VIII into our house. I picked up the remote-control and turned off the television.

"You have a tree," the Hasidic Jewish man said.

"Yes. We decorate it, that's part of Christmas."

He nodded and touched his beard. "What else is part of Christmas?"

"Well, we eat turkey, we give each other presents..."

"And what are you celebrating?"

"Um... family, friendship..."

"The birth of Christ," said my wife.

"Ah, him," he said. "He was one of ours."

I picked up a tray of mince pies and offered one to him. He shook his head.

"Would you like a drink?"

"No, thank you."

"Well, perhaps you'd like to sit with us? We're all about to watch a film on television."

"No," he said, "that's enough. Thank you."

I showed him out. As he was about to leave he said to me, "So you are spending this festival with your wife, your son, and some friends?"

"Yes."

"That's unusual for your lot, isn't it?"

"My lot?"

"Christians."

I didn't know what to say. He thanked me and started walking down the street. I went back upstairs. Bob was wearing a cowboy hat that had come as an accessory with my son's Christmas present: a singing rocking horse. He looked at me and asked, "How much did you pay him to do that?"

"I knew you'd think that. But I didn't, I promise. You heard the doorbell."

"Why did you let him in?"

"I had to. What if it was some sort of test? Besides, he seemed nice enough."

"What kind of description was that about Christmas? 'We eat turkey, we give each other presents...'" he mocked.

"What would you have said?"

"I don't know, how about, 'We pull Christmas crackers, we make decorations, we sing carols, we drink mulled wine,'" he had a flash of inspiration, "you could've told him about Father Christmas."

"Was that Father Christmas?" my son asked.

"No," I said, "it wasn't Father Christmas."

The next day we had lunch at our neighbours' house. We live in a friendly street where there are lots of people with children and there were three or four small families sitting round the table. After we finished up the various leftovers from all our Christmas meals, one of our neighbours said, "The strangest thing happened yesterday, a Hasidic Jewish man came to our door and said he wanted to find out about Christmas."

"Us too," said another couple, and in a few moments we'd established that he'd gone to nearly every house in the street. He hadn't accepted food or drink at anyone's homes, and hadn't stayed more than five minutes at anyone's place, aside from some slightly older neighbours whose drunken friend had bullied him into a theological argument.

"He must have been young," said my neighbour, "and brave, to do something like that."

"I'm glad he did," I said, "it made our Christmas."

I never saw him again, and this year we're spending Christmas with my wife's parents. I don't know if he understood the meaning of Christmas from going to all the houses on our street, or even if I could explain the meaning of Christmas beyond turkey and presents. But I know that this will remain one of my more memorable Christmasses, even when I've long forgotten the Christmas that my family watched the Rambo trilogy in one go, or the time that my friends rescued me from a miserable day with my divorced parents to take me to watch a band at the only nightclub open on 25 December, or any of the other weird ways I've chosen to celebrate this holiday over the years, and for that I thank him.

Matt Thorne is currently working on a critical study of Prince for Faber

The Surprise Seasonal Quandary

By Sophie Hannah

I find I respond best to an impending Christmas if I regard it as a puzzle: "This has to be the case, and so does this, and so does this, so what combination of circumstances is going to make all these details work together to form a coherent whole?" I plan my crime novels in exactly the same way. There is also (I perhaps shouldn't admit this) as much twisted psychology and as many ulterior motives involved. I once wrote a poem with the refrain line: "Which is worse at Christmas, to visit or to host?" The conclusion I reached this year was that if I visited, I would have less work to do overall, but no lie-ins afforded by extended family members getting up at 6.30am with my children. If, however, I hosted, I could potentially have three or four lie-ins, but I'd also have to cook several meals a day, and change four lots of bedding each time one set of relatives replaced another. This is because, according to unwritten rules, if I'm doing a shedload of catering, it won't be cheeky of me to ask other people to wake up with the kids, whereas if I'm not, then it will. Some of one's nearest and dearest never offer to do the early morning toddler-shift, not under any circumstances, and those are the people who will find in their Christmas stockings this year a copy of The Machinist, a film about a man who is dying because he hasn't slept for years. Trying to make a point? Who, me?

Christmas is a brilliant opportunity to get to know those close to you a bit better. It acts as a showcase for people's true personalities, the ones they might be able to hide quite effectively the rest of the year. Your actions, the way you behave, count for more on this one day than on any other. Everyone's sitting around eating, drinking, unable to escape from one another, focusing on what it's like to spend an entire day in the company of X or Y. Do you want your relatives to say, "Did you see what a fuss she made about nothing? And on Christmas Day, too!"? Or, "Notice how even at Christmas he's incapable of putting a smile on his face."? The basic rule is: if this is what you're like on Christmas Day, then this is what you're like.

In the end, I dealt with it in the most immature and unhealthy way possible: I didn't send my kids to the crθche, but I resented the (as I saw it) political-emotional blackmail so much that I spent months nurturing a grudge and plotting to oust all my significant others in favour of people who were much more right-wing.

This year, the SSQ is a particularly tough one. I haven't yet consulted anyone about it. My daughter Phoebe has been invited to a girls-only party on the day you are reading this. Trouble is, the party is at the home of friends of ours who we normally visit en famille. There are four of them and four of us, and it would not occur to my son Guy that he is any less a friend of the two Cookson girls than Phoebe is. If I tell him that Phoebe's invited to a Christmas party and he isn't, he'll be outraged. To be honest, I don't blame him. If he were older and had reached the "I hate girls" stage, it would be no problem – he wouldn't want to go anyway. But he's only three, and wouldn't understand why suddenly there was a special treat for Phoebe and the two Cookson girls from which he was excluded.

Trouble is, if I don't let Phoebe go to the party because of the random sexist edict, then I'll feel I'm depriving her. So the only option, as far as I can see, is for me to host a lavish kids' Christmas bash on the same day, open to children of all genders. This is what I'm going to do, but I can't help thinking it's a bit of an odd way to arrive at the decision to throw a party. Am I just a nutter, seeing real life as if it's an episode of The Moral Maze, or are other people also forced into behaving weirdly as a result of SSQs?

Sophie Hannah's latest poetry collection is 'Pessimism for Beginners' (Carcanet)'

The festering season champagne

By Mark Simpson

You know that queasy, hungover, fed-up-to-the-gills feeling of not knowing what day of the week it is – or what year? Wondering whether the banks will be open or not and whether you can be bothered to brave the freezing crowds and the thronging fog and exchange those fluffy Bhs slippers you were given by your niece for something more fetching? That sense of quietly increasing secret dread at the imminent approach of another bout of slightly hysterical binge-drinking and smiling at people you'd much rather spit in the eye?

Yes, the festering season is nearly upon us – that fag-end, cold-turkey, limbo-time between Christmas and New Year that cruelly drags out the whole experience, and the year, by another four days and feels like a fortnight of 1970s Sundays.

The sheer numbing tedium and disorientation of the festering season drives people to do crazy things – like accepting invitations to visit friends and relatives you haven't seen for ages, only to remember, too late, that the reason it's been so long is that you don't actually like them. Even worse, some people find themselves spending time with their partners.

The festering season is clearly a major social problem that needs an urgent solution. Shockingly, the major political parties have yet to take this issue seriously – I've checked and can confirm that neither the Conservative, Labour or Lib-Dem manifestos propose legislation to deal with the festering season.

Fortunately, the solution is as clear as the night Good King Wenceslas looked out. What's needed is a Christmas Anschluss: a union of Christmas and New Year. For far too long, Christmas and New Year have been artificially divorced by that demoralising boundary period in between. Soaked in booze and regrets, festooned with goodwill and domestics, they obviously deserve one another. It's time to bring them together.

By moving New Year's Eve to Boxing Day (what is Boxing Day for, anyway?), we can eliminate that date-nibbling, walnut-cracking period spent wondering whether to treat ourselves to another sweet sherry or not. We can all get completely rat-arsed on Christmas Eve and not sober up until New Year's Day. One moment you're putting out milk and mince-pies for Santa, the next you're waking up on someone's sofa with an end-of-the-world hangover, your pants around your head, smelling of candied fruit and vomit. Hello, 2008!

Alternatively – and this happens to be my personal preference – New Year could be run parallel with Christmas. Not only does this shorten the whole experience down to a more humane – and liver-sparing – two days, it gives you the perfect get-out to spare the feelings of those who you don't want to spend either event with, as well as providing those people who just don't like either Christmas or New Year – or both – the opportunity to opt out completely.

"Oh, sorry," you'd say, "I'd love to come to yours and gnaw my leg off with frustration this Christmas but unfortunately I can't – I'm doing New Year this year."

Or, alternatively, "Oh, that's a shame, I'd adore to come out with you and the gang on New Year's Eve and shout 'HAPPY NEW YEAR!!' at strangers so aggressively that I manage to cover them in gob even though they're on the other side of the street, but I've already promised to do Christmas this time."

Mark Simpson is the author of 'Saint Morrissey' (SAF Publishing)

A crack pipe at Christmas

By Sebastian Horsley

They say Christmas is for the kids – and considering just how ghastly the whole thing is and just how much I loathe kids, I would tend to agree.

I must have inherited my festive feelings from Father. Father was not what you would call a religious man. He believed in nothing. It was only sheer indolence that stopped him from being a nihilist. "Easter is cancelled this year," was his annual joke. "They've found the body." Christmas was treated much the same: "Xmas? What's that? A bloody skin disease."

My childhood days were the happiest of my life – which is only a reflection of the misery I have endured since. I grew up in a house riddled with standards of living. High Hall could have accommodated an entire family of Catholics. It was a soaring, rambling red-brick mansion with a maze of rooms to get lost in. At the heart of it all was the great balconied entrance hall. It was here that the sequoia-sized Christmas tree was every year planted, festooned with tinsel and piled with gifts. It was here that my parents and their coterie annually assembled to turn away the local carol-singers, to drink themselves stupid and collapse insentient instead. Yes, every luxury was lavished on me at Christmas: atheism, alcoholism and insanity.

This year will be my 45th Christmas. But how many since childhood can I actually remember? Only two. The first, I spent in Amsterdam alone – I wanted to wake up on Christmas morning in the arms of someone I loved. I checked into the Grand Hotel. When the day dawned, I rose in solitary splendour and prepared myself to dazzle the prettily frost-dusted world. The streets were abandoned. The ice glistened on the canals. Down a side street, two lovers were leaning together and laughing. Away in a backyard a chained dog was yapping. Sparrows scuffled for dropped crumbs on a bridge. Solitude moaned across the city like fog horns over the sea.

But the Salvation Army was open. The true spirit of Christmas lies in people being helped by people – other than me, of course. I joined the small congregation and sang. The service was touching. Men fear loneliness because it opens a glimpse into life's emptiness. But every taut sense thrills when you are alone on a day like this. Every footstep becomes philosophical. Every decision takes on a romantic cast.

I spent the afternoon chained in the arms of a whore. The brothel is a true home to the spiritual. You go there to pray. Stripped of your finery, you step into the holy of holies. You offer yourself up, your beating soul laid bare. On your knees, you discover that virtue and sin can exist in everything. This is the holy prostitution of the human spirit.

The other Christmas which I can remember was spent in company. There was no snow on the streets. But that didn't matter. I had made the preparations. And I was dreaming of a brown Christmas that year. Our presents came gift-wrapped in Cellophane. I and my friend proceeded happily to unwrap them: a sparkling mountain of extremely dangerous drugs.

Our living-room looked like a police narcotics laboratory. We spent the day roasting heroin on an open fire.

Like all creatures with a habit we did nothing. And then we did it again and we looked great not doing it. We shared our day. We slobbered sentimentally. A storm as turbulent as the traditional Christmas argument may have been brewing about us. We may have been utterly at sea. But we were jolly in our lifeboat. We pulled on another Christmas crack pipe together. The cold turkey only came later.

At Christmas we meet ourselves as we really are. That's why it's so hard to bear for the depressed. The day glows like a fire through dimpled cottage windows in an unforgiving season. But for those who can only peep through the curtains, for those who will never be invited in, it only opens even wider that empty gulf of yearning between other people's happiness and your own cold despair.

What about those on the inside? What about those who descend into the bunker of the family? It shouldn't take Christmas for us to recognise that Santa Claus definitely had the right idea. Only visit people once a year – and make sure, while you are at it, that you don't actually meet them.

But aren't we forgetting the true meaning of this day: a joyful celebration of the birth of Jesus? Isn't it strange how the whole world observes Christ's birthday while absolutely nobody observes his beliefs.

Jesus was a great and radical philosopher. Here was a truly autonomous mind; here was someone who was prepared to do his own thinking, no matter what the price. A Jewish thinker enrolling in the school of the Greek cynics, he drew on traditions of outspokenness, shamelessness and unconventionality. He spoke of anarchy, anti-materialism and identification with the poor.

His message, quite simply, was that family and personal property must go. Only then could we have peace on earth and goodwill to all men. So we celebrate Christ's birthday by gathering our families together and stockpiling mountains of possessions to wage war on one another over TV schedules and who will clear up.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? No one made more trouble than this baby. The ass-like cult of Christianity that stands around his manger is the antithesis of the man. Christ was an anti-Christ. He was a true radical.

So do celebrate Christmas, my dears: that season when we remind each other of the birth, 2007 years ago, of a Jewish revolutionary by giving tacky commodities to the children of people we dislike.

Christ came to save us from sin. You might as well make his birth meaningful by committing them. Happy Kiss My Ass.

The joy of darkness

By Michθle Roberts

All through my childhood Nana and Grandpa, my Londoner grandparents, provided memorable feasts in their little semi-detached. They had started married life in Hampstead Garden Suburb, which was designed for working-class families such as themselves. Here, Nana (born in 1899) wrote plays and masques for the local children to perform at May Day festivals. She carried on the tradition with her grandchildren. Music-making also ran in the family: her brother had played the piano to accompany silent films; accordingly, our Christmases included plenty of singing; not only carols but also music-hall songs.

Preparations meant following French- Catholic traditions, too. Mum set up the crib, in a miniature rustic stable made by her French father, on a table near the Christmas tree. A green tree came inside the house and we worshipped it by decorating it. I didn't know the word pagan but I felt it. The crib's little painted plaster figures came from France. An angel, waving a welcoming banner, dangled from the stable roof on a loop of elastic. The three kings, complete with camels, perched on a cabinet on the other side of the front room. Each day, we moved them a little closer to the crib. On Christmas morning Baby Jesus appeared in the crib and, at Epiphany, the kings reached him. Throughout Advent, we opened our calendars, a window a day, and were encouraged by the nuns to prepare for the birth of Jesus with extra prayers, good deeds and a spot of fasting. I don't think we bothered.

If we managed to stay awake on Christmas Eve, after midnight Mass, we heard our parents creeping up the stairs, playing at Santa Claus, my mother shushing my laughing father. Waking in the early morning, shivering pleasurably under our eiderdowns in our unheated bedroom, we opened our stockings, which had magically arrived at the foot of our beds. Such delight: receiving secretly delivered presents in the half-dark; cuddling and stroking them. No one looking on. Not having to be polite. We four children bounced about. The stockings always contained a tangerine in the toe, and some walnuts, plus miniature marzipan vegetables and joints of meat, arranged on silver-covered cardboard plates to look like proper dinners, sent from our French grandparents. Perhaps some cubes of bath salts. (One tiny toy I still have to this day: a rubber doll, two inches high. I tore his clothes off. Still nude, turned into a little household god, he stands on a bookshelf near my computer.) Later in the morning we received our presents from under the tree. In Mum's childhood, this ceremony was called "les ιtrennes". She said it was very formal. In our house it wasn't. I know I liked the stockings best. I liked the dark morning: the whole day still stretching ahead.

The traditional Christmas lunch finished with a dessert of fruit and nuts. Mum taught us French devices. She showed us how to make clementine or tangerine lamps. You cut horizontally round the fruit's middle, just a shallow cut through the skin, then eased the skin off in two halves, leaving one half with a central stem of pith. You cut a small hole in the domed top of the other. You dried the pieces, then moistened the bottom half with oil, lit the oil-soaked wick, put on the cap, and watched the orange glow. Mum also taught us a game with almonds, called Philippine. If, when you cracked one, it contained two kernels, you gave one to your sister. You both ate your nuts. Next morning, the one who first shouted "Philippine" had to be given a present by the other. Dessert also featured mince pies. Their oval shape represented the crib, and the three slashes in the lid the three kings. With luck, a half-crown nestled inside.

Christmas meant a warm darkness I loved. The darkness of midwinter, of our bedroom as we rested after lunch, lying on top of the sheets under our silky eiderdowns, of the front room lit just by the glittering tree, of Nana's sitting-room where we gathered later in the day to play games, with our uncles, aunts and cousins, in front of the red coal fire. After a high tea of shrimps and bread and butter, sticks of celery and Christmas cake, we put on the costumes Nana had sewed for us, crepe-paper-frilled skirts tied with ribbons, and did the dances she taught us. One year the grown-ups had to act a play she had written. Dad, as the moustache-twirling villain, had to snarl at the shrinking heroine, Mum, "What, girl, you dare to thwart me thus?" This became a family catchphrase.

Some of the games disconcerted us. One, "The Pope's Blessing" (definitely invented by the Protestant side of the family), featured the children being brought into the room one by one. While the adults watched, you had to kneel down in front of the effigy of the Pope: my father, wearing a bowler hat, standing on a table draped in a blanket. When you begged for the blessing of the Pope, Dad bent his head and the water in the brim of his bowler gushed down and wetted you and all the adults roared with laughter. Another game involved being blindfolded, picked up, swung about, your head tapped on the ceiling. Rough and tumble carnival, both scary and exciting.

More presents got given out after tea. One year, Dad entered the room dressed up as Santa Claus, driving a sledge (the disguised tea-trolley), drawn by my twin sister and myself in reindeer costumes, which bore a huge snowball (plywood covered with cotton wool) which broke open to reveal gaily wrapped parcels. Then we cousins would roam off upstairs and play games such as Murder in the Dark or Sardines. Bliss.

Michθle Roberts's memoir, 'Paper Houses',is published by Virago

A very special duvet day champagne

By Paul Magrs

In some ways 1981 was my happiest year. I don't know why; I loved being 12.

We had fiercely sticky, fondanty snow-spray that clagged up the tree baubles and the windows when we scraped at it in January. Nothing smelled more like Christmas than that chemical smell of the fake snow. Except the satsumas that came in twists of blue tissue paper, delivered in a box.

On holiday from my first year in the comp, I'd play a little in the snow and then I'd go home to write my novel. Outside, my brother and the ginger twins next door flew about on skates and down hills on black bin bags. When I'd written enough I'd take a leisurely cruise about the cul-de-sacs of our council estate on a Fine Fare shopping trolley.

That winter we put a duvet over the four of us as we sat on the settee. We'd have crisp crumbs all over it and the dog would be lying on the floor, under one corner, getting hairs on it.

"If anyone came round here and saw us all sitting like this, they'd think we were mad." Mam looked along the settee at us. "Or they'd think we were weird."

We'd watch telly all night, the sitcoms, the soaps and the quiz shows. Under the duvet it was drowsy and hot. Our stepdad would be sent to make some tea and we'd have it with crisps and chocolate. Working our ' way through selection boxes and crinkly stockings. Tooth-breaking toffee, vanilla, caramel. Our stepdad sat at one end of the duvet, then it was Mam, then me, then my brother, Mark. We must have all been quite skinny to get on that settee.

My brother was certainly skinny then. In the autumn he'd fallen down the stairs and we'd found him at the bottom, taking an epileptic fit. "You were foaming at the mouth," Mam told him afterwards.

I went knocking on the neighbours' doors. We didn't have a phone. The ginger twins' mother came round and she took one look at Mark and thought he'd died. She rang the doctor for us and that's when we found out he had an actual hole in his heart. I thought, if you had a hole in your heart, all the blood would run through it like water down the plughole.

Mam and Charlie weren't ones for going out to the clubs and pubs. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Mam would say. That was why no one would think us mad or weird for all sitting under a duvet, watching Christmas telly. Because no one would be coming in and seeing us like that. If anyone had knocked at the front door, the duvet would have been whisked away, as would the cups and trays and the bags of crisps. But no one would come knocking at the door. We knew that.

Charlie had a thick beard and a stammer, which meant he never spoke to Mark and me. He'd moved in with us a few years before, in l978. That was in the old house, on the other estate. Now we were in the middle of the estate everyone called the "Black houses" (above). It was easy to get lost. We lived bang in the middle of this maze of black houses.

Charlie sat at one end of the settee, so he could nip out to put the kettle on or take the dog, Duke, for a walk in the dark. It was also because he wouldn't sit next to me or Mark. I think he'd have been uncomfortable, so Mam sat between us. In my page-a-day diary I'd been calling him "Dad" recently. I couldn't quite call him that to his face.

That winter Mam was making her Redicut rugs. She'd made a few winter scenes, with stark, black trees against a red winter sun and all this white. She had the canvas matting on her lap, over the duvet and she was fiddling with the special tagging tool. The pincers were clicking all night. They would pause as she selected the right colour from the cartons of wool. As we watched the telly I listened to the tagging tool's click, dying to have a go.

That gap between Christmas and New Year always seemed safe to me. It was the gap between times. Just like being 12 was. I used to want to ask: Is Christmas still on? Are we still having it? You'd have Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and then Boxing Day, when we'd go to my Big Nana's, and then the day after Boxing Day, when we'd probably look at the sales in Darlington. But what about after that?

That Christmas Eve I'd eaten too many satsumas and been sick as a dog. I'd thrown up all Christmas Day, had no dinner and lay on the settee moaning. I was furious with myself, bringing up bright green and orange.

Mam came up with the real reason, and it was that I'd worried myself sick. Over tea on Christmas Eve – we were having tomato soup – she had said: "I don't know why you're excited. All you're getting for Christmas is new clothes."

"You can wear your new clothes all Christmas Day." She looked at Charlie and started laughing. "And you're not getting anything else."

Charlie chuckled. "They can wear their new clothes and play with their old toys."

They were laughing together, so I knew that they were kidding us. I hated being such a spoilt brat that I was looking disappointed. I felt sick. I hated the thought of sitting in new clothes and playing with old stuff.

Mam always went mad at Christmas. She always bought us an indecent number of presents. We were poorer this year, we knew that. Maybe the clothes thing was real.

In the gap between Christmas and New Year, when I knew I was safe, it was especially galling to be sick. Being sick was what I did on Sunday nights, Monday mornings when school dread was coming on. But holidays like this were full of days that made you think you'd never be going back to school. The school buildings lay dark, across the fields of snow. Somehow those prefab corridors and pebble-dashed blocks had been spirited away.

What I'd actually been given for Christmas was a desk in blond wood with five deep drawers, and every kind of stationery you could think of. Felt-tips and drawing books and Biros, rubbers, pencils, sharpeners, compasses, rulers, paints, brushes, envelopes, hole punches, stapler guns, and those clicky things with wheels for making labels out of plastic tape. And best of all, 20 tiny, beautiful bottles of coloured inks. Each had an illustration on their label to suit the colour.

On Christmas night I spilled the contents of the apple-green bottle inside my top desk drawer. That was the drawer in which I kept my new page-a-day diary. Already the book smelled of green ink and fresh pine.

That night I started l982 early. I opened all the vivid bottles of ink and set them in a row under my desk lamp, choosing a colour to write in.

Paul Magr's latest novel, 'Something Borrowed', is published by Headline Review

Santaholics Anonymous

By Scarlett Thomas

There are several recognised ways of confirming that you are officially an addict, beyond simply asking yourself, "Do I do this too much?" and "If I keep doing this, is it likely to kill me?" You can ask yourself a whole range of questions about your bad habits – drinking, smoking, gambling, downloading naughty pictures, or whatever. Key questions are: "Do I feel guilty afterwards?" and "Do I think I can stop, even though I can't?" Other key signs of addiction include missing work or school because of your habit, and its effects on your family life. Addicts commonly try to recreate the first time they enjoyed something, and often engage in ritualised behaviour around their addiction.

It would be comforting to think that our familiar British Christmas differs structurally from this, but I'm not sure it does. This year, as November drew to a close and it became, again, impossible to go out and buy something simple, like a tube of toothpaste or a bagel, without having to listen to Slade at the same time, it struck me that Christmas is in fact horribly like a mass addiction. It's bizarre: every year virtually an entire society starts behaving the same way, mainly shopping and worrying, and there's nothing joyful or celebratory about it.

People become obsessed with ticking items off lists, and making sure they've got "enough" for Granny. Will the table look like the one in the Sainsbury's magazine? What can you buy for the man or woman who has everything? Of course, in our world of sweatshops and consumer credit, almost everybody (well, the "everybody" who reads newspapers like this) already has almost everything they want. But at Christmas no one admits that. We're in mass denial about what we're doing. Weekend supplements run pages and pages of "gift ideas", because in the downward spiral of addictive behaviour, there is no such thing as "enough".

Yet another sign of addiction is feeling disgusted with yourself afterwards, and, in the later stages, actually feeling miserable while you do the thing that used to make you happy. I've noticed that it's not just me who hates Slade, Band Aid, Wham! and all the other crap that blasts out of every shop, every single year. Everyone seems to trudge around feeling (or at least looking) miserable, probably because they know that, come January, they will be faced with cold, dark winter nights and a huge overdraft.

You can, of course, go home and watch some uplifting American film about the spirit of Christmas and everyone being kind to one another. But when you're in Debenhams or Sainsbury's and you're only two items into your massive list and you haven't even thought about the milkman, the postman, the cleaner or whether you should get a stocking as well as a turkey terrine for your dog/cat, you probably feel that the equally harassed woman who's just bumped you with her overflowing trolley can stick the Christmas spirit up her fat arse.

One of the reasons addictive behaviour starts to feel "wrong" and "guilty" is that addicts soon begin to dispense with all but the pure centre of the addictive pleasure. Many people will understand how the few glasses of wine with a good meal can turn into quite a lot of double shots without food; and reading erotic novels can sometimes mutate into fast-forwarding to the penetration scenes in hardcore porn films. So we can also recognise why the baby Jesus doesn't feature too much in our British Christmas any more. In fact, screw the baby Jesus and his entourage – and midnight Mass, holly, ivy, mistletoe, carols and hoping for snow. Forget sending Christmas cards: we're all too stressed. Bring on the presents! And switch on the TV! The main point of Christmas now does seem to be an orgy of consumption, with, like all orgies, a climax that in the end leaves you feeling hollow rather than fulfilled. Calls to the Depression Alliance helpline go up by 40 per cent over the festive season, and one of the reasons is apparently that people become overwhelmed by having to make the occasion feel "special".

It's always hard to talk about addiction, partly because it involves admitting that you have given yourself up to pleasure. It's not that people don't moan about Christmas, but it does seem a bit obscene to admit having trouble coping with your own overconsumption and excess while half the world starves. Knowing this, many people experiment with the Christmas equivalents of decaffeinated coffee, mocktails or Nicorette gum: Fairtrade presents and "good gifts". Then they sneak in a DVD recorder and a new laptop as well. Why does this happen? Why can't people give up their full-strength Christmas?

Perhaps, like the addicts we are, we are all lost in a nostalgia for something that never really was. If you're lucky, when you were a child there was such a thing as an uncomplicated Christmas. But that was because someone else bought the presents and made the lists and roasted the turkey, and you probably got what you wanted, because all you wanted was a new bike and a couple of Famous Five books, and no one bought you a pair of knickers three sizes too big, or a menstrual calendar for a Filofax quite a lot smaller than yours. Or maybe there never was a perfect Christmas, except for the ones you once read about in books, and continue to read about in magazines. Most harmful pleasures have a glamorous image more powerful than the painful reality: it's often why we start indulging in them. After all, the Marlboro Man never seemed ill.

Once you realise Christmas is an addiction, you see that it even has negative effects on local communities. Is there such a thing as passive Christmas? Every year, when I can find time to stop pitying myself, I spare a thought for those people who don't celebrate Christmas but who can't escape from it. It's not just that buying a loaf of bread becomes almost difficult in mid-December, but Christmas is inescapable on TV, in newspapers, on the radio and in most institutions. However much we buy into the idea of goodwill to all men, Christmas becomes the most bleak time of year for people who need attention but can't get it because everyone's so busy buying presents.

But I'll admit it. My name is Scarlett Thomas and I am addicted to Christmas. Every year I say I'll give it up, but I don't. My mother also tries to give up, but she can't do it either. In some ways it's just like smoking.

After everything I've just said, I probably should be declaring that this year I will be working for a charity (as I did, sort of, in 2002), or knitting all my presents (as I attempted last year). But in fact I'll be trying, like most other people I know, to enjoy being a non-Christian using a Christian festival as an excuse for a holiday and some nice food.

Is the solution simply to admit this? Probably not. There's so much wrong with Christmas that no one will ever solve it. It should be banned for all our sakes, but it probably won't be.

So despite moaning about it until about 15 December, I remember how much I like giving presents, and the taste for it all comes back. I'll believe that maybe I can become a functioning addict, and get the pleasure of Christmas without the hangover, the overdraft and the need for emotional rehab and/or a lot of winter Pimm's. It must be possible. But then, to be an addict is to be an optimist: to seek pleasure without pain and think that the impossible is possible. And it's only a 12th of my life.

Scarlett Thomas' latest novel is 'The End of Mr. Y' (Canongate)

The Christmas you'll never remember

By Peter Ho Davies

Christmas is about memories, of course, or at least Christmas essays like this one – going back to Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales – are about memories, the warmer and fuzzier the better, like a sweater against the chill. Christmas may be for kids, that old truism, but it's also for adults and our memories of our own childhoods.

Our traditions – the same meal, the same decorations, the same gifts (socks again!), the same TV (the Queen, bless 'er!) – are all efforts to hold on to the past, to deny the passage of time. It's deeply reassuring that everything is the same, and we work hard to keep it that way – pulling out the old decorations, struggling to make the ancient lights light, the venerable plastic tree stand straight – even while complaining that Christmas isn't as good as it used to be (too commercialised, no good films on the box, no snow!).

But all this ritual, this tradition, so blurs the distinction between one year and the next that it runs the risk of blunting our more particular Christmas memories. It's the difference between memory and nostalgia – the former is specific, personal; the latter, general, generic in a way that allows it to be shared.

I've been thinking about Christmas memories lately because my young son is just starting to form his. This will be his fourth Christmas but it's the first year he's started to get excited about it, to know what's coming, because he remembers last Christmas. We're staying home for the holiday this year, not travelling to assorted family as usual, because we're hoping to establish a little tradition of our own.

When I told my mother this – by way of explaining why we weren't coming to my parents for Christmas – she was understanding. She and my father had decided not to go to my grandmother's for Christmas when I was three or four for the same reason, she said – a little piece of family history I didn't know, didn't recall. It brought home to me the strangeness of these last few Christmasses with my son – very vivid ones to me, that he'll never remember, and it made me think of my grandmother, my father's mother, with whom we spent my first few Christmasses in Wales (I literally had a child's Christmas in Wales, a couple in fact, yet can't recover a single detail of them).

My grandmother came to us for Christmas one year near the end of her life, in the midst of her own struggles with memory. She had Alzheimer's and had been in a hospital for a year or two at the time. My father brought her home on Christmas Eve, and for an evening at least, she was her old self, or close to it – the tree, the cards, the tinsel, all of it I think somehow filling the gaps in her mind. But the next day the magic was all used up. Those vestigial memories of Christmas melted away. In confusion, she struck out. She waved a kitchen knife in my mother's face. And some time that afternoon my father decided to drive her back to the hospital early.

He asked me to go with him for fear she might try to open a door and leap out of the moving car. It was a terrible journey, through the late afternoon darkness, and in a pouring rainstorm, made all the more dreamlike by the absence of other cars on the roads. Nearing the hospital, my father must have hit a puddle, or drifted towards the edge of the road, because a sheet of white water flared up the side of the car, and my grandmother started screaming. Like a child, I might have said before I had a child, but now I'd say more like an animal in terror. She was saying something in Welsh, which I don't speak, and only later, after my father had led her back on to the ward, and come out to the car, did he tell me that she had been screaming about seeing Jesus Christ. That she thought he'd come for her.

It was the last time my grandmother left the hospital, though she lived there another 10 years, and in a sense her last Christmas, too. Which, is why, grim as it was, I want to remember it, because it was also my last one with her. None of us remember our first Christmas; many of us won't remember our last. In between, it's easy to recall the good times, the gifts, but memory itself is a gift, even the memory of what we lose.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of 'The Welsh Girl' (Sceptre)

Return to Menu