Dinner in the cool of the evening

Press, 24 December 1986, Page 17

Dinner in the cool of the evening

We tend to think of Christmas particularly as a children’s celebration. “The Diary of a Real Boy,” written reminiscently by Henry A. Shute, tells in the boy’s own words of a Christmas shortly after the American Civil War. The diary first explains itself: “Father thot i aught to keep a diry, but i sed i dident want to, because i coodent wright well enuf, but he sed he wood give $lOOO dollars if he had kept a diry when he was a boy.” The pertinent entries run: “December 25. Crismas. got a new nife, a red and white scarf and a bag of Si Smiths goozeberries. pretty good for me. December 26. Crismas tree at the town hall, had supper and got a bag of candy and a long string of pop corn. Mr Lovel took off the presents and his whiskers caught fire, and he hollered o hell right out. that was pretty good for a Sunday school teacher, wasent it. Jimmy Gad et too much and was sick.”

Even in countries where Christmastime means the crash of surf and waving palm trees rather than snow and holly bushes, some traditions persist — and new ones have grown up. The cookery writer Skeffington Ardron remembers childhood Christmases in the Caribbean:

“Although I listened to waifs singing traditional carols on Christmas Eve, they were not standing in the snow or sleet but sang in the moonlit white of a coral road. Boxind day didn’t mean pantomines. It meant an exciting, distant beat of drums, coming closer and closer until the gombeys came in sight. Dancers in brilliantly coloured, mirror-decorated costumes and frightening masks, with enormous, feather-topped headdresses. Some of the dancers were on stilts and handled themselves with incredible skill. They had been practising for weeks for this.”

William Sansom has this vision of an Antipodean Christmas: “One hears of iced plum pudding, and one vision is of naked flesh broiling on the sand and great stretches of beach serving bronzed ball players fed on turkey legs glaces; elsewhere there sweats the image of a man in his broad-brimmed, greasy hat mulling the wassail beer and munching a sizzling bird with all the sogged suet of pud to come, a tin roof making an oven of the shack and the sole cool relief a

spine-chilling ghost story. “But more sensibly, as in most hot countries, the more fortunate and judicious hold off Christmas dinner until the debatable cool of the evening, hoses playing on the lawn, candles fluttering to catch a breeze, langour in the cane chairs and music of snow and rimy wonderlands coming canned through the loudspeaker.” The festive spirit even spreads to pets in the family, as Truman Capote remembers:

“Christmas Eve afternoon we scrape together a nickel and go to the butcher’s to buy Queenie’s traditional gift, a good gnawable beef bone. The bone, wrapped in funny paper, is placed high in the tree near the silver star. Queenie knows it’s there. She squats at the front of the tree staring up in a trance of greed: when bedtime arrives, she refuses to budge.” Dogs are not the only ones who fall into a trance of greed, and Scrooge was not alone in thinking Christmas a humbug. Anton Chekhov, wrote this letter to his brother in December 1894:

“My Lord! ... I have not yet received the cigars and don’t need your gifts. When I get them I’ll throw them down the toilet

“Three days ago I was at a Christmas party for the insane, held in a violent ward. Too bad you weren’t there.

“Since the New Year will soon be with us, may I wish your family a Happy New Year and all the best — as for you, may you see Beelzebub in your dreams.

“The money has been given to the French girl, the one you liked so much, in payment for your immoral conduct with her

All the best, sir. Is eveiyone well, my good man? Your, sir, A. Chekhov.

Many people disliked the increasing commercialisation of Christmas. As Aldous Huxley said: “The deep festal impulse of man was harnessed and made to turn a very respectable little wheel in the mills of industry.”

Among the greatest diatribes against the whole immovable feast is George Bernard Shaw’s: “I am sorry to introduce the subject of Christmas in these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, dis-

orderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying', filthy, blasphemous, and demoralising subject.

“Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: in its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.” Splendid one-eyed stuff! But he may have had some justification. “The Royal Magazine” estimated that in the year 1900 “the turkeys and geese cooked for Christmas would form an army, marching ten abreast, which would reach from London to Brighton.” Where would this gobbling army get to now, William Sansom wonders, in his book “Christmas”: Paris? Nice? Would it occupy Berlin? In 1900, the champagne alone drunk alongside this enormity of bird would keep the Trafalgar Square fountains working incessantly for five days. But in spite of the excesses, most people feel there is some deeper, if intangible, benefit in the annual celebrations. As the Countess von Arnim writes in “Elizabeth and her German Garden”: “I cannot see

that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we were perfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two days it brought us a little nearer together, and made us feel kind.”

W. H. Auden put our ambivalence about Christmas in a masterly nutshell: “Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, and the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to do, wanned up, for the rest of the week —

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot. Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — To love all our relatives, and in general Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away Begging though to remain His disobedient servant, The promising child who cannot keep his word for long.”

SM