How we finally learnt to love Christmas

“Nooo, I just love it so much! I’m a crazy Martha Stewart,” she cried. “I have the same menu, the same everything, every year and I insist we play Christmas music — snazzy jazzy Dean Martin, Julie London, Ella Fitzgerald — on a constant loop!” She started humming.

Clarissa prepares the fatted goose with a side dish called “soubise”, she told me, and starts ordering supplies of “peppermint puffs, they melt in your mouth” around August and she dots around “bowls of candy like grandma”. There’s panettone for breakfast, and eggnog — “With rum and bourbon and freshly grated nutmeg, the kids call it mommy’s medicine,” she added with a naughty sparkle.

I double-checked with Clarissa that she hadn’t got a job since last we met.

“Are you kidding? Christmas is my job — it takes me all year!” she replied.

And I don’t think she was joking.

I trace my issues to being the child of divorced parents, but I might also mention that when I was seven I woke up on Christmas Eve and realised that the bulky shape in my room holding my bulging stocking wasn’t Father Christmas. It was Uncle Pete.

Now, Uncle Pete was in many ways the most sensitive member of the Johnson family (not that the bar is high) but bearded Uncle Pete, of blessed memory as of this year, was of somewhat satanic mien . . . anyway, I shut my eyes then and now I also try to deal with Christmas by pretending it’s not there, as long as I can.

So that’s my main advice. Make like a man. Don’t overthink it. If you don’t do everything, other people (OK other women) will do it for you.

Yea verily, I hope that if I shut my eyes and chuck out 48-page supplements of Mary Berry recipes called “A Very Mary Christmas” it might go away.

But it doesn’t. Christmas is coming — then it comes. And as I am not a man, with a wife who will take care of business, I too want it to be perfect despite all the above.

So talks about talks with my sisters-in-law about the festive fayre have started (my position is that turkey and all the trimmings is non-negotiable. You should see my face when someone drops the goose or beef words.)

We have agreed an intra-family non-aggression pact on presents (apart from consumables — crates of vino will be carted all over the country). No presents for the over-18s. Not even socks.

We have ring-fenced it so that Christmas starts on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day means Brexit.

And everyone has to play games. Outdoors. With balls.

Christmas, I have realised at my advanced age, is an attitude. You have an attitude to Christmas just as you have one to money, or family, or anything else. And the best attitude to take is to gloss over the reality that it is an expensive, commercial, gut-busting marathon of waste and spending, and believe, like little children in Santa Claus, in the myth that it’s a sublime festival of light and love.

And therefore my husband is right. Not making merry is a downer for everyone. But my point is, it is a joint effort. Everyone has to feel it.

This year, I am going to get my holly jolly on.

Christmas is coming, so I might as well enjoy it.

We had stockings, but no tree
By Hugo Rifkind

I don’t understand Christmas jumpers, and I don’t know who to ask. They make you look good because you look bad? Yes? This is the thing? We’re all hipsters now? And you put on this bad-looking thing — with enormous bobbing pompom, perhaps, as a snowman’s head — and then you unsmilingly go to a supermarket, where you engage in a bare-knuckle fistfight over the last gravy packet with a granite-faced pensioner in a reindeer alice band. Yes? Am I getting this right? Is this the source of your joy?

I am not a natural Christmaseer. I am, in fact, a plagiarist Christmaseer. A Pinocchio Christmaseer, if you like, trying to be a normal boy. As a child in school, I did my bit. You want to hear Once in Royal David’s City knocked out on an alto recorder, I’m still your guy. Also, carols. Bloody loved carols. Only, I’d do that thing, which all secular Jews have done, where you let your voice . . . unfocus, slightly . . . over the particularly Christian bits. Ask one. We’ve all done it. Who knows, maybe Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs do it too. Mary was that mother mild/ Jee-wah-wah her little child. Keen to fit in. Delighted, really. But wary.

At home, back then, we didn’t really do Christmas. We didn’t actively not do it, you understand, but we kept it studiously unfocused. Stockings, yes, but no tree. A nice meal, but not necessarily turkey. Jee-wah-wah, all the way. And I’d visit other houses and see the bunting and smell the tree and I’d think: “Well, that seems nice, I wonder how it all works?”

You build your own Christmas traditions, in time. By my late teens we had ritual. Every year, with the same family friends, who were also Jewish-ish, but definitely more of the second ish than the first. Christmas became the time to go home, to the cold, out of flats and into houses. The trappings, the crackers and silly hats, in time they became truly ours. The Queen, the film, the endless nuts, the long, lolling evening on the sofa, belly stuffed, roof of your mouth raw with Toblerone. You stop asking questions, in time. You stop worrying about Jee-wah-wah. It all just is.

And then I married, into Germans, and it was all new once again. Who was this Christkind of theirs, who flew down the chimney with the presents? Was there a point in the Christian biblical chronology I’d missed, where the Messiah had tiny wings and knew where to source an iPod? Why, when all the ornaments were made of figs, was it so hilarious to suggest eating one? What, basically, was going on?

Nobody has been able to tell me, and I have not stopped asking. In time, I suppose, my questions became an annual tradition of their own. German Christmas makes you realise how self-consciously silly British Christmas is, with its red noses and paper crowns; how we retreat from spiritual wonder into jolly farce. Neither is truly mine, but I’ve grown terribly fond of both.

Added to them, now, are inexplicable traditions of my own. For me, Christmas starts each year when my former colleague Damian Barr tweets his now-legendary picture, I think from about 2010, of two drunk Santas at Camden Tube station, with one drunk Santa helping another drunk Santa vomit into his Santa hat. Somehow that always gets me in the mood. “I must buy a stilton for my mother,” I’ll invariably think, a few days after that, because I always do, even though we’ve long since passed the point where she says, “Oooh! A stilton!” when I present it to her, but instead says, “Where’s my stilton?” when I forget, and actually doesn’t really eat stilton anyway.

At home we now have a tree each year, albeit a fake John Lewis one, which comes down from the attic. The first year I felt terribly guilty about it. Now? Nah. It’s just a tree. When Chanukah falls at the right time, our menorah sits next to it and I’ll light candles and sing half-remembered songs, I suppose throwing further baffling incoherencies into the mix for future generations to worry about.

We also have a box of tree decorations we bring out each year. Half of them are beautiful glass intricacies from German Christmas markets, the other half are from Argos. Each January, when we pack them away, we write our memories of the year on the back of the biggest Christmas card, to jog our memories next time around.

I will never truly understand Christmas. Not just the jumpers. Deep down, I do realise that for many it’s not really about any of this, or Santa, or Jee-wah-wah, but somebody else, and that bit, I’m afraid, will always pass me by.

Most of all, though, I will never understand the odd, equally ritualised belief so many people have that all of this is supposed to be a hassle and a trial and a thing to be endured. Where on earth did that one come from? Who cares if the turkey is poisonous and the pudding a rock?

You’ve got new socks on, and the day off, and people to talk to, and an inexplicably vast supply of satsumas. What more could anyone want?