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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is the author of fiction, cookbooks and poetry anthologies. it The latest book is The Dinner Table, a collection of food writing
There is something paradoxical about Christmas. Maybe it's the whole God-baby business; perhaps it is the pagan light-dark dichotomy. Maybe it's how we inexplicably pack the hibernation season with more social engagements than the previous 11 months combined. Perhaps it is that the escapist nature of the thing is possible only because we cannot escape it. This is my discovery of the year: I'm only great at Christmas because I'm so bad at Christmas.
I start thinking about it early, like October: buying something nice for the tree, looking at ribbons, considering my themes (!). I always have a tree, and usually a large one for each place we live. There are two knitting hampers that live on a high shelf and I start fantasizing about opening them as soon as daylight saving time starts: basically the minute I start succumbing to the gloom of the year.
Like many, my instinct is for avoidance and seasonal affective disorder. If I were gold I would be fine (salmon sashimi; long sleep), but instead I am a person with a large and abundant family. We have traditions to keep! Places to be! People to watch! I have too much to do for sleep to be a viable option.
Also, I would miss him. I had a few years, for various reasons, of monstrous bad decimals, and even then I couldn't help myself: mince pies in the hospital lobby, miniature trees in critical care windows, making advent calendars on the ward floor . mini scalpel and some Pritt Stick. The year the world shut down and bypassing all things might be possible, I ate caviar and chips in the bathroom and watched Karol solo on Christmas Eve: festive, delightful and the only way out of a total pit of doom.
Christmas cannot be ignored. The alternative is not the clean life of the bear: the alternative is the pit.
That's why, I guess, if I were in a house fire, I might think of grabbing the Christmas box first. Nowhere else in my life have I built such a sophisticated system of self-defense against the dark: ribbons of velvet in six different shades, knitting angels, frozen Indian tassels as big as two fists and as small as a marble. A smooth goat bone and some polish stained glass. Miniatures of all kinds: toasters, toucans, tinned fish and — fresh from the National Theatre's newest production — glass-glitter ballet shoes on a taffeta ribbon.
I have saved these fragments against my own ruin, by which I mean the reality of what is now upon us: undone disasters, worried Secret Santas, the loneliness of being misunderstood or underappreciated, regular loneliness, deadlines last minute, delayed trains, baggage allowance, burnt beef, busy highways, families fighting, driving rain, darkness, trauma, too much talking, an inadequate return on effort and the proximity of income tax.
As my mother likes to say (in one of many family traditions) and citing the childhood of her teenage boyfriend, the next-door neighbor's mother: how was christmas Oh, you know: a few lines and a few mistakes. These things, or some of them, are inevitable.
And yet, other things may also be inevitable. If you can't beat them, join them: if you can't escape BYescape THEOR IN.
There is a technique for calming a panic attack, which relies on carefully observing the patient's surroundings through the prism of the senses: five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, one. something you can enjoy.
This is useful almost all the time, but it's especially good now. The paradox of Christmas is really that it has to contain everything at once, which is what makes it so compelling: joy, pain, loss, longing, big sandwiches. It turns a microscope and a magnifying glass into your life, however you live it.
Such high-intensity suffocation can only be balanced by careful observation of details: the swirl and glow of, for example, a garlic-purple glass bulb on a fine gold thread; the woodcut interior of an Angela Harding advent calendar; the sheen of demerara sugar on a star mince pie. Netflix's Happy Pink Blink 4K Birchwood Fireplace for Your Home: Crackling Edition. A bowl of light peelers. A quality road wrap under the coffee table. A paper hat tearing off someone's great uncle's head. The shortness of the day is just beginning. Leftovers at midnight. Pleasure, wherever it can be found and wherever it is darkest.
