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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories for this weekly newsletter.
The author is the author of non-fiction books, cookbooks and poetry anthologies. He The latest book is 'The Dinner Table', a collection of food writing
There is something confusing about Christmas. Perhaps it is the business of every child of God; perhaps it is the pagan light-dark dichotomy. Maybe it's the way we're cramming the hibernation period inexplicably with more public engagement than the last 11 months combined. Maybe it's because the escapist nature of something is only possible because we can't avoid it. This is my annual revelation: I'm only good at Christmas because I'm terrible at Christmas.
I start thinking about it early, like October: buying something nice for the tree, looking at the ribbons, considering my themes (!). I always have a tree, and usually one that is too big for any place we live. There are two hampers sitting on the top shelf and I start thinking about opening them as soon as daylight saving starts: a minute, basically. , I begin to fall into the darkness of the year.
Like many, my instinct is to avoid and disrupt the season. If I were a bear I would be fine (salmon sashimi; long naps), but instead I'm a person with a big and exciting family. We have traditions to keep! Places to be! People to see! I have too much to do in dormancy for it to be a viable option.
Again, I can remember it. I've had a few years, for various reasons, of really bad Decembers and I couldn't help myself even then: mince pies in the hospital lobby, little trees in the critical care window cleaner, making advent calendars on the ward floor with a tiny scalpel and a Pritt Stick. The year that closed the world and jumping everything was possible, I ate caviar and crisps in the bath and watched. Carol You're alone on Christmas Eve: festive, fun, and the only way to go down to the absolute pit of doom.
Christmas cannot be ignored. The alternative is not pure bear life: the alternative is the den.
That's why, I think, if I was in the firehouse I would think to grab the Christmas box first. Nowhere else in my life have I built such an elaborate system to protect myself from the dark: velvet ribbons in six different shades, gray angels, frozen Indian bulbs as big as two fists and as small as a marble. Polished goat bone hoop and brown Polish glass. Little things of all kinds: toasts, toucans, tinned fish and – new to the National Theatre's new production – glass shoes glittering on taffeta ribbon.
These pieces I have kept against my own damage, I mean, the reality of what is now with us: deleted catsitters, unpleasant Secret Santas, loneliness of not being understood or appreciated, constant loneliness, deadlines, train delays. .
As my mother likes to say (in one of many family traditions) and citing her teenage son's childhood neighbor's mother: How was Christmas? Oh, you know: fewer rows and fewer errors. These things, or some of them, are inevitable.
However, some things may be unavoidable. If you can't hit 'em, join 'em: if you can't run fromto avoid to goor in a.
There is a technique to relieve a panic attack that depends on the sufferer carefully looking at their surroundings through the prism of the senses: five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, one. something you can taste.
This is very useful all the time, but even more so now. The paradox of Christmas is that it must contain everything at the same time, something that makes it mandatory: joy, pain, loss, longing, big sandwiches. It turns a microscope and magnifying glass into your life, even though you live in it.
Such high dimensions can only be countered by careful attention to detail: the roundness and brightness of, for example, a pink glass globe on a fine gold thread; woodcut interior of Angela Harding's advent calendar; a demerara sugar glaze on a star-studded mince pie. A happy crack of Netflix's 4K Birchwood Fireplace for Your Home: Cracking Edition. Bowl of easy-peelers. A standard street fold under the coffee table. A paper hat that rips off the big head of someone's uncle. The shortness of the day when it begins. Leftovers at midnight. It is joy, wherever it can be found, and wherever it is too dark.