Several nights before Christmas
On the evening of Dec 31st, 2019, I said the same thing I say every New Year’s Eve. I make a fervent wish that the people we love may stay safe and well during the months to come. Unrealistic, I know, but one can hope.
There’s been a lot of darkness this year; and a feeling that we’re approaching critical mass. People have not remained well. We have not all made it. The wheel turns (yule was represented by the symbol of a wheel in old almanacs), life begins, continues, and ends, but sometimes it seems as if our entire globe might spin off its axis. 2020 has been such a year.
Humans need the beauty of light in the darkness and the symbolic representation of the guiding light of the Star of Bethlehem is a story that fills me with emotion even though I am not religious: the thought of all the animals in the fields and stables going down on their bended knees as the star appears, and the hugeness of the sky as midnight strikes on the 24th is a captivating one. You don’t have to believe in God to feel wonder at a world apparently holding its breath for ... something. It’s part of the reason why I adore Alison Uttley’s ‘The Country Child’ because this is a story told to Susan, the young protagonist, by her farming elders.
My own grandfather who has been gone some twenty years told me the same. He was a sailor, a conscript into the Royal Navy, who transformed him into a man who understood the navigational importance of stars, night skies, and storytelling. I lived in hope of catching the creatures outside going down on bent knees, from the hedgehog that visited us nightly to the mistle thrushes that lived in the high trees surrounding my grandparents’ garden. Do hedgehogs have knees? I’d ask and ever since, in the minutes approaching midnight, I stand in my own garden wrapped in a blanket, looking at the stars and wondering…
Of late I have discovered that Thomas Hardy wrote this: “Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock./ “Now they are all on their knees,”/ An elder said as we sat in a flock…” and published it on Christmas Eve 1915 in the London Times. The Dorset superstition was that oxen used to kneel every Christmas Eve, honouring the holy birth so Hardy told readers that were he to be invited by a farmhand to witness this miracle: “I should go with him in the gloom,/ Hoping it might be so.”
Writing this, some ten days before Christmas, I am holding my breath for something good. Yesterday came the awful news that London has been placed in Tier 3, joining other parts of the country, all of them filled with businesses whose income streams (so dependent on the festive season) have been decimated. I am not someone who cries but yesterday my eyes constantly leaked. It has been really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel because of all the rockfalls. And it has been even harder to make myself go out and spend, and buy gifts, and make food for people I may not see. People I have not seen since last winter. We’re all in the same boat but I don’t know whether that is a comfort when it feels like it is slowly going down.
“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” wrote Stanley Kunitz and I don’t have any answers beyond feeling grateful that I am still alive yet this is tinged with sorrow for everyone who has lost someone dear to them or endured severe illness and its protracted, limiting after-effects; the loneliness, the isolation. I miss you all. I miss physicality and jostling and the sharp angles and soft curves of crowds of humans. I miss browsing and pottering and spontaneity. I long to not bump into someone because my glasses have misted up before leaping away like a scalded cat, brimming over with apologies for fear I have harmed them with my breath. And then I read this, by Adam White on how Nigella has shown us another side of being alone through her words and her TV series of ‘Cook, Eat, Repeat’ and I feel soothed. “What’s new has been her isolation, her friends and family replaced by dinner for one. That Lawson remains the same through it all and cooking and discussing food with just as much excitement, is an unspoken asset to this series that even she may not have anticipated,” he writes.
I also read and shared this piece about just a few of the people in South Carolina who died from Covid, and the comfort recipes they will no longer be able to cook for loved ones. It is deeply affecting and I appreciate getting to know a little about some of this disease’s victims. “A concealed backup pie is the epitome of comfort food. A familiar, uncomplicated dish that arrives at a moment of worry to take all concerns away,” writes Hannah Raskin which is especially poignant when you imagine all the pies carried up paths by bereaved relatives, to be sliced and eaten at wakes and funeral gatherings.
“Caught in darkness, I have turned to pie to light my journey. I'm not eating pie. At least no more than usual. I use pie the way a student of meditation uses a mantra. To practice mindfulness. To soften sharp edges of the day. I carve pie slices from clay. I paint images of pies in acrylic. I photograph pie. I work on song lyrics about pie. I imagine writing murder mysteries where the plot turns on pie. I question the particulars of pie, wondering about the forces that shaped pie over the past thousand years.” writes John Bare in his own tribute to Betsy, his wife, taken by Covid.
Last night I slipped out for a walk as the sun was setting. It’s the first time I have seen the town’s Christmas lights switched on and it felt weird. I’m sorry I can’t be more articulate about how I felt other than to say when I walked to our small local cinema and saw the doors locked and the lights off, I struggled to not burst into tears. The sight of store windows with their brave little trees festooned with defiant, jolly decorations is all the more poignant this year. I admire the store owners and hospitality businesses, and their employees greatly. I thank them for their shining lights which illuminate the darkness because that’s what all of this glitzy kitsch and seasonal brightness represents if you consider that the Christmas tree was originally a pagan symbol of light. A tree is a reminder that spring will again come. Fires and yule logs were lit on the longest night of the year to symbolise this so it is not surprising that this year, people felt compelled to put their tree up early and to raid The Range for inexpensive decorations.
It’s not always about mindless consumerism. As my husband hauls down his four suitcases filled with Christmas decorations, and I brace myself for weeks of living on the combined film sets of Deck The Halls, Elf, and The Grinch (I am more the latter), his remote control holder in the shape of Santa’s trousers, the two feet high Nutcracker soldier on the mantelpiece, the flashing lights around every window to match our friend’s house opposite (and the nightly challenge to synchronize our lights with theirs and vice versa), and his appalling snowman Christmas jumper complete with rudely protruding carrot are all points of lights in the darkness.
More reading:
Nicky Catto on shopping while vulnerable in Vittles.
“You find solace where you can.” Emma Brockes on comfort food.
Overcoming food insecurity and the effects of genocide by rediscovering ancient foodways, by Katelyn Reinhart. Change really oughta come.
What have you done, this ‘merry Christmas’, for the happiness of those about, below you? Nothing? Do you dare, with those sirloin cheeks and that port-wine nose, to answer – Nothing?’
(Punch magazine, 1843)
Buy ‘The Food Almanac’ edited by Miranda York for Kit De Waal’s essay about her father’s Antiguan Christmas cake alone. Also, Simon Thibault’s magical diorama of maple sugaring in Canada where “warm and dewy steam” billows from sap boilers.
In the newsletter, Tigers Are Better Looking, Kate Young talks about her favourite seasonal reads.
A Gullah Geechie night before Christmas
Grieving in Gullah: Christmas after a loss in the family, by Jordan McDonald.
Black Cake:
I’ve written about my favourite boiled fruit cake here. It makes an excellent Christmas cake too and another recipe that I’ve made for years is Laurie Colwin’s Black Cake. Mentioned by Nigella in How To be a Domestic Goddess, Colwin’s black cake came to her via her daughter’s Caribbean babysitter. Here is Colwin on that black cake:
“There is fruitcake, and there is Black Cake, which is to fruitcake what the Brahms piano quartets are to Muzak. … Black Cake, like truffles and vintage Burgundy, is deep, complicated, and intense. It has taste and aftertaste. It demands to be eaten in a slow, meditative way. The texture is complicated too—dense and light at the same time.”
An Armenian Christmas in Kolkata via Goya Journal.
Alison Uttley’s Christmas possets from Recipes From an Old Farmhouse:
“A starved child was a very cold child and I often came home from my long walk from school starved in the winter nights. A posset of hot milk and bread cut into small squares with a dash of rum and some brown sugar brought colour into my cheeks. Milk was curdled with ale to make a christmas posset. Spices were added, cloves and cinnamon, and a grate of nutmeg and brown sugar. The posset was mulled on the hot stove, in a pewter tankard, and poured into smaller mugs of pewter when ready. The ale curdled the milk and made a froth like lambs wool, the old froth of roast apples once used in possets.
Mayukh Sen on why the Muppets Christmas Carol always makes him hungry.
What could be more Christmas than pie-pie? in Goya Journal.