The paradox of Christmas is what makes it so compelling

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing

There is something paradoxical about Christmas. Perhaps it’s the whole God-baby business; perhaps it’s the pagan light-dark dichotomy. Perhaps it’s the way we inexplicably cram the hibernation season with more social engagements than the previous 11 months put together. Perhaps it’s that the escapist nature of the thing is only possible because we can’t escape it. This is my revelation of the year: I am only great at Christmas because I am very bad at Christmas. 

I start thinking about it early, like October: buying something pretty for the tree, looking at ribbons, considering my themes (!). I always have a tree, and usually one too big for whatever place we’re living in. There are two wicker hampers that live on a high shelf and I start fantasising about opening them as soon as daylight savings kicks in: the minute, basically, I start to succumb to the gloom of the year.

Like many, my instinct is for avoidance and seasonal affective disorder. If I were a bear I’d be fine (salmon sashimi; long nap), but instead I am a person with a large and exuberant family. We have traditions to uphold! Places to be! People to see! I have much too much to do for dormancy to be a viable option. 

Also, I’d miss it. I had a few years, for various reasons, of monstrously bad Decembers and I couldn’t help myself even then: mince pies in the hospital lobby, miniature trees on wipe-clean critical care windowsills, making advent calendars on the ward floor with a mini scalpel and some Pritt Stick. The year the world shut down and skipping the whole thing might have been possible, I ate caviar and crisps in the bath and watched Carol solo on Christmas Eve: festive, delightful, and the only way out of descending into a total pit of doom.

Christmas can’t be ignored. The alternative is not pure bear living: the alternative is the pit. 

Which is why, I suppose, if I were in a house fire I might consider grabbing the Christmas box first. Nowhere else in my life have I built such a sophisticated system of self-defence against the dark: velvet ribbons in six different shades, wicker angels, frosted Indian baubles as big as two fists and as small as a marble. A polished goat bone hoop and some Polish stained glass. Miniatures of all kinds: toasters, toucans, tinned fish and — fresh from the National Theatre’s newest production — shimmery glass ballet shoes on a taffeta ribbon. 

These fragments I have stored against my ruin, by which I mean, the reality of what is now upon us: cancelled catsitters, uneasy Secret Santas, the loneliness of being misunderstood or under-appreciated, regular loneliness, last-minute deadlines, delayed trains, luggage allowance, burnt beef, busy motorways, bickering families, driving rain, darkness, trauma, too much talking, an inadequate return on effort and the imminence of the income tax.

As my mother likes to say (in one of many family traditions) and quoting her teenage boyfriend’s childhood next-door-neighbour’s mother: How was Christmas? Oh, you know: a few rows and a few mistakes. These things, or some of them, are inevitable. 

And yet, other things can be inevitable too. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: if you can’t escape from, escape to, or into. 

There is a technique for calming a panic attack which relies on the sufferer carefully observing their 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 thing you can taste. 

This is helpful pretty much all of the time, but it’s especially good right now. The paradox of Christmas really is that it has to contain everything all at once, which is what makes it so compelling: joy, pain, loss, longing, large sandwiches. It turns a microscope and a magnifying glass on your life, however you live it. 

Such high-intensity overwhelm can really only be counterbalanced by the careful observation of detail: the spin and shine of, for instance, a violet-tinted glass garlic bulb on a fine gold thread; the woodcut interior of an Angela Harding advent calendar; the glitter of demerara sugar on a star-topped mince pie. The cheerful rosy crackle of Netflix’s 4K Birchwood Fireplace For Your Home: Crackling Edition. A bowl of easy-peelers. A Quality Street wrapper under the coffee table. A paper hat tearing around somebody’s uncle’s enormous head. The briefness of the day once it begins. Leftovers at midnight. Delight, wherever it can be found, and wherever it is darkest.