FIONA McCANNConfesses to loving Christmas
'REMEMBER WHENyou're writing the column this week that not everyone shares your fondness for Christmas," my husband cautioned as he left the house this morning. Well, we all know who he means by everyone. While we two are of similar minds on many things, such as dogs, meanness and American presidents, our points of view annually part ways around this time of the year. In other words, he has a sense of proportion about the festive season, while I will it to take over our lives and verily invite it to do so. You see the problem.
Thankfully, he still finds it winning that I go all goosebumpy at the first strains of Silent Night, and coo audibly at Christmas lights in all their garish glory. One gets the feeling this won’t last, however. It’s often the case that foibles considered sweet and endearing in the honeymoon period can break the camel’s back later down the line. Christmas is not only a potential source of marital conflict in the future, however – can “irreconcilable Christmasness” really be cited as grounds for divorce? – it nearly scuppered the thing altogether before we even made it to the I dos.
This time last year, we had the mammoth showdown thereafter referred to as Christmas-tree-gate. Suffice to say there was a tree involved, tellingly, and my express wish to decorate it with every garish and unmatched hanging accoutrement I could find. This was countered by my then-future-husband’s outlandish and unreasonable position that, because we would not in fact be in our house for Christmas, a tree was not top of the list of priorities that year. Let’s just say the temperature drop resulting from said position was enough to make Frosty the Snowman look toasty.
In an attempt to generate a little warmth, he gamely offered that he had no personal objection to a tree, but being time-pressed, suggested I should decorate it myself. Decorate it myself?He might as well have told me to raise our firstborn alone.
The whole point of having him around was so we could be one of those madly-in-love couples decorating their first Christmas tree together, like in Wham's Last Christmasvideo (but not like George Michael and the one that threw him over for Andrew Ridgeley). Of course, he didn't know who Wham were, but professed equal joy in our neighbours' glowing Santa-fied garden and other Christmasnesses. His stipulations were not Scroogeish, but a measured approach to the explicit evocations that now come part and parcel with the season of goodwill.
Nonetheless, the good man had seen a glimpse of Christmas futures, and still signed up. Christmas-tree-gate was to all intents and purposes our Yuletide pre-nup: all Christmas festivities in the future would hereafter be shared jointly and with gusto, with Wham on a seasonal loop.
But this Christmas thing, see, is not entirely my fault. My family has a genetic predisposition to Christmas mania. On my last trip out to my parents’ house, my mother proudly informed us that she’d bought an unprecedented amount of Coke (Coca Cola, people! It’s not that kind of white Christmas she’s after) just to get a free red Christmas truck, like in the advertisement. “Holidays are comin’, holidays are comin’,” she sang, driving her truck along the kitchen table like a four-year-old. Here was proof that the festive gene runs in the family. What chance did I have?
Living in Stoneybatter in Dublin hasn’t helped either, mind. The Batter takes Christmas very seriously: Decorations must be big, bright and prominently displayed both inside and outside the house. You’re not really a local until you’ve a luminous Santy riding reindeer up the walls and a snowman poking out of your chimney.
Kids in the hood also seize the opportunity to get festive by stopping by at all hours of the day or night to offer you their personal take on some carolling classic. Usually in scattergroups of four or more, they belt through a version of Jingle Bellswith scant heed paid to lyrical niceties, and what they lack in melody they more than make up for in volume.
Naturally, I reward them for their efforts. Some might call it protection money, but I see it as another opportunity to encourage the festive spirit. So what if it now means the doorbell rings every 10 minutes with new permutations of carollers who’ve heard that our house is a veritable money box of festive cheer? It’s Christmas, for crying out loud.
The truth is, nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than garish lights and carolling gurriers. I realise there is no rational explanation for my love of this particular feast: after all, it’s specifically religious and by no means universal. It’s crassly commercial and often taste-free. I know that I have been sold a bill of goods, and I know that behind the Christmas curtain there’s a fat cat sitting on the spoils of my festive spirit. I know that the jingle bells are there to drown out the ker-ching of money being transferred from threadbare pockets into tinkling tills. I know that much of the magic I recall from my childhood was one fat, red-coated, white-bearded, imported fantasy, and yet I still love Christmas, in all its tack and bling and Tiny Tim tweeness, and every last luminous Stoneybatter Santa clause. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and don our gay apparel, after all. I’ve been waiting all year for an excuse.
