Bah Humbug!

Bah Humbug! Christmas is over! Or is it? For sitting in my hall are four boxes of presents all in their bright tinsel wrappings and complete with the buttons and bows that took me until half-past eleven last night to affix: the children's (and the children's partners) presents. Yes, today is another Christmas and day of feasting.

For me this has been a sort of 'before and aft' Christmas, starting with one great family party (over two days) the weekend before and finishing with today's extravaganza. But of course it won't end there, for there will be something no doubt at New Year, followed by something else on New Year's Day and then our traditional Twelfth Night entertainment on 6 January, to test the stomach just when it thought it was recovering.

For the first time that I can remember we actually spent Christmas Day alone this year and it was wonderful! Just to be able selfishly to listen over breakfast to the News Quiz review of the year and then to 'With Great Pleasure' on Radio 4. To be able to cook something simple - we chose to have a venison casserole - and afterwards to curl up with a Christmas present book. Knowing my love of history, J had bought me 'The Other Boleyn Girl' - the fascinating account of Anne Boleyn's younger sister. In the evening we watched 'Love Actually' - not the greatest of films, indeed positively silly and cringe worthy in many places, but infused with such happiness as to make almost perfect entertainment.

All of which prompts me to ask - what, exactly is Christmas for? Now that may sound like the sort of question asked by every vicar in every pulpit at some point in the festive season - but Christmas, in Britain at least, ceased long ago to have any relation to the religious festival that is held confusingly at the same time and under the same name.

The religious festival I can understand - it is the rest of it that has left me grasping for the plot in a manner that happens frequently when I am trying to follow Midsomer Murders. What are we all really trying to do - for what happens in my experience bears as little relation to the ostensible objective of 'having fun' as ice and snow on Christmas cards do to the mild wetness of a south British December.

I mean if you are really wanting to eat well - then why on earth eat Turkey, which is held in such low esteem the rest of the year that it is one of the cheapest meats you can buy? Do people's taste buds become anaesthetised in December so that cardboard tastes suddenly succulent?

And why if we are wanting to enjoy a family day do we so arrange to eat and drink ourselves into a kind of stupor, sometimes even before we sit down? In the middle of the day excess alcohol is just about the biggest antidote to pleasure that it is possible to imagine

Presents are supposed, one imagines, to give pleasure both to the giver and the receiver. But frequently it seems the only person that benefits is the shopkeeper.

The value of a present does not lie in its bigness, or brashness or even its price; it lies in how appropriately it fills some little niche in the receiver's life. There are few people who know how to give presents. Whole books ought to be devoted to this for most of us are hopeless at it. How often do we ask - what would you like for Christmas? - worse we give our families vouchers and tell them to choose a present for themselves - a classic opt-out from the difficult, though rewarding business, of present choosing.

That defeats the whole object of a present, which is the surprise and delight at receiving something, however small, that you would never have thought of buying for yourself but which is so geared to one's fancies that it is precisely 'right.'


My neighbour, Annie, who happens to be French, is an expert at this. She doesn't buy much - but everything usually turns out to be a delightful surprise. Somehow she manages to tune in to some inner need and suddenly there is something priceless in the foil wrapping.