SO WHY NOT TURN CHRISTMAS ROUND?

'Tis the season to be jolly, as the old song has it.  Well, no, not really.  'Tis the season to be stressed would be more like it.  Still help is at hand for I hear the BBC has discovered a group of researchers who have carefully plotted the development of pre-Christmas stress and, most importantly, have calculated when it ends.  According to Radio 4, this is when the presents have been unwrapped and the dinner has been eaten: a time which occurs, so the researchers say, in the average household around five minutes to two o'clock on Christmas Day.

There is something in that precision, isn't there, that makes one instantly suspect that the researchers do not inhabit the same world as you or I?  I suppose there may be some super-efficient households in which everything is finished by five minutes to two; where the paper-hatted family falls contentedly into a stress-free sleep wearing their new slippers and smelling strongly of the less expensive offerings of the parfumiers (for I doubt those who finish their Christmas lunch at 1.55pm precisely, are in the habit of lashing out £241.95 for a 30ml bottle of Channel No 5), but I have never known any.

My own pre Christmas stress has been building up quite nicely as it happens and is now safely in the red area of intolerable pressure.   Somehow we have enjoyed five dinner parties in eight days, four of which have been given by ourselves involving considerable moving and rearranging of furniture and equipment.  The dishwasher and the cooker, both of about twenty years vintage, sigh almost audibly as they receive another load. Bless them!

As if this wasn't enough it has been Christmas card week and present ordering week and the week the car went in for its MoT.  It has been a week of thunder and hail and the week when the telephone crashed.  The car failed its test (it needs a new windscreen, the garage said helpfully) while the telephone needed, it turned out, a new junction box, the previous one having melted in the storm; both required me to be early on parade waiting for the requisite engineers to make a house call.   Meanwhile, our label customers have merrily been demanding ever more complicated jobs in ever shorter timescales 'before Christmas' so that we have been winding labels literally between the wineglasses and candlesticks.

With a week still to go I am nicely frazzled, with a sore tummy, and the irritating feeling of guilt you get when you receive a card from someone you have previously overlooked. There is still much to do: the car to be given another go at its MoT, and fourteen boxes to be shipped out in the direction of the sunny Seychelles. 

If the government wanted to do something useful it could employ me to give Christmas a makeover for the purpose of reducing stress levels in the population.  At the moment we all want to fit everything in 'before Christmas.'  That includes present buying, card posting, cake making, party giving, tree decorating, relative visiting and so on.  Everything has to be done at once and the result is the nation drowns in stress.  No wonder a sea of alcohol is required to survive the ordeal.

But then, after Christmas, nothing happens apart from the New Year hiccup.  Time is spare.  If only those empty hours could be moved into the 'before Christmas' slot.

So why not turn Christmas around? Recently, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' have become ever more a reality.  So what if we moved Christmas back to the Feast of the Epiphany - from the first to the twelfth day of Christmas?  Christmas, the religious festival, could of course remain on 25 December, but 'The Big Day' would then be at the end of the holiday rather than at the beginning.  All the Christmas paraphernalia could be done in the holiday period itself thus ensuring that December's productivity and our collective sanity don't suffer as they usually do.

In our drama group it has become a tradition to celebrate Twelfth Night with some sort of festivity and a handsome frangipane Galette des Rois. This year the Rain or Shine Theatre Company are bringing their winter show Top Hats and Tinsel to Cowbridge.

The Twelfth Night tradition is one well worth reviving.  Interestingly I see in this week's Spectator magazine an article by Melanie MacDonagh recounting how women used to gather in the West of Ireland to celebrate the Epiphany with cakes and gossip in a celebration called Nollaig Beag - or Little Christmas.  These days though, she says, the custom is 'an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub........a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women's Day.'

Well - it's an excuse to bring out the Chanel I suppose, and it likes me better (to use a Shakespearean idiom) as a stress-buster than finishing the show by five minutes to two on Christmas Day.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this  the first Christmas you remember.  something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently.  I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs.  Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin.  The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough.  Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod.  As far as I remember it went like this. 

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing.  Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting.  Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea.  He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.
 
So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish.  For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater.  He had fallen into a seal hole. 

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill.  Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water.  But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air.  So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall.  Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him.  It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice. 

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him.  “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William.  But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this?  William was covered in fish!  There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole!  When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring.  In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com  via Google's Images for Seal Holes.  Use is acknowledged with thanks).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

A similar Bobble.  You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas.  I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking.  I am hopeless at answering.  What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both.  Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers.  Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise.  Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points.  Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person.  She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears.  It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth. 

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered.  You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily.  In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course,  as all things do.  The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange.  I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths.  I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version.  It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather,  soft as a second skin.  The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets.  They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment.  Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing  insulated headgear.  Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet.  I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925?  It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out.  The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all.  CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth.  This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team.  Actors don’t like forced choices, you see. 

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying.  If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse.  You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co.  For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)