Rhodri Marsden - A Very British Christmas - Twelve Days of Discomfort and Joy

Because there are people who don’t like Christmas, and I wanted to hear from them too. Rev. Martin Turner gave a Christmas service at London’s Methodist Central Hall in 2014 where he talked about the lost and the lonely. ‘Guilt weighs them down,’ he said, ‘work wears them out, poverty imprisons them, lack of direction confuses them, the struggles of life agitate them, relationships come and go and hurt them, there seems to be no rest from the pressures of life, no still place, no Silent Night, no Holy Night.’ Many of us battle with these things on some level, and it’s all felt more acutely at Christmas. So you’ll find sad stuff in this book, too, things about love, and loss, and dashed hopes, and breaking your arm while trying to stuff a turkey. That kind of thing shouldn’t be glossed over, so I haven’t.

‘I’m not sure this book would have been commissioned in the US,’ said an American friend of mine the other day, ‘because people consider Christmas to be such a precious and magical thing. Americans have awful times at Christmas, too, but the idea that the awkwardness would actually be acknowledged is ridiculous.’ However, ridiculousness is perfectly acceptable in my book (literally), so I’ve tried to acknowledge all the weirdness of the winter holiday, all its idiosyncratic splendour and all the magnificent flaws dotted throughout it like sultanas in a Christmas pudding. I apologise for rather predictably dividing Christmas up into ‘twelve days’ (as we know, Christmas seems to run for more like fifty or sixty), but across those twelve chapters our cultural icons will be saluted, our national customs dissected, and the people who’ve eaten all the turkey and lived to tell the tale will tell us those tales. Tidings of discomfort, tidings of joy.

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