time, we might be having a few glasses of this or that to alleviate the Christmas pressures of gift buying, food preparation, logistical arrangements and coping with the unusual whims of our in-laws. Perhaps tragically, we use alcohol to help us spend periods of time with people who, despite being part of our family, we just don’t know very well.
‘These days I make much more of a thing of, say, putting out the reindeer’s food,’ says Lucy Rocca, who’s been dry for six years and heads up Soberistas, a worldwide community of people trying to give up alcohol. ‘I used to rattle through all that stuff, because my entire focus was on getting drunk. It took precedence over everything. Now there’s a different emphasis that’s more about revisiting my childhood, I guess. And I don’t know whether it’s because people are thinking more about their health, or because they’re resisting the cultural pressure to drink, but these days we get a lot more people joining us in the run-up to Christmas rather than waiting until January.
‘Drinking can absolutely be about twinkly fairy lights and glamorous parties and lovely cosy evenings indoors, but the people for whom it isn’t… well, they’re not often thought about.’
The thing is, it’s not always easy to let our hearts be light or, for that matter, put our troubles out of sight. Christmas boozing can assist with all that; it can help to clear out our mental in-trays and vigorously toe punt our worries into the New Year. But there, along with the dying Christmas trees, gym memberships and the dryest of dry Januarys, our problems will sit, waiting patiently for us to all turn up, regretful, dehydrated and wincing. Glass of Prosecco, anyone?
Carlisle, Christmas 2007
I had a traditional boozy Christmas Eve catch-up with some school friends in the pub. At closing time I went back to my mum’s, where I was staying in a small computer room. As soon as the lights went out things deteriorated pretty quickly. Trying to find my way out of the smallest room in the house at 3 a.m. was for some reason (and I still can’t fathom it) impossible, and I resorted to running my hands down every wall surface in a desperate attempt to locate a light switch.
Unfortunately, all I succeeded in finding was the top of a bookcase, which I proceeded to pull over and towards me, pinning me to the bed. Disoriented, confused, surrounded by books and, crucially, leathered, I was now completely stuck, and my mum was trying to prise the door open (which was forced shut by the bookcase) and wondering what on earth was going on. I called her a ‘stupid woman’ and told her to go back to bed. Those were the first words I said to her on Christmas Day.
D. K.
Orphans [singing]: God bless Mr B at Christmas time and Baby Jesus too,
If we were little pigs we’d sing piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,
Piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,
Oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo, piggy wiggy woo, oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo.
Blackadder: Utter crap.
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1998
Musicians are fond of wistfully recalling the first song they ever wrote. I’m now obliged to reveal that mine had the title ‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’. The passing of time would have wiped this from my memory, but I’ve got a cassette here marked ‘Christmas 1980’ which I’ve just listened to while biting my knuckles with embarrassment, and there I am, this precocious kid, giving its world premiere to a battered cassette recorder. My family isn’t religious, so I don’t know why I got rhapsodic about Bethlehem and set those words to music, but I did. I wasn’t very imaginative; I didn’t throw in mentions of any jugglers, traffic jams, poodles or candyfloss, and just stuck to the accepted version of events, i.e. wise men, shepherds, a stable and a star. The tune is meandering and the poetry is poor; I rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘rare’, for Christ’s sake. (Literally for Christ’s sake.) If I’d written it today, of course, I’d have rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘monsieur’, ‘masseur’ or ‘frotteur’, because my vocabulary is now enormous.
‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’ never entered the liturgical canon, partly because my parents didn’t promote it with a letter-writing campaign, and partly because it’s up against a collection of tunes that’s deeply embedded in our national consciousness, thanks to centuries of vigorous bellowing. At this stage it would have to be a pretty catchy number to edge out the likes of ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, although ‘Ding Dong’ (as it’s rarely known) isn’t without its flaws. It was written in 1924 by an Anglican priest called George Woodward, who took a traditional French tune called ‘Le Branle de l’official’ and shoehorned in words with such brute force that it’s surprising the matter wasn’t reported to the police.
E’en so here below, below, let steeple bells be swungen,
And ‘Io, io, io!’, by priest and people sungen
Woodward repeated words in desperation and invented a couple of others to haul himself out of a poetic hole of his own making, before spreading the word ‘Gloria’ over thirty-five notes in the chorus, which is as audacious as anything Mariah Carey has ever attempted. In fact, on reflection, ‘When Christ Was Born In Bethlehem’ stands up pretty well against ‘Ding Dong’, and I’m going to stop being so hard on myself because I was only 9 years old.
It’s easy to sit here picking apart Christmas carols,12 but they’re likely to be the oldest songs you ever learn, so if you’re remotely interested in maintaining a connection with the past it probably behoves you to give them a yearly airing. Many of our most popular carols, such as ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ and ‘Deck The Halls’, combine medieval folk melodies with words written in the mid nineteenth century, when the clergy was mounting a rescue operation to revive interest in a dying form. This was just as Dickens depicted Ebenezer Scrooge as threatening violence towards someone who dared to sing ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ at his door; composers presumably figured that carollers should be equipped with some better material, and they set to work.
Carols such as ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’ were written from scratch at around this time, and within a few years a belting catalogue had been assembled that we still sing to this day. Some areas of the country take their carolling very seriously and have their own distinct repertoire. ‘Certain carols are peculiar to a small area,’ says Pat Malham, who’s sung local carols around South Yorkshire and Derbyshire for more than forty years. ‘For example, carols such as “The Prodigal Son” and “A Charge To Keep I Have” only seem to be sung in the villages of Ecclesfield and Thorpe Hesley. If you try to strike up an unfamiliar carol, the retort will come: “We don’t sing that one here”!’
Cornwall, Christmas 1981
I remember my dad taking us to midnight mass. We weren’t a church-going family, but me and my brothers thought it would be a wheeze to stay up singing carols past midnight and deliver one in the eye to Santa. But we were wrong, it was nothing of the sort. It was deathly dull, with carols coming all too infrequently during a very long, sombre sermon.
I did, however, get to hear my dad sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, right out loud and with proper conviction. I don’t ever remember him making any other musical forays, so it was an unfamiliar sound, but it came across as both joyful and triumphant. Even to this day, the climax of ‘O, come let us adore him’ can reduce me to shoulder-shaking sobs of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever went to church, nor heard my dad sing, again.
J. T.
Carols can have emotional resonance for many of us, but the grouchier members of the community will always resent the brutal