Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

  Add the cheese until the whole thing is a nice, doughy mixture. If it’s too dry add a bit of milk or an egg.

  Knead it all out till smooth and firm.

  Roll the mixture into logs about 8 inches long – too short and it’s fiddly, too long and it’s unwieldy.

  Put the logs in the fridge to stiffen up (I know you’ve made a sex toy but we won’t go there).

  When you want your cheese crispies, heat up your oven to 180°C or whatever. HOT. I have an Aga and I don’t really understand other ovens – the noise makes me nervous – but we can work it out.

  If you too have an Aga, it’s top oven, obviously.

  Lightly oil a baking tray to prevent STICK – or use baking paper (useful as a firelighter afterwards).

  Slice your logs into thin slices – imagining the biscuits you want to eat – and stick them in the oven for 15 minutes.

  These logs freeze well.

  And that’s it! Even if you make these for your ungrateful party guests, keep a few for yourself, the cat and the dog, and that time of reflection.

  THE LION, THE UNICORN

  AND ME

  efore it happened, an angel lined up all the animals – every one, of every kind, because this angel had the full list left over from the Ark.

  Most were eliminated at once – spiders, monkeys, bears, whales, walruses, snakes. Soon it was clear that four legs on the ground at the same time would be necessary to reach the qualifying round. That left some serious competition – horses, tigers, a stag with antlers that branched into an unknown forest, a zebra painted black and white like an argument.

  The elephant could carry the world on its back. Dogs and cats were too small, the hippopotamus too wayward. There was a giraffe in jigsaw graffiti. The camel was wanted elsewhere, as were the ­cattle. After a long time, it was just the three of us: the lion, the unicorn and me.

  The lion spoke first. Present position: King of the Jungle. Previous history: worked with Hercules and Samson, also Daniel in the lions’ den. Special strengths: special strength. Weaknesses: none reported. The angel wrote it down.

  Then the unicorn spoke. Present position: mythical beast. Previous history: in Hebrew I am Re’em, the creature that cannot be tamed. Special strengths: known to be good with virgins. Weaknesses: tendency to vanish. The angel wrote it down.

  Then it was my turn.

  ‘He’ll make an ass of himself,’ whispered the lion. I did. I am. A proper ass. Present position: under-donkey. Special strength: can carry anything anywhere. Weaknesses: not beautiful, not well-bred, not important, not clever, not noticed, not won any prizes . . .

  The angel wrote it down, and down, and down. Then the angel gave us a tie-breaker: could we say, in one sentence, why we were right for the job?

  The lion spoke first. ‘If He is to be King of the World, He should be carried by the King of the Beasts.’

  The unicorn said, ‘If He is to be the Mystery of the World, He should be carried by the most mysterious of us all.’

  I said, ‘Well, if He is to bear the burdens of the world, He had better be carried by me.’

  And that is how I found myself trotting quietly along, the red desert under my hooves, the sky rolled out like a black cloth over my head, and a tired woman nodding asleep on my back, towards the little town of Bethlehem.

  Oh but it was a musty, rusty, fusty pudding of a town turned out for a show, its people cussed and blustering, all buy and sell and money, taking their chance while the going was good before the goods got going again. Taxes, and everyone here to pay up, and everyone had to be put up for this one night, so that even the mice were renting their mouse-holes, and there were travellers hanging out of birds’ nests, their beards full of twigs and old worms, and the anthills were full up, and the beehives had three families apiece, and there was a man tapping on the frozen lake asking the fish to let him in.

  And every bed and every under-the-bed, and every chair and cushion and curtain and carpet, and every ledge, nook, shelf, cranny, gap, rack, cupboard and cart squeezed and popped with arms and legs. When we arrived at the inn, there were two large, empty pots on either side of the door.

  Being a donkey, I poked my head into one of them to see if there was anything to eat. At once, a stubbly face popped out of the pot, and warned us that the inn was so full that he and his brother had had to uproot the olive trees from either side of the porch. Sure enough, there was the brother, head like a melon, scowling in the other pot.

  My master Joseph was an optimistic man.

  He knocked at the door. The innkeeper opened it, and the boy who had been sleeping in the letterbox fell out.

  ‘No room,’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘For my wife only?’ asked Joseph. ‘Tonight she will bear a Son.’

  ‘Then she must do it by starlight,’ said the innkeeper, closing the door. Joseph put his foot in the way.

  ‘Listen,’ said the innkeeper, ‘you think I’m joking?’ He pointed upwards, into the beams, where five spiders were looking gloomily at six infants whose father had knotted the webs into hammocks.

  Joseph nodded and was about to turn away, when the innkeeper said, ‘But go round the back to the stables, and see what you can find.’ Now, the animals that night knew that something strange was going to happen because animals always do know when something strange is going to happen.

  They were murmuring among themselves: the ox had seen a star glowing brighter and brighter, and the camel had had a message from his brother, who worked for a king, that kings were travelling to Bethlehem that night.

  Mary, Joseph and me pushed our way into the crowded stable. It smelled of sweet, warm dung and dry hay. I was hungry. Straight away, Joseph swept some straw into a heap, and spread out a blanket from the saddlebags. He went outside to fill his leather bottle with water from the well, and because he was a kind man, he brought in fresh water for the hot, crowded animals too. Mary was glad of the heat of the animals. She fell asleep for a while.

  When I was unsaddled of all my burdens, Joseph turned me out into the yard to eat my supper. It was cold, sharp, biting weather. The stars were bright as bells. The deep black sky had the new moon cut in it and the fields beyond the town were visible under that moon, but as a dream is visible to one who sleeps, and not to one who is awake.

  ‘Something will happen tonight,’ said the ox. ‘I can feel it in my shoulders.’

  ‘I can smell it,’ said the dog.

  ‘It’s quivering my whiskers,’ said the cat. The horse pricked her ears and looked up. I carried on eating because I was hungry. Eating as only an ass can eat, I saw the light flash across my hooves, and wipe from grey to bright the turned-over, trampled and frosted clods of earth around the stable. I looked up; the back of the inn was ramshackle and dark, but the stable was shining. Two creatures in bright array were sitting on the slipped clay tiles of the ridge, their feet clean and bare, their hair flowing like a fast river, and each carried a long trumpet slung across his back.

  Above them was a star whose edge was so close I thought it would cut the roof in half, and wedge its brightness in the wormy purlins, so that the stable and its star would be solid together, hay and dung and another world.

  There was a great commotion, and three camels, jewelled and brushed, stood steaming in the yard. At a word, the camels bent and kneeled, and the kings who rode them each unpacked a precious box of great price.

  In all of this light and motion, I trotted quietly through the little door and pushed my way through the other animals to where Joseph was kneeling with Mary. She was on all fours, just like us. There was a rushing sound, like water, and a cry, like life.

  It was life, bloody and raw, and wet and steaming in the cold like our breath, and the Baby, its face screwed up and its eyes closed, and Joseph’s hand bigger than its back, and suddenly there was the blast of trumpets, and the front bl
ew clean off the stable, and I looked up and saw the angels’ feet pushed through the sagging roof and their bodies taut on the ridge-line, heralding the beginning of something, the end of something, I don’t know what words to say, but beginnings and ends are hinged together and folded back against each other, like shutters, like angels’ wings.

  I tipped back my head, and I brayed and brayed to join the trumpets. My nose was so high and the roof so low that the angel’s foot brushed me as I sang.

  The kings came inside even though there was no inside left now that we were blown inside out, time past and future roaring around us like a wind, and eternity above us, like angels, like a star. The kings kneeled and one of them, the youngest, began to cry.

  Then four shepherds, dressed in sheepskins and smelling of sheep dip, came with hot mutton in a broth and poured it into wooden bowls, and Joseph fed Mary as she leaned against him, the Baby under her cloak, its body lighting up her body, so that even in the gold that was the angels, and the silver that was all the stars of the sky, the Baby shone brighter. They wiped Him. They wrapped Him up. They laid Him in the manger.

  Some time in the night, the lion on soft paws crept in and bowed his head. Some time in the night, through a gap in the wall, no bigger than thought, the unicorn touched the Baby with his horn.

  Morning came, a stretching, yawning, sniffing, snorting, shuffling sort of a morning. I trotted round to the front of the inn, and there were the scowling melon-heads sitting on their pots by the porch, drinking thick coffee from tin cups.

  ‘Look at that donkey’s nose,’ said one.

  ‘What’s he been eating?’ said the other.

  I squinted down the velvety barrel of my nose, but I couldn’t see anything strange.

  All around, the town was waking, merchants and herdsmen, camel-drivers and bankers, and the whispering news was that something wonderful was happening.

  The innkeeper came out of the inn. He was the first with the news: King Herod was coming to Bethlehem – what an honour, what a compliment, that must be the meaning of the star, and the babbling portent of the raving drunk asleep in the empty wine barrel – angels on the stable roof, he’d said. He looked at me.

  ‘What happened to your nose?’

  The three kings had left before dawn, warned in a fitful dream to return by another route. I had seen their dromedaries moving like music out to the fields where the shepherds were already lighting their morning fire.

  There was nothing to show for the night just gone, except three boxes of precious stuff, a hole in the roof where the angels had dangled their feet on the rim of time, and the fact that the stable door had been blown off. Joseph paid for the door with a piece of gold from the box, and showed the innkeeper the Baby Boy, and they talked about the star seen in the East, and the innkeeper gave his opinion, boasting about Herod, and some fool-talk about angels, and then I trotted back round the corner, nose-first.

  ‘Well I’ll be blowed,’ said Joseph.

  The truth is that when the angel’s foot had rested on my muzzle as I brayed, my muzzle had turned as gold as a trumpet that proclaims another world.

  We didn’t wait for Herod. We set out for Egypt, not telling anyone where we had gone, and I carried Mary and her Baby, many days and nights, into safety.

  Sometimes, when the sky is very cold and clear, and I have done my day’s journey and stand half-asleep, half-awake in the warmth of my stall, I think I see the bowl of a trumpet, and its long funnel, and a foot, clean and white, dangling over the ridge-line of the stars, and I lift up my voice and I bray and I bray, for memory, for celebration, for warning, for chance, for everything that is here below and all that is hidden elsewhere. Hay and dung and another world.

  have never been good at New Year’s resolutions.

  New Year’s Eve, like Christmas Eve, is a time of contemplation for me. It’s a good moment to look back – not with a view to doing things better; that only works with practical stuff, like practising your swimming stroke or improving your French. No, the important stuff has to be done not better, but differently.

  It might be the way you relate to your partner or your kids. It might be to bring more joy into your life. It might be to make time. It might be to let something go.

  Doing things differently is difficult. We like habit. I guess that’s why people resolve to kick their habits at New Year. Some do that, through willpower; most of us fail. Actions and behaviour – habits – are on the surface. Why we act or behave in certain ways is usually buried deep – and so it’s hard to change our behaviour unless we change something more fundamental about ourselves.

  My old Jewish friend Mona says you go through life carrying two bags, and you have to know which bag to put your problem in. One bag is time and money. The other bag is the life-and-death struggle.

  The life-and-death struggle includes having any kind of conscious life at all beyond the effort to meet your material needs. And it includes coming to terms with death.

  Mrs Winterson celebrated New Year with a mixture of gloom and anticipation. This was a woman for whom life was a pre-death experience. Somewhere there was a better world but it wasn’t on the bus route and she had never learned to drive.

  Every year she wondered – out loud – if this would be her last. She wondered too if it would be the Year of the Apocalypse.

  Our drill went like this: in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping and Dad was on the night shift, Mrs W stood at the bottom of the stairs blowing her version of the Last Trump. We didn’t have a bugle so it was usually a mouth organ or comb and paper. Sometimes she just banged a pan.

  I had to run downstairs and get in the cupboard under the stairs, where there were two stools and an oil lamp. And lots of tinned food. Then we read the Bible and sang. When the End came we were going to wait under the stairs till an angel liberated us. I used to wonder how the angel’s wings were going to fit under the stairs, but Mrs Winterson said there would be no need for the angel to come in.

  I don’t know where Dad was supposed to be in all of this, but he still had his tin helmet from the war, so perhaps he was supposed to wear that and wait outside.

  We were living in End Time. If you live that way you live on high alert. I did. I do. There’s so much we carry with us from our past. And if we can’t change it then the next best thing is to recognise it.

  At least that way you can laugh about it or maybe make something of it for yourself.

  We had a ritual at home of burning the calendar on the fire on the stroke of midnight. I still do that. I like going round the house collecting the old calendars. I realise that few people have open fires these days, and a shredder doesn’t have the same poetic intensity.

  A friend of mine writes a page of regrets and sets fire to it in the kitchen with a candle. Other friends let off fireworks, each one a wish for what might happen.

  Fire is celebratory and defiant. Light and fire have always been symbols of the spirit against the relentlessness of time.

  Nearing midnight I turn on the radio. Hearing Big Ben chime the hour on the BBC has a solemnity to it and a sense of tradition.

  On the first stroke of the great bell I open the back door to let the Old Year out, and I stand with her as she goes. Goodbye! On the last stroke I open the front door to let in the New Year, welcoming her as she comes.

  This is all pretty busy because I have to make it past the fireplace with the calendars on the way.

  And usually, because everybody gets a bit sentimental sometimes, I’m reciting Tennyson to myself:

  Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

  The flying cloud, the frosty light:

  The year is dying in the night;

  Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

  The rest of this part of the very long poem ‘In Memoriam’ is pretty terrible tea-towel stuff so I stick with the first verse. Be
ing a great poet doesn’t mean that you always write great poetry.

  In itself, that’s a lesson for New Year.

  We’re humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don’t know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We’ve been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We’re pessimists who believe it’s too late so what the hell? We’re the comeback kids in love with second ­chances. And every New Year is another chance.

  What is New Year anyway?

  Until 1752 Britain and her colonies (sorry about this, ­America) had two new years a year because the legal new year began on March 25th, Lady Day, so-called because if you’re going to have Jesus born on ­December 25th Mary has to be bang on time and conceive on March 25th – a date conveniently close to the spring equinox of March 21st, when our pre-Christian ancestors celebrated New Year. New life, the return of the sun, all very sensible.

  Britain has been celebrating a new-year festival on January 1st since the 13th century, but until the 18th century the legal new year on March 25th forced the custom of double-dating for nearly three months of every year depending on whether you reckoned you were in a new year or not.

  To add to the fun, in 1582 Roman Catholic Europe ditched the Julian calendar, invented by Julius Caesar in 45BC, and started to measure the year by the Gregorian calendar, still used today.

  The problem was that Caesar’s solar year was eleven minutes a year out, which added a day to the calendar every hundred and twenty-eight years. By the time we had reached the 1500s, the calendar pinned on the wall (OK, so there wasn’t one but you get the point) bore no relation to the two equinoxes and the solstices. Pope Gregory decided Europe needed a new calendar, named after him, of course, and because he was Pope everybody had to agree. Except England.

  England was busy splitting forever with the Church of Rome – this was our first Brexit from Europe. Naturally we weren’t buying their calendar with a different picture of the pope for every month.