Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

  So we carried on being eleven days different from the rest of Europe. And we did this, not just Britain but America too, once the Puritans had made it to Plymouth Rock, right up until 1752.

  You can hear the old calendar in the names of the months: September – the seventh month; October – the eight month; ­November – the ninth month; December – the tenth month.

  Adjusting to the new calendar in 1752 involved ‘losing’ eleven days. And so September 2nd 1752 was followed by September 14th 1752.

  Time is a mystery.

  Here is my New Year’s Day steak sandwich.

  YOU NEED

  Best sourdough bread you can buy

  Sirloin steak. Buy a wedge and slice it thinner than usual – think sandwich not slab.

  Winter salad greens and reds – radicchio, chicory, romaine lettuce

  Horseradish

  Home-made mayo (see ‘Susie’s Christmas Eve Gravlax’)

  METHOD

  Slice the bread not too thin. Spread with mayo. Not butter.

  Pile on the greens and reds – both pieces of bread.

  Fry or grill your slices of sirloin the way you like them – bloody or burnt – and put one or two on top of one slice of bread.

  Spread the steak slice with horseradish.

  Slap the second slice of bread on top of the first – the lettuce will stay put.

  Cut in half with a lethal knife.

  Eat at once.

  Drink with a slightly chilled Gamay whatever the time of day, including breakfast. This is New Year’s Day and millions of people will be detoxing, dieting and proclaiming Dry January. Take a stand.

  If I have guests who are vegetarian I make them an omelette sandwich, same bread, spread with HP sauce, no butter, and served with a glass of champagne. Or a cup of strong tea. That’s the best I can do.

  Happy New Year.

  THE GLOW-HEART

  hristmas Eve.

  Marty was leaving his friend Sarah’s house after supper. Sarah always threw a party on Christmas Eve and, like all the other Jews they knew, went to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day.

  Marty was the last to leave. He stood looking out of the window of the apartment. The snow was falling contentedly. The street was quiet.

  ‘Christmas Schmistmas,’ said Sarah, leaving the pile of plates she was stacking in the dishwasher and coming to stand beside him and leaning on him a little. ‘Jesus was a Jew born in Bethlehem. Why is it always snowing?’

  ‘Well, it is snowing, no arguing with that,’ said Marty. ‘I like a white Christmas. Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, “Have yourself a merry little –” et cetera.’

  ‘Don’t be so sentimental,’ said Sarah.

  ‘What’s the matter with schmaltz?’ said Marty. ‘We invented it.’

  ‘We invented Christianity and what good did it do us? Hundreds of years of persecution.’

  ‘We invented it but we didn’t believe in it – we were too practical; as a story, it’s ridiculous, the woodworking Messiah raised from the dead and heaven at the end of the runway. But think if we’d kept the copyright.’

  ‘Yeah, it was a lousy deal, but you can’t rewrite history.’

  ‘What do you think I do all day in my office? “Hey, can we break this contract?” “Hey, can we stop these people breaking the contract?”’

  ‘That’s just business. I’m talking life. The life of us all.’

  ‘Wait a minute – aren’t you a shrink? Did I miss something?’

  ‘No, you didn’t miss anything. If you want to talk about inventions of the mind – and to me that’s what religion is, an invention of the mind – then the Jews invented psychoanalysis because every Jew would like to change the past: 0y vey! She ate the apple . . . Sure, the food’s nice, but you should have eaten here before the flood . . . You’re telling me that’s the Promised Land? Can we share an Uber back to Egypt? Maybe everyone would like to change the past – the regrets, the failures, the mistakes, but you can’t do it.’

  ‘But you can change the past,’ said Marty, ‘not big history but small history. As a mass we’re doomed and disappointed, I agree with you. Individually, things can change. I know you believe that.’

  ‘Home is where the heartache is,’ said Sarah. ‘My job is always a challenge around Christmas. People get worse, not better. But what about you? How are you doing? I’m sorry we didn’t have time to talk tonight – so many people, and we’re all so noisy. Want a Scotch?’

  Marty shook his head. ‘I’ll get going.’

  ‘Sit next to me tomorrow at Chine-Ease.’

  ‘I’m not coming. I want to be with David. He loved Christmas.’

  ‘Marty . . . this isn’t good . . . ’

  In reply Marty kissed Sarah on the cheek and took his coat. He forgot his gloves.

  How quiet it was. Had everyone gone to bed already, waiting for Santa Claus? What an inspired mess is Christmas. Santa Claus, spruce trees, elves, gifts, coloured lights, decorations, magic, a ­miracle birth. And the winter solstice shortest day just gone, and the need of something like hope, just now.

  Marty started singing Judy Garland – was it from Meet Me in St Louis? ‘“Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. ­Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow . . . ”’

  David was dead. This was the second Christmas Eve he’d walked back from Sarah’s alone.

  The first Christmas Eve he’d stayed the night with her, on the couch, under blankets thick enough to keep out the cold air but not the cold in his heart.

  Love is regret, he thought. The ultimate ‘if only’. The seductive swerve in time where life changes track twice. When you meet. And when you part.

  David had been the dreamy one, the gardening one, the sporty one, the outdoor one. Marty preferred a movie and a meal with friends. David didn’t eat hot food unless someone else was cooking it. Left to himself, it was cheese sandwiches or sardines from the tin, with a bottle of the best wine. He ate handfuls of salad and carrots raw from the garden. Marty protested and tried to bring the produce indoors to try a new recipe. David thought you should cook intuitively – ‘That’s because you never cook,’ said Marty.

  David believed in signs – ‘Look for the signs,’ he said, whenever there was a decision to be made and Marty, sighing, was trying to weigh up the odds.

  ‘Good thing we didn’t try to meet on a dating site,’ said Marty, ‘or we never would’ve.’

  They weren’t opposites; more like different time zones. ­Marty working late into the night. David up early in the garden. David sleeping without waking. Marty staring at the ceiling for at least two hours of every darkness.

  Marty liked to be on time. David was always running late. There was an acceleration in him, thought Marty. His body couldn’t keep up with his mind. His mind raced ahead. His body ran out of time.

  The city had finally stopped counting down to Christmas as though everyone was their own personal space rocket and Christmas their own personal star.

  That afternoon the shops had closed. The assistants had gone home. Marty knew that millions of people were still buying online but at least they were out of his way and he could walk the streets – if not in peace, in quiet. He liked walking. He liked city walking. He didn’t want to have to go to that place called the countryside to take a walk. He wanted to stuff his hands in his pockets, set his internal compass vaguely east or south and wander till he was tired enough to get the bus home. He’d done a lot of that since David’s death. It was a way of being with him.

  What Marty hated about death was the fact that you thought about the other person nearly all the time – it was overwhelming and invasive. Exhausting. What you didn’t do any more was arrange to meet at 6pm and try a restaurant. You didn’t rush to finish up at work so that you could get away early for the weekend together. There wa
sn’t the glorious muddle of forgetting someone completely – because you had that luxury – and then looking up, seeing the clock, feeling the jolt of anticipation, sexual, emotional, knowing you would be with them soon, leaving work, flowing down the street with thousands of others, but moving in the ­certainty of the two of you together.

  And always that same smile, hello, kiss, his hand on your shoulder, what a day, what will you have, oh, it’s good to see you. And not going home apart later. The silence of the night where he’s turned from you, sleeping, and you touch his bare back unseen, and this bed is your raft of time.

  They had walked through London together, and now the walks were a way for Marty to spend time with the man he loved.

  As if he were there. And at the door, at home, Marty said ­goodbye – sometimes he left his dead David at a bus stop, kissed him, walked on, without turning round.

  Then, when he got in the house, poured a drink or made tea or sat with a book, then just for a little while it felt better. But he still woke up too many nights, even after all, and turned over into the emptiness of the bed.

  ‘You should try to meet someone,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I’m not ready.’

  Sarah lived in Camden Town. Marty lived in Shoreditch in an old Georgian house that had belonged to his parents. They had never sold it – it wasn’t worth anything back then. Instead, they had moved out to the suburbs from the rough city streets, and rented the house, room by room, to students, all sharing the single bathroom.

  Marty had inherited the house, gone on renting out the rooms, living in the basement that only had a cold-water tap, until he could afford to let the tenants go.

  He renovated the house year by year, doing much of the work himself.

  He lived alone because he liked it. He had men, but not relationships. David was the first person he had fallen in love with.

  David had never moved in with him – there was more than enough room, but David liked his small bright rented studio in King’s Cross.

  Marty suspected that David saw other men for sex but he didn’t ask. David liked to go clubbing. He was braver, more flamboyant. ‘What exactly is flamboyant about holding hands?’ he had said to Marty, who was nervous about it at night, walking home, and ­embarrassed about it by day.

  David worked out, liked his body, had a pieced ear. Marty bought him a diamond soon after they met.

  ‘That’s flamboyant,’ said David. ‘The word means wavy like a bouncing flame – and look at the light bouncing off me now!’

  Marty had waited, unseen, outside David’s studio one evening. He saw an older man going in with David. About an hour later, the man came out. Marty was meeting David that night for a late movie. He sent David a text to cancel. He didn’t give a reason. He never told David what he’d done, but he realised that night that either he would have to start spying on his lover, or he would have to stop right now.

  David was David. Why do we fall in love with someone because of the glory that they are, and immediately try to change them?

  It wasn’t until after David died that Marty started haunting his building again. He walked past it at least once a week, and it made him angry and sad. It did him no good, brought him no relief, but he kept on doing it.

  He was walking by the building right now. David’s blinds were still in the windows. Half-drawn, the way he liked them. Tonight there were Christmas lights in the window too. David would have lit a candle. A single candle.

  When they first met, David had taken Marty to his studio and lit the candle. They had kissed each other standing in front of the fridge, which had made Marty feel poetic about fridges ever since. Sometimes he patted one as he went past it, as though every fridge everywhere was a benevolent player in their romance.

  But Marty was shy, and it took him a week, after that first night, to get back in touch with David.

  David, coming in from a run, saw the message, threw his phone in the air and ran out again. He ran all the way to the Columbia Road flower market near Marty’s house.

  Marty opened the door in his dressing gown that early Sunday morning to find David in shorts and running shoes, leaning on the bell with an armful of flowers and lighting up the narrow hall with globes of pink peonies.

  ‘I didn’t think I liked cut flowers,’ said Marty.

  ‘It’s a sign,’ said David.

  Soon David was turning Marty’s long, thin back yard into a Promised Land of climbing beans and wisteria and old English roses and lavender, and the windows were open onto the street and life came in like music and played in every room.

  ‘Thank you for making me happy.’

  Marty said this out loud to the candle. David had loved little ­twinkly lights. When he made the garden for Marty, that first summer, he had taken Marty out to a bar to eat the night of the summer solstice, and insisted they didn’t go home till dusk – nearly eleven o’clock that night, and Marty had to go to work the next day. But David was excited about something. When they got home he ran ahead, leaving the front door open, shouting, ‘Don’t put the lights on!’

  Down the long, narrow hall into the long, narrow yard there was a wavering light. Marty followed it. He stood in the yard. The place was lit up with something like Chinese lanterns – but long, not round – everywhere – on the top of the wall, in between the roses, among the lettuces that shone weirdly green like veg from Mars.

  ‘Glow-worms,’ said David. ‘Because the sun stands still today – that’s what solstice means. From the Latin sol: the sun, and the verb sistere: to stand still. I want our sun to stand still, just here, just now. Let this be world enough and time.’

  They made love on the pull-out bed in the shed.

  Marty looked up at the candle that was no longer in the window. Then he turned away to cut through Clerkenwell, carrying the heavy bag that had become his heart.

  David had squeezed his hand that final time and whispered, ‘I’ll send you a sign.’

  But there had been no sign. There never is, is there?

  Marty didn’t believe in life after death. David did. ‘It’s not interesting as an idea,’ argued Marty. ‘Why are we even talking about it?’

  David said, ‘It’s fifty-fifty. One of us is right and one of us is wrong. When we’re dead, in that split-second when there’s still consciousness, one of us will be saying, “Oh, shit.”’

  Life after death, thought Marty, then out loud, to no one, because no one was on the streets, Marty said, ‘So I said to him, and do you believe in Santa Claus too?’

  The whiteness was brightness. Deep and crisp and even, reflecting the street lights. But then Marty, looking round in the emptiness for an answer to his question, registered an alteration of light, and a vast shadow darkening the white. He looked up.

  In the white snowbound sky, right above his head and big as an airship, floated a giant, peaceful Santa trailing a stream of HO HO HOs behind him. Marty could clearly see his black boots and red hat and the sack slung over the shoulder. Had he come unmoored from some expensive offices? Was he a Christmas publicity stunt? What was he doing flying silently over the silent city?

  Marty stood looking up as the Santa hovered in the frozen airstream of midnight. He appeared to be waving at Marty. There was no reason for Marty to wave back but he did. And as he did the Santa seemed to change direction; he wasn’t moving west any more.

  He was moving east, with Marty.

  Marty shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets and quickened his pace. He liked Christmas, truly he did, but should that warrant being followed home by an inflatable Santa Claus?

  ‘Hey,’ David had said, ‘don’t you love it that you get camels and robins on the same Christmas card?’

  ‘When were Christmas cards invented?’ said Marty. ‘Victorian, right? Must be.’

  ‘Postal service and cheap printing,’ said David. ‘Yes, y
ou’re right. Henry Cole 1843 in England – guy worked in the newly founded Post Office, responsible for the Penny Post. In America the first commercial Christmas card is 1874 – for once we got there first.’

  ‘I like it that you tell me things,’ said Marty.

  David drew and wrote their Christmas cards. His last Christmas he was too tired but he had sent Marty out to buy fifty of those slim, round watch batteries and he spent the day in bed cutting up paper. A friend of his had come round and David asked Marty to get everyone champagne.

  When Marty returned with the bottles, he went upstairs to find David. The bed was empty. He panicked and ran through the house, shouting DAVID! DAVID! The friend had gone – leaving the door to the back yard open. Marty could hear Judy Garland – ‘Next year all our troubles will be miles away . . . ’

  Marty went into the yard. Hanging from the trellis and the hooks and scooped across the door in a chain and fixed onto garden canes in every pot and raised bed were lit-up paper hearts, white and red and pale green.

  David was sitting wrapped up in his wheelchair in the shining dark. He was smiling, so pleased with himself and his surprise.

  ‘You loved the glow-worms I made for you that summer we met. So I made you these. I call them glow-hearts. And they are mine and they are yours and I love you.’

  Marty knelt down by David’s chair and put his head in the rug on David’s knees and he cried all the tears he had kept back. And David cried too, wetting Marty’s hair, and David said, ‘There was a princess in a winter that was never summer and she cried so much for what she had lost that her tears froze to pearls and the birds took them away to decorate their nests. A prince riding by, as princes do in fairy tales, saw the pearly nests and asked the birds where they had found such riches, and the birds flew with him to the princess who had cried so much she was surrounded by pearls. And the story ends when he kissed her, of course, and it stopped being winter that day.’

  ‘That is the most sentimental thing I ever heard,’ said Marty, through his tears.