DREAMING OF A GREY CHRISTMAS

MAYBE SCROOGE WAS RIGHT?

Bah, humbug! Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge in A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951)

Until I moved to France, Christmas was seldom merry. For a writer, it’s a working day like any other, and I was used, as the holidays loomed, to find myself alone in a town where I knew almost nobody. One learns to live with this, and not to make it worse by accepting the invitation from distant acquaintances who, thinking to take pity on you, squeeze in an extra chair at Christmas lunch, and even scrape up a gift or two, generally exhumed from last year’s discards. (“Let’s give him this. You’ve never worn it.”)

To tell the truth, some of my warmest Yuletide memories are of escaping it entirely.

Before FedEx and other express shippers took over the market, legal firms which needed to move documents across the world in bulk, and in a hurry, used a courier, who received a free air ticket in return for the use of his baggage allowance.

In December 1988, I was alone in Los Angeles and contemplating a solitary Christmas with relative equanimity when a courier agency rang. Could I accompany a last-minute shipment to Sydney?

I still remember the sense of freedom as I took off from LAX that afternoon. Fast diminishing in my wake were all thoughts of gifts, cards, trees, carols, egg-nog, turkey, Santa and screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life. 

Fourteen hours later, I surrendered my baggage checks at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport to a frazzled-looking legal secretary and,  in the dawn of a scorching summer day, took a cab to the house of an old girlfriend. We enjoyed a Christmas brimming with comfort and joy, and not a reindeer in sight.

Things didn’t necessarily improve once I got married. I won’t easily forget a Christmas we spent in Detroit, at the invitation of an old friend. An academic like me, he had - also like me - married one of his students, abandoning a wife and two small children to do so. He felt their loss keenly.

“It’ll be great!” he said over the phone. “I have my kids for Christmas. We’ve got a tree - and a turkey!”

Meeting my eye, my wife raised her eyebrows and mouthed silently “Detroit?”  But we had no plans, and he was a friend. Why not share his  pleasure?

Christmas Eve dawned stormy. Cold fronts marched across the eastern seaboard, and a roiling bank of steel-grey cloud pursued our flight. By the time we reached Detroit, it was a blizzard. Our host made increasingly desperate calls to his ex-wife, begging her to ignore weather reports and put his kids on the plane. By nightfall, it was clear that, sensibly, she wasn’t about to do so.

For him, the holidays ended there. Inconsolable, he wandered the apartment, staring out at the horizontal snow and, ignoring our presence and that of his wife, muttered “Christmas is nothing without kids.” Next morning, lights on the tree remained unlit,  gifts unopened. The snow passed by mid-day but not the wind that drove it. Since nobody felt like cooking, we trudged to a deli for a Christmas lunch of pastrami on rye with a pickle, and a slice of pie. 

We did no better on another American Christmas, this time spent in Louisville, Ky. Divorce ran through through my wife’s family like one of those genetic conditions that passes down the female line. The scores of discarded partners scattered around town made it a diplomatic minefield. As socialising with one faction automatically earned the hatred of the rest, we decided, on this occasion, rather than face the parade of recrimination, to stay in a hotel, see a few relatives, and slip out of town on Boxing Day.

On Christmas morning, however, a knock on the door roused me. I opened it, to be faced by a skinny African American man in a Santa suit. Behind him stood a TV camera crew, lights blazing.

“Happy Christmas,” he said. Dipping into his sack, he handed me a banana.

“We’re from local TV news,” the cameraman explained. “We’re doing a piece on people alone in town at Christmas.”

“OK,” I said. “Want to try Take Two?”

I closed the door, opened it to the second knock, affected surprise, accepted the banana, and answered a couple of questions.

“What was that?” my wife asked sleepily.

“Local TV.” 

She sat up in bed, now completely awake. “You didn’t talk to them?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Because it’ll be all over the mid-day news! Now everyone will know we were here.”

She was right, of course. The recriminations were exceptionally bitter.  “It’s bad enough that you didn’t call,” hissed an aunt, “but to go to a hotel….”

But then I moved to France, and married into a family for whom Christmas wasn’t simply a holiday but a succession of celebrations, dinners and ceremonies which, incorporating a few birthdays and anniversaries, begins mid-December and doesn’t end until the 6th January - what the British call Twelfth Night - a date marked by the French with the ritual division of the galette des rois.

Cemented into this structure, I’ve learned to, if not actually like Christmas, to at least endure it. But if the phone should ring on Christmas Eve and someone ask “Could you possibly courier a package”, I can’t promise not to ignore the unwrapped gifts and the turkey in the oven and, grabbing my passport and humming Leavin’ on a Jet Plane, head for the airport.