The chaos of Christmas is what makes it so powerful

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newspaper.

The author is a writer of fiction, cookbooks and books of poetry. He latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing

There is something magical about Christmas. Maybe that’s the whole God-children thing; perhaps it is the pagan light-dark dichotomy. Maybe it’s the way we’re pushing the hibernation period so clearly with more conversations than the last 11 months combined. Perhaps it is the nature of running away from something that is possible because we cannot avoid it. This is my revelation of the year: I’m only good at Christmas because I’m really bad at Christmas.

I start thinking about it in advance, like in October: buying something nice for the tree, looking at ribbons, thinking about my topics (!). I always have a tree, and it’s usually too big for whatever area we live in. There are two wicker hampers that live on a high shelf, and I start to think about opening them as soon as the daylight savings start: a minute, actually. , I begin to succumb to the blackness of the year.

Like many, my mindset is one of avoiding and seasonal inefficiency. If I were a bear I would be healthy (salmon sashimi; long sleep), but instead I am a person with a big and happy family. We have traditions to keep! Places to be! People to see! I have a lot to do for dormancy to be a viable option.

Again, I would miss it. I’ve had a few years, for various reasons, of really bad Decembers and I couldn’t help myself even then: soggy pies in the hospital lobby, little trees on the windows cleaned, I make calendars to get to the floor room by room. a mini scalpel and another Pritt Stick. The year the world shut down and jumping everything was possible, I ate caviar and crisps in the bathtub and watched. Carol You’re alone on Christmas Eve: it’s festive, it’s fun, and it’s the only way out of the pit of total doom.

Christmas cannot be ignored. One thing is not a clean bear life: the other option is the pit.

That’s why, I think, if I was in a house on fire I would think to grab the Christmas box first. Nowhere in my life have I built an elaborate defense against the dark: velvet ribbons in six different colors, wooden angels, Indian baubles as big as two fists and as small as a marble. Polished goat bone hoop and Polish colored glass. Miniatures of all kinds: toasters, toucans, tinned fish and – fresh from the National Theatre’s new production – glittering glass ballet shoes on taffeta ribbon.

These fragments that I have saved against my destruction, by which I mean, the reality of what is upon us: the canceled catsitters, the uncomfortable Secret Santas, the loneliness of not being understood or unappreciated, constant boredom, last minute schedules, late trains. , baggage fees, roast beef, busy streets, feuding families, raining trash, darkness, heartbreak, talking too much, not getting back with not enough effort. and the prevalence of income tax.

As my mother likes to say (in one of the many family traditions) and to quote the childhood of her neighbor’s boyfriend: How was Christmas? Oh, you know: a few lines and a few mistakes. These things, or some of them, cannot be avoided.

However, some things can also be avoided. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: if you can’t run away to leaveescape toor to enter.

There is a technique to relieve panic attacks that relies on the patient to carefully observe his surroundings through the prism of the senses: five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things that you can touch, two things that you can smell, one. something you can taste.

This is always useful, but it is especially useful now. The paradox of Christmas is that it has to have everything at once, which is what makes it so powerful: joy, pain, loss, longing, big sandwiches. It turns the microscope and magnifying glass into your life, however you live it.

Such overwhelming trauma can only be resisted by careful attention to detail: the roundness and sparkle of, for example, a purple glass bulb on a fine gold thread; the wooden interior of Angela Harding’s advent calendar; a glaze of demerara sugar on top of a star-shaped pie. Netflix’s rosy crackle thriller 4K Birchwood Fireplace For Your Home: Crackling Edition. A bowl of soft peelers. Quality Street cover under the coffee table. a paper hat that rips off the giant head of a human uncle. A short time of day once it starts. Leftovers at midnight. Sweetness, wherever it can be found, and wherever it is dark.