I don’t mind admitting to the whole world (or such proportion of it that reads this blog at any rate) that I love Christmas. And not just any Christmas, mind, but a Traditional English Christmas. The Christmas of a chocolate-box cottages festooned with holly and mistletoe settled in a thick blanket of virgin snow. Inside, the ruddy-faced yeoman of England get ready to carve the succulent goose while their stout jam-making wives bustle in and out of the kitchen with sweet, steaming puddings. Through the window the sight and sound of squealing children building a snowman and playing with their toys (they have to be innocent, wooden toys – tops and hoops and dolls – none of your Nintendo in this folk-fantasy if you don’t mind) and carried on the wind are the melodic harmonies of the Church choir singing carols from vestries unseen
After the banquet, the sleep-inducing warmth of the crackling hearth, the brandy and the sherry and the port; the smell of cloves and mulled wine; stories and songs and recitations and in every soul the ghostly tingle of the metaphysical magick of the yuletide
This is what Christmas means to me. It is what Christmas will always mean to me. I know it is probably a construct; a quasi-Dickensian fantasy of an England that is no more and, perhaps, never was. But it is a righteous and worthy fantasy all the same; an expression of eternal desire for all the truly important things in life – goodness and bounty and family and home
I have no place in my heart for ‘Happy Holidays’ or the ghastly, bureaucratic ‘Winterval’. Christmas is Christmas and for me it will always be that chocolate-box cottage in the snow somewhere in Dickensian England
May I take the liberty of wishing a very merry English Christmas upon all my fellow Blogistas
