On Christmas

Day in the Morning

Merry Christmas to you.

Yesterday, I managed to watch Scrooge — the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol — so now I’m a lot less Ebenezer.

What made me finally realise that, beneath my crust of Christmas grump, I really love a lot about the season, was writing this little passage from my novel Patience.

You don’t need much context. It’s 1979. The narrator, Elliott, a young boy, lives in a Catholic children’s home, looked after by the Sisters. He is confined to a wheelchair. He is a bit of a genius, in love with words.

And so here is Elliott’s Christmas rhapsody, which I send to you with all best wishes for a happy, healthy, creative and compassionate New Year —

The other soundworld in the long corridor I loved was Christmas carols because they floated on the air like icing on marzipan that is pretending to be snow on a Christmas cake with the smiling snowman cake decoration and the Santa’s sleigh cake decoration that came out every year although the Sisters were very careful with me because I could so easily choke and choke to death on a currant or a raisin just as if it were an orange button but the peace of O Little Town of Bethlehem traveled in a straight line parallel to the floor from the radio to my heart and I believed that at that precise moment my mother who must love carols because carols are the sound of a mother a mother like Mary’s wall whiteness and plain love for her infant child born in Bethlehem or anywhere in the world amid woe and straw and kine and need to be redeemed she heard my mother heard as I heard and in our ears we met as if our ears were touching and her ear was tender against my ear and her cheek was motherly against my cheek like marzipan beneath icing like snow though warm and blushing with happiness to think of the faraway son having his best Christmas because of the three wise men card and the Snoopy book and the blue and white stripey jumper and together travelling along the long sounds of we see thee lie.

I wished her my mother a Merry Christmas through the still small voice of the carolling that hymns on high in the human heart and cannot but be felt wherever kitchens are full of roasting smells and brothers and sisters who can stand and walk in and out of rooms full of gratitude for their presents from their parents and appreciation of every bauble on the Christmas tree and every link in the paper chain with which they have festooned the ceiling from corner to corner marvellous word festooned above their diagonally crowned heads because they couldn’t wait to crack the crackers and so become on this day a royal family with Princes and Princesses as well as King and Queen before the real Queen’s speech that is warm but wise as she offers motherliness to everyone in the Commonwealth sometimes in front of her tree which is bigger than the trees of almost everyone else in the Commonwealth she sent a great message from me to my mother speaking of the importance of family at this special time of year or the especial importance of family at this time of year I can’t remember which she said exactly but the Queen comes after the carols from King’s College Chapel Cambridge and for an hour and a half the long corridor of the ward was a soundworld of choirboys with voices like snowing singing notes like icicles to listeners as cosy as fires in hearths with stockings hanging on either side just like the Christmas card from one birthday card and one missing birthday card before Jim arrived.

My poor mother when the Queen speaks of the especial importance of family must think of me with warmth and guilt and longing and Mahler sounds but we have already been together at Yuletide in O Little Town and in our ears of beautiful white cake.