Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

by Jeanette Winterson

Every time a woman gives birth she is the fleeting tableau of the holiest of happenings. Daily life and devotional life are held together in this image. And it’s an image with its roots deeper than Christianity. If we look back into Greek and Roman history we can see that gods and marvellous mortals are usually born of one divine and one human parent.

So the Mary myth brilliantly manages two magnetically opposed forces: the new religion of Christianity offers a tale of god-into-man divine birth. Mary is special and singled out – like in the hero stories. Her pregnancy is no ordinary domestic arrangement; she has been visited by a god. At the same time, her purity and submission allow the new religion to break away from the riotous pagan sex cults and fertility rites that the Jews hated. Right from the start, Christianity had the knack of fusing together core elements from other religions and cults – ejecting any problematic elements, and then telling the story in a new way. That has been part of its global success story. And the most spectacular of its success stories is Christmas.

But there’s a psychological side to this too. The 19th century was haunted by itself. Its new industrialisation seemed to have unleashed the very powers of hell. Visitors to Manchester called it the Inferno. The English writer Mrs Gaskell wrote of her visit to a cotton mill, ‘I have seen hell and it’s white . . .’ And the new poor, the factory slaves, the basement-dwellers, the toilers in iron, heat, filth and degradation, appeared like spectres, thin, yellow, ragged, semi-human, half-dead. That this is also the century of organised charity and philanthropy is not a coincidence. And that it is the century of Christmas at its most inspired as well as its most sentimental should not surprise us. Christmas becomes a magic circle, the season of goodwill where those who have benefited most from the mechanised desolation of their fellows can both make amends and soothe their own souls.

In fact Acker, with her bluestocking fascinations and zero culinary skills, had now blended together forever custard and New York City. After all, Bob Zimmerman had changed his name to Bob Dylan because of his hero Dylan Thomas (maybe ‘Tambourine Man’ owes everything to Night Custard). And Dylan Thomas died in New York in the Chelsea Hotel. Whenever I make custard I think without thinking, image without imaging, a New York City now as lost as Atlantis; of Beat hotels and drunk poets and diamond voices as various as Andy Warhol and Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas and Kathy Acker . . . who died not many years after this time, in 1997, furiously fighting cancer and upholding Dylan Thomas’s poem: Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Our grand gestures and our small acts are not so far apart. We remember our friends for the insignificant and silly things we did together, and for the greatness that they were too.

It might as well have said ‘27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON’. The frenzy was the same – the rush to buy as many things as you could that you didn’t want and couldn’t afford. Things so little wanted they were given as gifts – that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

Sandy interrupted me. ‘People feel light-headed on mountains because the solid world dematerialises. We are not the dimensional objects we believe ourselves to be.’ ‘Are you a Buddhist?’ Sandy shook his head impatiently. I was failing him, I could tell. He tried again, looking directly at me. Those eyes . . . ‘When I am climbing I understand that gravity exists to protect us from our lightness of being, in the same way that time is what shields us from eternity.’