LIBBY PURVES reflects on how it is a time to heal us all – and celebrate those special traditions

Who are these people who must ‘ring the changes’ at Christmas, ditch the boring old traditions for something new and radical? I wish them a merry one, but it baffles me every year.

I flinch a bit at design-conscious householders who buy a new set of tree decorations every year (‘our theme is silver and burnt-orange for 2019’ etc).

Whaaaaat? No old, scratched family baubles? No wonky toilet-roll angel? Do you not value the past, with all its flawed, naff precious decisions?

I love small family traditions that go on and on. They defy absences, bereavements, sickness, precarious times, anxiety.

My Christmas this year drops neatly between two chemotherapy cycles (lymphoma, early days: one week in hospital then three out, till spring, hurrah for the NHS) and I’ll be back in hospital for New Year (which sounds rather peaceful).

It’s unnerving, of course, but there have been harder ones and nothing stops Christmas and its old certainties.

Seasonal habits don’t need to date back to Dickens or be universal, and you can always add a new one or drop a nuisance (look, there’s no law about fiddly pigs-in-blankets! Lunch is quite enough of a meat-sweat without that . . .)

But some feel sacred. My mother always made almonds fried in butter and salt for a snack before Christmas lunch: no idea how it started, but I do it in her memory. And to general delight, almonds turn out to be the one nut that my allergic family-member can eat.

Doing the traditional thing is not a cliche, but attests to our acceptance of certain basic things: home and hearth, family and its flaws, hospitality and friendship and the Christian heritage that enjoins the simple instruction to extend ‘goodwill’.

We’ve been missing that a lot this past year, a year of angry divisions nationwide. I’m not saying tinsel and mince pies can heal everything, but they help. They really do.

For my family — we’re not particularly original — the core of the festival means carols, stockings, bracing walks and either watching or participating in the fearful Christmas Day North Sea Swim.

Lunch follows, involving crackers with terrible jokes, indoor fireworks that set off the smoke alarm, pudding ignited bravely by the youngest person present (my youngest nephew took over Granny’s Recipe on her demise, and now constructs the pud even if he’s not there on the day).

Who are these people who must ‘ring the changes’ at Christmas, ditch the boring old traditions for something new and radical? I wish them a merry one, but it baffles me every year [File photo]

Then there is HM Queen at 3pm while we’re still in paper hats. All of us are beside that tree on which every phase of past life is dangling: children’s home-made decoration disasters, a Polish wooden rooster bought by my mum in 1946, stuff bought on holidays in France, Spain, Prague, Krakow, Disneyland and the ‘coat-of-many-colours’ bauble that we picked up when visiting that shrine to Dolly Parton, Dollywood in Tennessee.

It’s history, that tree. The shape of the feast varies between families, and indeed branches of one family. One of our tribes favours Midnight Mass (awesome below the angels in the roof of Blythburgh Church in Suffolk).

For others a long, cosy supper, maybe some readings (‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’ is always a favourite).

Another insists on watching The Nightmare Before Christmas; my own family needs The Snowman.

But however you do it, keeping tradition at Christmas means having everything the same — only different. Sometimes you can’t do it all, but even then you can reach for the small things, just one or two of them.

Repetition underpins the rolling years, anchors us, weaves the memories together. The longer your winding road through life, the more fascinating to pause and look back. 

You remember the great ones, the exciting ones, the slightly routine ones, the new-baby ones, the big, emotional years when it took iron resolution to raise a glass to ‘absent friends’.

You remember the lonely, awkward or ridiculous ones, too: teenage anxieties about whether spangly tights and a miniskirt would attract boys’ eyes in church, the weary nights breastfeeding a colicky baby under a glimmer of fairylights, the brave family unification the year after we lost our son.

On the day, you can safely turn back and allow all the old years to show themselves again, good or bad. It makes you see that life is an oyster, laying down a new layer on a pearl every time, making it bigger, though some layers are less smooth and shiny than others.

Dig up the memories, good or bad. Safe in the nest of small, daft unchanging traditions, it’s easier to accept how much has changed. Here are a few of mine.

There were the childhood years when we were often abroad for my father’s job as a diplomat. 

I faintly remember hot, sticky climates in Thailand and being assured that Santa would manage without a chimney because he comes up the canals in a boat with dragons instead of reindeer.

Christmas is a pause, a staging-point, a moment of hope; a time when doors are both open and closed. Closed against the prattling, argumentative, newsaholic, social-media snipey Brexity world, so that we sit around a table with real people for whom we have real affection [File photo]

In Johannesburg, too, it was hot, but the expat community insisted on a traditional dinner, eaten outdoors under a vine, with the sausages fierce chunky Boerewors, not chipolatas. 

But we still managed mince pies, and our longest surviving tree bauble dates from there: a Xhosa wooden doll.

Hamburg meant gingerbread and wonderful midnight masses, full-throated renderings of Stille Nacht with artists from the State opera house coming to our church and drowning us in glorious voices — a young Placido Domingo came once.

Switzerland meant snow, ritzy streets, unaffordable shops and dignified religious ceremonies. 

It also meant a large and temperamental Spanish housekeeper, ironically called Jesusa, who walked out on Christmas Day when we had the ambassador due for lunch.

My mother had begged her not to work Christmas, because she was quite capable of cooking dinner without a black thundercloud of Spanish disapproval in the background.

But Jesusa had strong views about the correct pampering of ambassadors, and insisted on coming. I never found out what the trigger for her defection was, but we didn’t see her again.

Always, though, there were those fried almonds, pudding and turkey and crackers. Early memories are, of course, the ones which, later on, you passionately want to give your children and help other children to have (support the Sally Army and all those toy appeals!)

Few things in life are as magical as those first exciting dawns: the thump of a heavy stocking or pillowcase on the end of the bed, the sleepy groping for surprises (one year, when I was very small, I reached in and pulled out the tangerine, put it back, then later pulled it out again and for a moment thought all I’d got was tangerines).

Another year there was the jack-in-a-box: I still have it, it still works. In Germany there was a tiny wooden pigsty with four wobbly pig-snouts: it is on the mantelpiece still as I write.

We flinch a bit now at the torrent of plastic toys and silly stocking-fillers, but there’s healing in the giving. And when there is fracture, and sadness, and rancour, it nourishes as much as food itself.

I have never forgotten joining an overnight queue outside Toys ‘R’ Us to get one of those scarcity toys for a nephew: I think it was that awful Tracy Island model.

Strangers, out in the cold, struck up conversation and several people talked about how sad their own beginnings were and how Christmas made them determined to lay down better memories for the new generation. It was the most powerful vision of seasonal hope I ever encountered.

Later, young adult lives can, though, go through a stage when you don’t feel in tune with Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas. Perhaps you want to feel the festival over a larger canvas. 

For two years while working on local radio, having no children or partner, I volunteered for Christmas duties and stayed away from home until the 27th.

There was something special about arriving in the studio alone at 6.30 on a dark Christmas morning, saying ‘Happy Christmas!’ to anyone listening, and taking phone calls from people who might be alone, or sad, or simply first up in their house, shoving turkeys in the oven. It was an honour to be the first to wish them merry.

Later in the morning, we broadcast live from a children’s ward at the local hospital with doctors and nurses playing Santa, and the Radio Oxford entertainer and Punch-and-Judy man doing tricks.

I loved being on duty that day, just for those two years, and shifting the day 48 hours onwards to go home and play family (with fried almonds) afterwards. There’s a different, equally precious buzz in being a Christmas Day worker.

Another year found me crewing a yacht in the mid-Atlantic, sailing towards Barbados. Again, it was an early-morning moment that fed my spirit. 

I was alone on watch at the wheel as the sun came up on the 25th, and the BBC World Service was broadcasting the Queen’s Christmas message.

It was 1978, the year that HM quoted her father, George VI, reciting the poem by Minnie Louise Haskins in his 1939 Christmas broadcast as the world plunged once more into conflict.

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,

Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.

And he replied:

‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

‘That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’

Alone, on a sunlit deck, rolling across the waves on the greatest of adventures, wondering whether when I got back I would still have a boyfriend (I did — later my husband), it was like a hand on my shoulder.

But most of the memories are the straightforward ones: 40 years of family life, in five different houses. I remember the rapture of our 18-month-old when he was allowed to take a New Berry Fruit out of the bowl, and was so excited he carried that treasure round in his fist for an hour.

I remember the years of making sure that ‘Santa’ used different wrapping paper from that adorning the main presents under the tree, and the challenge of assembling Lego pirate ships after a few slugs of mulled wine.

The numbers around the table varied over the years, from seven to 22 (which meant wobbly trestles). For years there were the old people of both families, not always quite as tractable as one might hope but part of the essential furniture. My brother’s father-in-law had a splendid white beard, and when he fell asleep in his chair after lunch it felt as if we were hosting a worn-out Santa.

There were glitches: one year, my mum had pneumonia and had to have her Christmas dinner (and cracker) brought upstairs to her, and the rival granny got jealous of the attention.

Another time, our two had mumps, and my brothers — who hadn’t yet had children — quite reasonably decided not to come given that mumps in adulthood brings a risk of infertility in men.

Repetition underpins the rolling years, anchors us, weaves the memories together. The longer your winding road through life, the more fascinating to pause and look back [File photo]

Once, the lot of us were snowed in and had had enough of each other by the 27th.

Two years ago, a phone call from America announced the Christmas Day birthday of my first great-nephew: last year he was among us at the table, waving a handbell out of a cracker with proper one-year-old glee.

This year we hope he’ll be even more into it.

Christmas is a pause, a staging-point, a moment of hope; a time when doors are both open and closed. 

Closed against the prattling, argumentative, newsaholic, social-media snipey Brexity world, so that we sit around a table with real people for whom we have real affection.

But open, too: a time to put a candle in the window to signal a symbolic welcome to wanderers. The best buzz is when for some reason there’s a stranger or near-stranger among you.

I was brought up to think of celebrating all Twelve Days Of Christmas, not giving up on Boxing Day. After the boozy or quiet New Year comes the feast of Epiphany on January 6, when the church marks the arrival of the Three Kings at the crib — Twelfth Night.

The French held Epiphany parties for children, where a tiny ceramic bead hidden in a flan and the child who gets it, possibly chipping a tooth, gets to be Le Roi or La Reine, wear a paper crown and choose a partner. My mum kept that up for decades, with neighbours’ children.

And afterwards, well, the goodwill has to grow, to mean anything. It’s a peak time for resolutions and sign-ups to support charities, to volunteer, make resolutions not just for self-obsessed slimming or promotions, but for others.

Christmas only works if it reaches out beyond the home. The warm glow of the family tree has to spread out wider.

So that when it’s over for another year, another layer of shine has been added to the pearly bauble on the tree of our life. Enjoy the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and yet to come!