Christmas Past

A short message of goodwill

… But Christmas morning. There’s something about Christmas morning… the first moment when you wake up. Somehow, I don’t know why, I always know it’s Christmas morning. It’s as if during the night, while you were asleep, something had happened…

Like Celia Johnson in The Holly and the Ivy (see my post on that majestic film) I always feel a sense of magic when I wake on Christmas morning. The world, as she says, feels different.

I really can’t explain this, except as some sort of embedded antique knowledge of the nativity story. Which of course is not shared by everybody. One would no longer say, as Celia does: ‘And you realize, and this seems the strangest thing of all, that it’s Christmas everywhere’, although in context the line is very beautiful.

And I completely understand that not everybody enjoys it… one is sometimes aware of offering blithe festive messages to people who clearly wish they could be teleported to December 27th. or even Jan 2nd (out the other side of the terrible concept that is Twixmas). Sometimes that is for reasons more serious than a dread of boredom/arguments/in-laws/ bad TV. For instance I remember the Christmas Day that fell three days after my father’s funeral; or rather I don’t remember it at all, except that it left me with a very strong aversion to brandy - which he adored and which I must have drunk too freely (I don’t remember that either) as a way to get through. It’s odd: I can’t bear the smell of brandy and yet I can think and talk about Dad with pleasure.