on the fabric, and ask if you wanted him to remove it. He told everyone about the Fuzz Away and used it until it fell apart, and then he worked out how to hold it together so it still functioned. I never saw him as keen about anything, ever, let alone a Christmas gift.
S. S.
In 2008, a company called Life of Jay responded to the apathetic shrugs of British men in the lead-up to Christmas with a product called Nothing, consisting of a clear Perspex ball full of air. At a stroke, the company fulfilled the specifically stated wishes of several thousand men; they asked for nothing, and they received Nothing in return. Nothing (or ‘Nothing’) wasn’t what they really wanted, of course – but it’s their own fault for never expressing any delight at small things over the course of the year, and instead developing secret desires for ridiculously big things like yachts, or expensive Bang & Olufsen speakers that promise ‘optimum precision in sound’. These things are forever destined to remain pipe dreams, and men should set their sights a little lower, maybe somewhere just above luxury bath salts.
The annual tit-for-tat reciprocity of Christmas giving3 begins with Christmas cards, a tradition that only started in the mid nineteenth century but one for which the British continue to show great enthusiasm. The Christmas card industry is surprisingly resilient; we bought more than a billion cards in 2016, and they’re still seen as a more appropriate display of familial affection than sending your uncle an e-card with a virus that key logs his computer and sends his credit card details to a hacker in Minsk. Unlike festive JPEGs, the exchange of physical cards is constrained by Royal Mail’s last posting dates, which feels like a quaint concept in this Internet age. Some people fail to get their cards sent in time because they’re disorganised, but others do it very deliberately as part of a covert psychological operation.
My mum keeps a list of all her friends. Every year she goes down the list and writes everyone a card. Then she waits. The day after the last posting date for Christmas, she puts a second-class stamp on the envelope and then posts them. This ensures that if someone hasn’t already sent her a card by that point, they don’t have time to get one back to her. My mum thinks that these people have to remember her of their own volition, and not be reminded with a card. If they fail to remember, they get removed from the list.
But if she forgets someone and they send her a card, she obviously has time to send one back. So she doesn’t hold herself to the same standards that she holds everyone else. And if everyone adopted her system, the whole Christmas card industry would collapse. It’s ridiculous.
G. G., Nottingham
If you thought it was difficult to think of original gift ideas, spare a thought for the people who are tasked with designing and writing our Christmas cards, year in, year out. The struggle to come up with new concepts that might appeal to a fickle British public gets more difficult by the year. Millennials may have no interest in a traditional scene featuring a wintery landscape, twinkling stars and Robin Redbreast; they may prefer something a bit edgier, like someone in a Santa hat flicking a V-sign with the caption: ‘Fuck Christmas, I’m Getting Twatted Instead.’
I spoke to an editor at a greetings-card firm on condition of anonymity because she didn’t want to get the sack, which is fair enough. ‘You’d think it would be easy,’ she said, ‘but there’s a lot to think about. For example, you can’t use the word “I” in a greeting in case the card is being sent from more than one person. The main problem is making the messages seem personal, but also sufficiently vague for lots of people to want to buy them. And every year we have to come up with new Christmas puns, but they’ve all been done. They really have. We’ve gone a bit delirious with it, honestly.’
I used to spend every Christmas within a few miles of the Welsh village of Bethlehem, which in December becomes a magnet for people who want their cards to have a Christmassy postmark. (Most people don’t even read postmarks, but again, it’s the thought that counts.) ‘People come a very long way to get a stamp,’ says local resident Des Oldfield, ‘but we don’t actually have a Post Office here any more. For a while people were taking their cards to Llandeilo instead, and they were sent on to Cardiff to be postmarked with “Bethlehem”! What a scam! They may as well do it in London! So we offer our own stamping service from a café here in Bethlehem during December, from Monday to Friday. The post office lets us stamp the envelopes as long as we don’t frank the stamp itself. It’s a nice oblong blue stamp which says, “The Hills Of Bethlehem”, and I think people prefer it – because who reads postmarks anyway?’ (Exactly what I was saying, Des.)
The other unusual postmark knocking about over Christmas is ‘Reindeerland’, which adorns envelopes sent by Father Christmas (who definitely exists) to children who have made the effort to write to him. In the UK he has been assigned the rather cute postcode XM4 5HQ, and every year hundreds of thousands of children use it to send beseeching begging letters. He actually replies in person, and it’s definitely not dealt with by a team of people in Royal Mail’s national returns centre in Belfast. OK, hang on a second. If you’re excited about the prospect of Father Christmas visiting you this year, I suggest you turn to page 17 while we deal with some issues that don’t concern you.
Birmingham, Christmas 1988
I grew up poor in an Islamic family in a terraced house near Aston Villa football ground. We had nothing. My dad was a jailbird and my mother worked as the cleaner at the local fire station. But growing up, as the days got shorter and the nights got colder, came the onset of Christmas, and it was the best thing ever. Trees in people’s front windows, the tinsel… Christmas adverts were joyous and we always had a catalogue. We never ordered from it, but I would thumb through, picking out the toys I wanted, knowing I would never get them.
In our front room the fireplace had issues. It used to have a gas fire, but we couldn’t pay the gas bill so my dad ripped it out and taped it up with a piece of white board. But for me this was a problem. How was I going to get the present Santa had thrown down the chimney for me? The other kids got presents. Santa surely wouldn’t deny a Muslim child because, you know, he’s Santa. So I figured my presents were being stockpiled behind that piece of card. They were safe. I told no one in my family in case they took them, but Santa and I had a pact.
When the card eventually got taken away, there was nothing but dust and cobwebs. I thought with all my heart Santa had my back. Instead he turned out to be a bastard. Christmas is a bastard. Doesn’t stop me loving it, though.
A. S.
It’s impossible to write a book about Christmas without addressing the question of belief in Father Christmas. Last year I was invited on a radio programme to talk about matters pertaining to Christmas, and I was sternly informed by the show’s producers not to make any reference to the possibility of Father Christmas not being real for fear that irate parents would jam the switchboards, furious at their offspring having been mentally scarred. In 2011, the Advertising Standards Authority received hundreds of complaints about a Littlewoods advert that appeared to suggest it was parents, not Father Christmas, who brought presents into the home. The ASA allowed the advert to continue running, but preservation of belief in Father Christmas, rather like vaccination, does rely on everyone buying into it in order to avoid widespread misery.
Runcorn, Christmas 1977
In the mid to late 1970s, having a new hi-fi was a big deal, and taping ambient sound from that hi-fi felt like entering the realms of science fiction. One year my dad suggested that we just ‘leave the tape recording’ overnight, so we could hear the sound of Santa arriving. We left out a mince pie and some brandy as usual, and before we went to bed we hit those two chunky Play and Record buttons simultaneously.
