Why not have Christmas every other year?

I still adore Christmas. I would do anything for it. I am steadfast and loyal to the season, bracing myself, pacing myself, until I brim with shrill pneumatic cheer. 

Ideally I’d like to chop down a huge tree with a shiny axe, powdery snow from its higher branches settling on my hair, iced-bun style. I’ve been collecting Christmas baubles since I was five and strung up on the tree they’re almost my autobiography now. 

I do a placement for the parcels when I’m packing the stockings, building crescendos and interesting pairings, with something appealing to each of the five senses as well as the makings of an emergency meal. 

Christmas plays to my strengths. I have the necessary skills latent in my personality. I am more than happy with overwhelming emotion, nostalgia, neon, Dickens, glitter, Coca-Cola and pine essence. 

I know all the songs and have replacement lyrics for the lines of carols that offend. (For “Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s Womb” which is horrible, try “Lo he is comfortable with parthenogenesis”.)

Key scenes from Christmas films such as Elf, our hero ecstatic on the Etch-A-Sketch production line, or Meet Me in St Louis with Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with Technicolor poignancy, are playing in my head year-round any way. 

I enjoy overfeeding people and plying them with drink. Wicked in April, in December it’s chivalry. 

Gift-wise, I often know what people want before they know it themselves. Quite a bit of my house is already red and green. 

When, each year around November 20, people sensibly murmur: “I’m not going to go mad this year,” it offends me. What sort of attitude is that?

The Christmases of my childhood were sublime, laid on with care by my mother’s best friend — the kindest person I ever knew. 

Her husband — almost unbelievably — was a big cheese in toys. Ten children crashing around a house in a field with donkeys, Frank Sinatra and Count Basie playing on a loop, and occasional interruptions from Debbie Harry. There were mountains of presents, often so thoughtful they winded you.

My ordinary life then was fraught and insecure, low in treats and high in bean-based economy drives. The bright memories of these Christmases sustained me through hundreds of forlorn hours. 

It was medicine for the loss and disappointments of ordinary time. Compensation and reward, a cure perhaps. Christmas raised my morale, turned me and my siblings into heroes. It changed the way I saw the world.

I will never forget what Christmas did for me then. I am still, in my way, trying to repay its debt and make others concede its magnificent allure. 

And yet every year a tiny bit of me suspects that Christmas is secretly trying to kill me. It wants my heart and my liver and kidneys too. 

I give it my all, making stained glass windows for the gingerbread house by melting Fox’s glacier fruits in a double boiler, and still it isn’t satisfied. 

Like a withholding parent in a novel by Henry James, these days Christmas seems to ask a great deal of satisfaction for the little it gives.

Some years that elusive Christmas feeling — a mixture of wild excitement, sugar, rescue, sharply felt absence and Benylin — refuses to arrive at all. Snow helps; and new babies. 

The reconstruction of an 18th-century confectioner’s at the Fitzwilliam Museum. But such things aren’t always to hand.

I’ve seen children of nine, brave and wistful that Christmas doesn’t make them feel the way it did when they were six — when they were sad it didn’t make them feel the way it did at four. 

I’ve seen women in their very late forties rueful that they felt quite Christmassy on June 3 2017, but not once since.

There’s an embarrassment between me and Christmas now. We know each other too well. 

Christmas saunters into town like a wisecracking cowboy in a country song, smiling that smile, and you’ve promised you’ll stand up for yourself this time and you’ll stay strong because who is meant to be the boss round here anyway? But before you know it . . . Here you go again.

The trouble is Christmas draws together so many bewildering uncertainties. 

What emotional state is your family in? How loved are you? What is there to believe in? What do you want? What are your needs? And how can we best bear the loss of the departed? 

Add anxieties about food and money, all in one day and yes . . . you better watch out.

Might we have it every other year?

The Christmas after my mother died, life as I knew it was unthinkable, so we went to Miami. On Christmas Eve after the cinema we wandered into a church that was bright as a toy shop. 

Banners proclaimed an “extravagant welcome”, “relentless compassion”, “unending revelation”. (I liked this building’s understanding that Christmas was never for the faint-hearted.)

It was a service, indeed a church, for people who were struggling. Quite a few of the congregation were suffering the ill effects of alcohol and drugs. 

Three little sisters in flammable red flamenco dresses swayed alarmingly close to a bank of lit candles. I held my breath. 

Next to me a young woman in an older man’s arms nodded in and out of consciousness. There was no attempt to hide the dangers of life. They were everywhere; as good as anything.

Amazingly the service that night was almost entirely aimed at mourners. It was a small miracle for me. Merry Christmas. FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Susie Boyt is a novelist who lives in London. She writes a column on shopping for the Financial Times Weekend supplement.