Charles Moore Charles Moore

My childhood horror of a warm Christmas

As a child, I had a horror of the idea of Christmas in a hot place. Somebody told me that in Australia they ate roast turkey on the beach. This sounded positively irreligious, and I gave no consideration to the fact that the chief subject of the Christmas story probably never enjoyed a white Christmas himself (though it can be surprisingly cold in the Judaean hills at this time of year). Actually, I never experienced a white Christmas either, on the day itself, though I do remember the evening of Boxing Day 1962 when it began to snow, and didn’t melt till March. The other day, I re-read The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White. I loved the book when I was eight, but had almost forgotten it. It is the story of a boy known as the Wart (rhyming with ‘smart’), whose real identity may be guessed from the book’s title.

Charles Moore
Written by
Charles Moore

Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.

He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

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