Christmas

Tuesday

Selina Mills

Bah, humbug!, Tiny Tim

Here we go again. Partridges in pear trees. Lovely big Christmas turkey. The Queen’s speech. And then, at some point during the Yuletide season, some version or other of Dickens’s ghost story A Christmas Carol. This year’s glut of Scrooge stories includes the Old Vic’s major production starring Rhys Ifans (reviewed by Lloyd Evans in last week’s Spectator) and Michael Rosen’s retelling of the tale, Bah! Humbug! There is a new film, The Man Who Invented Christmas, featuring Christopher Plummer as Scrooge and Dan Stevens, he of Downton Abbey fame, as Mr Dickens himself. It plots the months running up to the publication of A Christmas Carol in Yuletide 1843.

Harry Wallop

Banning shops from opening on Boxing Day is a terrible idea

Britain was once a nation of shopkeepers. But one wonders for how much longer. As if the combination of Amazon, councils’ parking charges and above-inflation business rate rises wasn’t bad enough, we now have a petition. Of course, we do. The petitions wants all large shops to be shut on Boxing Day, as they are on Christmas Day. It argues that the people who work in shops toil very hard in the run up to Christmas. This is true. It then argues, ‘retail workers [should] be given some decent family time to relax and enjoy the festivities like everyone else’. Why? Why should the government legislate to ensure we can all relax? Because this is an ‘Up The

Wednesday

Felicity Hannah

Not to be a Scrooge – but I don’t want to spend £75 on an advent calendar

It’s not even December, and already it’s almost impossible to read a personal finance article that doesn’t include the words ‘in the run up to Christmas’. My social media feeds are full of photos of friends’ decorated firs and the caption ‘We’ve treed!’ The other thing that is guaranteed to happen around this time of year is that, possibly for the first time since you were a child, you’ve started to wonder if you need an advent calendar. Not one with tiny chocolate robins and angels in it, but a luxury calendar, filled with toys or booze or make-up, depending on your age and preferences. What started as a bit

Friday

Steerpike

Labour’s Christmas attack

Christmas is meant to be the season of goodwill. Alas, no-one at Labour HQ appears to have got the memo. The Labour party have released their Christmas cards – with a distinct Conservative vibe this year. Corbyn’s party has used the festive opportunity to make fun of Theresa May’s conference speech where the letters fell from the board behind her – meaning the slogan of ‘building a country that works for everyone’ soon became confused. Yours for a mere £8…

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 16 November 2017

Q. My husband, who used to be away on business most of the time, now works from home and has become bossy and dictatorial. He spends a good deal of his day advising me how the house could be better run. This is bringing tensions into our previously harmonious relationship. How can I put a stop to his interference in a delicate way without him feeling that I’ve ceased to respect his opinions? PS: the house already runs like clockwork. — Name and address withheld A. Why not act daft and agree with your husband that, since you seem to be less efficient than him, he should direct the running

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A cold coming to Cornwall

In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war. References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 5 January 2017

On the Monday before Christmas, the black dog came around again and I couldn’t get out of bed. I lay all day staring at the wall. Depression has little to do with sadness, I think. It’s blankness. The same thing happened to me about 15 years ago. I was like a prize gonk for the four or five weeks it took for the Prozac to work, which it did, and since then I’ve managed to foster and sustain all the illusions I need to keep me buoyant. I couldn’t get out of bed on the Tuesday either. I was adrift in outer space. But I knew I must pick up

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 29 December 2016

Q. Our first Christmas card arrived on 2 December and it was a lovely thing — a Burne-Jones angel musician, finely printed, paper inner lining and sent first-class in a franked envelope with an immaculate printed label.Unfortunately, the signature was just a large and meaningless felt-tip flourish; no address, no other clue except ‘Season’s Greetings’, which may hint at someone with an international list. While we still maintain our fading Christmas card habit, we would not want to give unwitting offence by not reciprocating. What do you advise, Mary? — P.W., address withheld A. Your letter has only just reached my hands. My advice will be too late to employ

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 29 December 2016

Home The Queen was said by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to have asked, at a private lunch before June’s referendum, about the European Union: ‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out. What’s the problem?’ Mervyn King, who was Governor of the Bank of England until 2013, said that Britain needed to be more ‘self-confident’ about its chances outside of the economically ‘pretty unsuccessful’ EU. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, issued a Christmas message: ‘As we leave the European Union we must seize an historic opportunity to forge a bold new role for ourselves in the world.’ George Michael, the singer, died aged 53. Rick Parfitt, who sang and

Joan Collins

Diary – 29 December 2016

Every year, from mid-November to mid-January, dozens of DVDs drop through my letterbox. These are most of the movie releases of the past year. It is with great anticipation that I tear open the yellow padded envelopes from Sony or Disney or The Weinstein Company, and even from companies I’ve never heard of; but invariably it’s with disappointment that I scan the hundreds of titles unknown to me, and I do read Screen Daily and the Hollywood Reporter. I’m amazed that the production companies manage to finance some of these films. I know from whence I speak. However, snuggled up on the sofa in the days before Christmas I dutifully

Emma Simon

Billions are wasted each year on unwanted xmas presents, but you can do something useful with that ugly jumper

Unwanted Christmas gifts have always been part and — excuse the pun — parcel of the festive season, whether it’s an unfeasible number of French hens, or an over-pungent celebrity-endorsed Myrrh bath oil. We all have our favourite stories of mis-judged pressies: from the husband who bought his wife a gravy separator for Christmas (we are still married), to Auntie Mabel’s attempts to buy fashion items for a 14-year-old. Nationwide, the value of these duff gifts is now estimated to be some £2.6 billion, according to a recent survey by Triodos Bank. Among the most unpopular gifts are Christmas jumpers, onesies, celebrity autobiographies, novelty socks and kitchenware. That’s what charity

Kate Chisholm

Chance would be a fine thing | 29 December 2016

It’s been a turbulent year, and not just in the outside world. Inside radio, digital is changing not just when and how we listen but content, too. Classic FM overturned its daily schedule in the run-up to Christmas to stage an all-Mozart day with nothing but the virtuoso’s works for 24 hours. It was a bold step by the commercial station, reliant on advertisers (and therefore listener figures) for its survival. How many non-Mozart-enthusiasts would be turned off by such a monothon? That Classic FM was prepared to take the risk suggests that the conventional division of the day into separate programmes, making sure there is something for everyone in

Saturday

Mark Forsyth

Who invented Santa Claus?

Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural terms. Over the course of the 1870s the venerable British figure of Father Christmas was consumed by an American interloper. Father Christmas (first recorded in the 14th century) was the English personification of Christmas. Just as Jack Frost is a personification of the cold and the Easter Bunny is a rabbitification of Easter, so Father Christmas stood for Christmas. He was an old man (because Christmas was ancient) and he was plump (because Christmas was a feast). But Father Christmas did not give presents, did not come down the chimney,

Alexandra Coghlan

The wartime origins of Carols from King’s

Christmas, for many people, began at exactly 3 p.m today, Christmas Eve. The moment when everything stops, frantic present-wrapping, mince-pie making and tree-decorating ceases and calm briefly takes hold. The reason? A single boy treble whose voice, clear and fragile as glass, pierces through the chaos with those familiar words: ‘Once in Royal David’s city/ Stood a lowly cattle shed…’. The service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, and its annual broadcast on BBC Radio 4 is as essential a part of contemporary Christmas folklore as stockings and Santa Claus, plum pudding and presents. Ageless and timeless, it seems as though there must always have been boys in red

Charlotte Gill

Christmas carols and the sorry state of British singing

At my local carol concert this week, I couldn’t help but despair at the state of the singing. It was just so dire. And it got me thinking: is the same dreadful crooning taking place at churches and carol concerts up and down the country? Are the tone-deaf spoiling age-old songs elsewhere too? If so, it’s a worrying indictment of just how bad British singing has become. Fortunately, when I was growing up I was always in choirs. Being in the Gluck glitterati, I lived a sheltered life, hidden from the tone deaf and silent myriad. There was never a sermon too dull, or wedding too icky, when I was exposed to the hymn belters.

Alexandra Coghlan

How a Christmas Eve ritual was conceived in the trenches

Christmas, for many people, begins at exactly 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve. It’s the moment when everything stops, frantic present-wrapping, mince-pie making and tree-decorating ceases and calm briefly takes hold. The reason? A single boy treble whose voice, clear and fragile as glass, pierces through the chaos with those familiar words: ‘Once in Royal David’s city/ Stood a lowly cattle shed…’. The service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, and its annual broadcast on BBC Radio 4 is as essential a part of contemporary Christmas folklore as stockings and Santa Claus, plum pudding and presents. Ageless and timeless, it seems as though there must always have been

Thursday

Gary Bell Qc

Season’s beatings: A barrister’s guide to a busy Christmas

My colleagues at the commercial and chancery bar are all at their chalets in Gstaad, funded by the endless fees from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and the family bar are out en famille in Mustique, awaiting the festive fallout — there’s something about turkey, port and the Queen’s Speech that pulls marriages apart like a pound-shop cracker, and divorce doesn’t come cheap. But for we poor criminal hacks, it’s business as usual: crime never sleeps, and never less so than when Santa Claus is coming to town. As a junior barrister I made out like a bandit. Booze flows, blood follows; office parties are a magnet to drug dealers keen to

Wednesday

Helen Monks Takhar

Why you’re not too broke to be charitable this Christmas

My mother is a good woman. But on being greeted by a charming golden retriever, a shaking red bucket and the dog’s well-meaning human handler from a local animal charity, a line had been crossed, even for her. Having already put her hand in her pocket for multiple charities in the town centre while Christmas shopping – from the wonderful Salvation Army brass band playing Away in a manger and the granddaughter she sent forth with a few quid, to the ebullient veteran who offered to pack her bags at M&S for a military charity – as a pensioner with no private income, she felt there was nothing more she could

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MPs release their ‘National Living Rage’

Oh dear. Just in case there weren’t enough novelty Christmas songs out there, brains at Labour have decided it is time to offer up one of their own. Siobhain McDonagh, the MP for Mitcham and Morden, has rallied the troops to record ‘National Living Rage’. The track — which takes inspiration from Band Aid 20’s ‘do they know it’s Christmas?’ — attempts to raise the plight of ‘hard working people’ who are being ripped off by some of the UK’s leading companies: ‘Christmas is hard on the national minimum wage At Christmas time, we give but some employer’s take And we know that they have plenty but they give out less

Helen Nugent

Don’t give in to New Year fad diets and fitness – they’re a waste of money

It’s not long now until Christmas Day, that cherished time of year when we don our elasticated pants, break the seal on the Quality Street and prepare to eat until we pass out. It’s the one day of the calendar when diets, healthy eating and all thoughts of exercise are banished, to be replaced by cries of ‘just one more helping’, ‘where’s the remote’, and, let’s face it, sheer gluttony. It’s a special time. Like most things, however, this abandonment comes at a cost, and I don’t just mean the suffusion of self-loathing on Boxing Day. There’s a financial price to be paid come New Year, and that takes the