I was dreading it. Utterly dreading it.

I love Christmas. 

Seldom have I looked forward to it less. 

The only Christmas I can remember not enjoying was when I was a teenager and for some lunatic reason opted to stay with my French exchange friend’s family over Christmas.

No carols from King’s.

No parties with my friends from the choir.

Not even my family (though I minded that a lot less).

To top it all, my hosts served a huge bucket of fresh, live mussels on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve… which was when I discovered my violent allergy to shellfish. Most particularly fresh live mussels.

Never again.

But at least that Christmas I hadn’t dreaded beforehand.

(Actually, sorry, there was another Christmas that was seriously dire. By December 2005 we had been homeless for four months: in which time I’d been living hundreds of miles away in Scotland; three of the children extending their accommodation at university; one prolonging his stay at boarding school; and Shaun, first sofa-surfing then staying with kind friends forty minutes’ commute from the church that had tipped us out onto the streets in the first place. The only way we could be together at Christmas was by borrowing three homes in succession, from extremely generous people we didn’t even know.

That was a pretty bad Christmas… Though one of the two moments I remember most vividly was of Ben making us all laugh round the borrowed kitchen table till we were doubled up, weeping, aching and snorting through our noses. He does that, Ben.

The other was of being so distraught and distracted I nearly drowned our youngest.)

The more friends I talk to this winter, the more I feel the misery hanging like a dank cloud over the country, pregnant with more unspent tears.

Loneliness, frustration, even anger…

Locked-down throughout London. Locked-down here in Bedford. Locked-down almost everywhere and at the last minute.

(And, I confess… I’m sure… friends who have never broken the law in their lives before…  doctors hugely sympathetic to the measures… pillars of the community… extremely moral members of churches… dashing to pick up family… planning a quiet flight on Boxing Day… sneaking out to go to aged and alone parents before midnight when another law falls.)

Christmas loomed without half our family. And, for the first time in my life, without either of my parents.

And the prospect drear beyond bearing.

A few weeks ago I read the letter from our daughter (the one who is extremely ill) with her wish-list for Father Christmas.

First item.

Communion with her family…

(She who finds church so formal and cold, she hasn’t been since I can remember.)

There must be advantages to having a man of the cloth in the family. Not many, perhaps. And none financial.

But still…

So there came a moment, around lunchtime on Christmas Day, when I looked up and out through the window, and saw sun on the bare branches and a bird hopping.

And suddenly realised,

This is all right.

This is fine.

This is really, seriously, ok.

The fire was crackling.

The candles were lit: four for Advent and one for Christmas.

We had just been singing carols by my father’s close friend and colleague David Willcocks: Ben on the piano; the other parts as best we could.

Shaun was now speaking the dear, familiar words of the Book of Common Prayer.

There was a simple goblet half-filled with port on the coffee table (left over from making my cranberry sauce) and a plate of seeded brown bread with the crusts cut off (surplus from my bread sauce).

Our daughter had her wish.

And I, far more than I had even asked for.

We have not been struck by Covid.

We have not lost our home.

We have plenty to eat.

Some time around nine o’clock on Christmas night we started playing charades and laughed so much we woke our ill daughter and she came downstairs again.

You’ve got to give me a title, she said.

Come on then: out in the hall.

Cæsar’s Gallic Wars, I said.

Cæsar’s what? You’d never know she read Classics at the same college as my father.

Well, there’s not much that rhymes with Gallic. And what does is quite rude.

(* See 18+ footnote)

And that was after we’d been through strings of garlic and baguettes and moustaches and Ben’s even ruder French joke that we all know better than we wish we did.

We laughed even more than we had in 2005.

It took for ever.

It always does when she enacts them. Last year we were half an hour shouting out Always Look on the Bright Side of Life before it transpired that this miserable image hanging by its arms was not in fact a human crucifixion victim but a very depressed albatross shot by an Ancient Marriner.

Eventually Shaun: Are you trying to say, Cæsar’s Gallic Wars?

Yes! Well done!

You morons. It’s not called Cæsar’s Gallic Wars.

Oh?

It’s De Bello Gallico.

Of course.

(Ok. You try enacting, Sounds like, Hello phallico.)

Do you know, my daughter said at the very end of the day…

I think that’s one of the best Christmases we’ve ever had.

(*Adult gloss.

Sounds like masturbation? Shaun asked at one point.

Oh yeah, Ben said.

Like all the other words that rhyme with masturbation…)