Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those for whom the sacred has slipped away. There are times when life insists we do nothing, and some come at Christmas. Holidays bring downtime, moments when work and parties, preparations and cleaning, computer games and social media, all cease. William Henry Davies knew the value of time left fallow:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
I remember a fertile silence as a young man in a wintry chapel, where incense lingered and the only sound was stone settling after six hundred years. When I had a functioning knee, I found ideas would often come to me as I ran, even when the fields looked lifeless and the road was edged with frost. They came because I was both occupied and absent-minded, and the challenge was not in reaching for them – they arrived of their own accord – but remembering them when I got home. I suspect many that I forgot still served to help, tilling untrodden regions of my mind.
Sacred moments can make a church of a cluttered room
Sometimes the frantic side of Christmas seems the real point, the chaos culminating in children’s feet cantering around the house in excitement and torn wrapping paper shin-deep over the living room carpet. But some of the best hours are peaceful, and sacred moments can make a church of a cluttered room. Parents will know the change that comes over a house once children fall asleep, and the sense of gratitude and quiet happiness that can fall on Christmas Eve. Until last year, my wife and I made a habit of drinking Louis Remy’s Latricières-Chambertin 1991, acquired in a fire sale from Justerini & Brooks. A lovely wine, fragrant with woodsmoke and autumn glory, but what mattered were the hours it accompanied. We drank it as we wrapped presents late into the night.
When I say ‘we’, I mean my wife. I am banned from wrapping duties, and in this instance my incompetence is neither learned nor weaponised but innate and unforced. As a casualty doctor, my sutures were secured by enormous granny knots, and my wrapping takes that spirit and applies it to the scrunches of which paper is capable. But at least I supplied the wine, even if I asked my wife to extract the crumbling cork.
I remember mutual incomprehension when, as a young couple, we started spending weekends together. She couldn’t fathom how Saturdays and Sundays could be approached without goals and timetables. I couldn’t comprehend how they could have either and still be a weekend. She would set an alarm for seven hours after we went to sleep, and to my bafflement would get out of bed when its bleeps first broke the silence. I preferred to snooze, and felt it to be one of my core talents.
Somewhere in Keith Waterhouse’s wonderful Theory and Practice of Lunch – an ideal Christmas present, and it pains me to say a far more festive one than my own books – he explains why supper can never be its equal. At supper-time we know it’s OK to relax, to enjoy ourselves. At lunch, especially on a weekday, there is the zest that comes from stolen time, from playing truant, from enjoying ourselves when the siren call of labour is loudest. Stealing lunch from the jaws of work is quiet rebellion; Christmas gives us permission. Shared holidays turn truancy to civic virtue.
In 1819, John Keats wrote to his brother and his sister-in-law, telling them of his indolent morning. ‘If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness.’ Yet from that letter, and the train of thoughts it records, came two of his greatest odes, the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn. Reverie, whose friend is absent-mindedness, is not rumination. Clearing one’s mind allows it to become what Keats called a chamber of maiden thought:
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same
Sanctuaries of the mind are not permanent, and neither are we. Christmas should remind us of that; as well as gold and frankincense, the Magi brought myrrh, an embalming oil, a reminder of death. Sometimes we fool ourselves about our duties and about our nature. Fine, as Rudyard Kipling advised, to fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. But better, sometimes, to sit and watch them pass. Fallow time is not wasted time, and this Christmas will not come again.
