All I want for Christmas
Matthew Dennison
IT was more than an icicle. More like an icy boulder, oversized and murkily white, faceted like a cartoon jewel and, shortly, dripping. It had lurked beneath a low stone bridge at the bottom of the wood, where sycamore thickets bald for winter gave way to mud and a mountain-fed stream, quick with meltwater. Of course we took it home, this Christmas trophy discovered by an enterprising four year old small enough to stand upright under the bridge.
We paused for photographs in the hall, gumboots making puddles on the stone floor, the ice boulder obscuring the red cheeks of its proud finder, then lovingly consigned it to the only tiny corner of the freezer unoccupied.
How crisp are the outlines of this memory of the finding of the ‘ice rock’. And why? Because it heralded as near perfect a Christmas as any can be, but one whose happiness was characteristic and has been repeated and repeated, albeit without the ‘rock’.
‘Sameness and repetition are intrinsic to family Christmases’
Our son was four, he had three of his four grandparents, it snowed and it snowed; after church, the entire family sledged on the hill beyond the kitchen windows. It was a long, low house and there was space in the drawing room, although nowhere else, for an enormous Christmas tree and heating sufficiently moody to ensure the tree’s longevity.
Sameness and repetition are intrinsic to family Christmases: that year, our trip to cut holly from the hedges had been complicated by overcurious heifers nudging much too close and we dragged the prickly bundles home on a bulkily loaded sleigh. Indoors, the scent of cut holly is sharp as clove oranges and never changes, like the musk of board games unearthed once a year, together with white napkins, bottle coasters and the Christmas tea towels. And we remember being four, even those of us who didn’t find the ice rock.
Matthew Dennison writes for COUNTRY LIFE and is the author of several biographies, including ‘The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter’. His new book about The Queen will be published next year
Jonathan Self
NOTHIN’S as mean,’ said Kin Hubbard, ‘as givin’ a little child somethin’ useful fer Christmus.’
This was not my parents’ philosophy. You could ask for whatever you wanted, but if you had outgrown your coat and there wasn’t a hand-me-down in your size, you could expect a coat under the tree. They weren’t poor or parsimonious, merely frugal.
In 1966, aged seven, I still slept at the very top of the house (as I got older, I was allowed to descend to more comfortable realms), in a room that was so cold I might as well have been outside. On Christmas Eve, I pinned one of my father’s thick, hand-knitted socks to the chimneypiece and wriggled between the icy sheets. I lay completely still because, if I moved around too much, the quilt, fashioned from a particularly slippery satin,