Afternoon:
10°c
I’ll never be ready for Christmas – so bring it on
23 Dec 2008The three-year-old, whipped into a state of exquisite anticipation, stares unhappily at the tree. "It takes too long to get Christmastime," she says, with piercing toddler woe. It does indeed take a long time to get Christmastime for us mere rude mechanicals in the great domestic drama.
We have attended three school productions and comforted one weeping child dressed as a donkey who broke for freedom. We have been instructed to source a gentleman's cap and a "T shirt like the Victorians would wear" (what?) for a staging of A Christmas Carol at one night's notice.
We have ordered from Father Online and duly sent back misdirected goods to Father Online's great sorting office in the sky. We now have a Pavlovian reaction to anything that looks like a delivery van. We have braked abruptly as the top-secret talking doll hidden in the boot clearly articulated her prolix presence after we hit a speed bump.
We have ordered a large turkey and then remembered we are somewhere else for Christmas lunch. We have bought a Father Christmas biscuit-cutter: and maybe we will achieve the actual biscuits by next year. We have hidden things so diligently, we will not remember where they are at 11pm on Christmas Eve. We will remember on Boxing Day exactly where they are.
Parents take heart at those eerie, wintry lines of Robert Frost: "I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep." Don't we know it.
* Keynesianism (or at least the splashing-out bit) has been the great return of 2008 - chief adherents, Gordon Brown and Nancy Dell'Olio. But Nicky Haslam, who threw his Great Gatsby party as recession dawned, has a better claim to the title than most. "There's nothing like spending your way out of a recession," he tells me. "After all, my father was Maynard Keynes's private secretary."
* My memorable pre-Christmas thrill has not been the triste parties, where we stared into our non-champagne asking each other if fiscal stimulus will work, but Twelfth Night at the Donmar West End. Michael Grandage's production is pitch- and pace-perfect. Highlight: Derek Jacobi as the deluded Malvolio (below), determined to smile while never quite getting there. One obvious model for this performance: Gordon Brown, who has similar difficulty distinguishing between grin and grimace. Still, he ends the year still in power and catching up in the polls. He might even feel that he'll be "reveng'd on the whole pack" of his tormentors, too.
