Christmas Days

My heart is a coal cellar, piled high with flattened, inflatable Santas, shattered Christmas tree ornaments, and red and green drifts of unsent holiday greeting cards. There are picture albums stacked perilously high near the furnace, filled with photos of Christmases past. Polaroids of the angry uncle, the racist grandfather, the Born Again aunt with the long nails and the red eyes from staring too long at the bottom of a bourbon bottle, all carefully catalogued and labeled for my inevitable, once-a-year grudge viewing.

I prefer to leave Christmas down there, so imagine my surprise when asked to review Jeanette Winterson’s CHRISTMAS DAYS: 12 STORIES AND 12 FEASTS FOR 12 DAYS. Adjusting my monocle, I smirked into the darkness of my cellar. “With your name, Ms. Winterson, this had better be good,” I said to a startled-looking, plastic reindeer half-buried in desiccated poinsettia leaves.

I had to revive the atrophied organ in my chest dedicated to processing whimsy and mercurial wonderment to understand Winterson’s collection.

Winterson’s collection begins with a whirling recitation of Christmas history with her tell-tale confidence leading the way. I admit, even in my stodgiest of my many hearts, I’m a sucker for history and was taken with the high-speed historical roundup and the bright touches of Winterson’s own deep love for the season.

There is an unexpected suddenness to Winterson’s writing here that may cause a reader, especially one of deficient Christmas spirit, to reach for their seatbelt. Veterans of the Christmas wars will be familiar with most of the history, and will fall in love with it promptly anyway. After eleven pages of historical arcana, Winterson gives the reader a solid wink and urges the sleigh faster.

The heart of CHRISTMAS DAYS lies in the three-part harmony of short fiction and memoir couched in the form of Christmas recipes. Christmas fable, Christmas food, and Christmas memories follow one another in quick succession, just like whiskey tonics at the office holiday get-together. While a few of the stories simply end too quickly for this writer’s taste (I enjoy lingering over my whiskey), the touches of memoir and Christmas recipes are where Winterson’s truest Christmas spirit can be found.

There is a great deal of love in every treat recipe, along with touches of sadness that sweeten each memory. At the conclusion of CHRISTMAS DAYS, I discovered the urge to ring Winterson up and ask her to consider writing an entire memoir in the form of a recipe book. I am ashamed to admit I already had several potential titles picked out for her.

Short stories are a necessary medicine for my daily woes; they are taken in large doses and can be found spilling from my luggage and coat pockets in airports and classrooms. I respect short stories for their courage and economy, while I demand overwhelming creativity and depth of spirit. The skill it takes to carve a short story out of 12 pages and make it work as both entertainment and spirit food is extremely impressive.

While reading the first three stories of Winterson’s CHRISTMAS DAY, I scowled, stumbling past the trapped Spirit of Christmas, trudging beyond a minute snowman who speaks in all capital letters (only to be chastised for it), and into the requisite grim Christmas ghost tale. In short, I could hear my coal cellar greedily licking its lips for another addition.

This troubled me.

I fancied myself a great lover of short fiction and here I was, grinding my teeth at good writing. Winterson knows her craft and knows it well, but I still found I had trouble with her fables. I was left sitting in my cellar, unhappy and rather confused. Why didn’t I care for these stories? I loved the memoir, so why was I stumbling around like it was 3am on New Year’s instead of giggling like a lunatic on Christmas morning? And with that image, the problem was solved.

At some formative point, when I was busy filling my coal cellar, the child in me fell down the stairs and was buried beneath a piled of burnt-out string lights. I had forgotten that through the eyes of a child, Christmas is a very different thing. Luckily, Winterson has not forgotten this key fact and I ask her forgiveness that it took me several stories to remember.

CHRISTMAS DAYS is not a children’s book, but it is for children—the children buried in coal cellars all across the land. These stories are not dressed in their finest clothes, ready to be inspected by a connoisseur, but dressed in their snow pants and sledding hats, cheeks red with weather, play, and a really good glass of port.

I had to revive the atrophied organ in my chest dedicated to processing whimsy and mercurial wonderment to understand Winterson’s collection. I invite any reader of CHRISTMAS DAYS to do likewise.

The standout story of CHRISTMAS DAYS for this stale fruitcake of a reader is “Mistletoe Bride.” Dark enough to capture my crusty heart, here she explores with enough caprice to feed a reader’s newly-freed coal-cellar child and enough sweet sorrow to accommodate the adult the child has become. In it, a new bride plays hide and seek at a party in her honor, only to find herself trapped in a cedar box where she witnesses her husband with another woman.

Trapped in the box, she faints. "[W]hen I woke I was sitting with my dolls in the schoolroom at home, and I hadn’t lost my childhood self at all, I had become her. I was singing a little song about the sun rising over the river, and suddenly I realized, with a terror I had never known, that I would never see the sun rising again.”

But she doesn't die. She escapes and, year later, she takes advantage of a divine moment to gain her revenge.

...Christmas recipes. Christmas fable, Christmas food, and Christmas memories follow one another in quick succession, just like whiskey tonics at the office holiday get-together.

For Veterans of the Christmas Wars, this collection will be a plump read, one that sparks enjoyment and touches the heart of Christmas. For curmudgeons, CHRISTMAS DAYS offers a chance to coax you out of your cellar and into a brighter space with much better food.

While CHRISTMAS DAYS didn’t quite lift me from my own cellar, it did coax me up the stairs, give me a candy cane, and introduce me to a few pleasant holiday spirits (of both varieties). And if Jeanette Winterson should ever stumble past the entrance to my cellar, I would invite her down for a glass of port and a story. I may even ask her to help me set up the inflatable Santa-Riding-A-Harley, which I haven’t been willing to admit I own. I bet she wouldn’t mind.

Of Sherry Trifle and Christmas Ghosts: