We have a Christmas tradition in my old family home, the house I was brought up where my mum still lives – someone dresses up as Santa, and it’s usually the person who least wants the job, who’ll be easiest to tease. This year my son, Pi, now twenty, gets the job. When I was a kid, we had a threadbare Santa suit with mouldy beard, thankfully now sent to the great landfill in the sky, so instead Pi wears a pound-shop Christmas hat brought home from a drunken night at Spoons. He takes the lead from the charade of Xmases past, saying he just needs to pop out for a bit, then he knocks on the door and comes back in as, Surprise, Father Christmas! And we all cheer as he does the Ho ho ho voice to give out the presents, then it’s a mad mess of opening before Santa leaves and Pi reappears and we all go, Oh no, you just missed Father Christmas, and he says, Damn, I only popped out for a moment. And we laugh like every year because it’s so bloody daft, and because it’s our thing. No one in the house believes in Santa anymore, I should say, the youngest in the room is 9.
A friend asked me before the festive season if my family have any traditions and I had to think really hard before returning a slightly bewildered No, we just like to get together. But throughout the festivities, I kept being reminded of all the things we do, that we’ve done for years, that the kids now expect as part of the package. There’s the setting of intentions on the Winter Solstice, the two chefs who cook our Xmas lunch being the only family members brought up in non-Christmas-celebrating faiths (oh, the irony!), the lunchtime pub trip on Christmas day, the debate about the best ale and my husband, Sunshine’s, piss-take about how many toenails me and my brothers’ pints contain. Later, the Hennessy and cigars in homage to the Wu-Tang Clan, the food-coma nighttime walk round the village and the dashes onto neighbour’s lawns to shake their decorations. One year, Sunshine rattled someone’s illuminated plastic snowman and fused the entirety of their elaborate outdoor Christmas scene – reindeers, fairy lights and all – and we grabbed the hands of our then toddlers and ran screeching up the road. The kids still talk about this event as if it were a magical scene from a much-loved book.
Boxing Day and a walk up the lane that leads to Chanctonbury Ring, although we won’t make it that far, we’re all too full and hungover. The kids come along because it gives them a break from rotting, which is what they call lying in bed looking at their devices, the word co-opted and turned back on us oldies from years of saying, Get out of bed and stop rotting your brain on that phone. Rotting is their pleasure, but they also seem to be learning that to enjoy the rot you need to mix it up.
A heavy stream gushes down one side of Mouse Lane. The council re-laid the road a few years ago and tried to contain the spring by burying it underground, but the water won’t be told; the impossibility of holding back nature – we have tried but it never works and mostly it’s a disaster. My brother reminds us of an old photo of him here – an angelic, sulking toddler, wet and freezing from jumping in the craters carved out by the water. I used to drag my kids up here too when they were little, when we were staying with my parents. Bleak February days, and they’d cry and moan about how boring it was, and couldn’t they just stay home and watch Sponge Bob. But now on this Boxing Day, they poke their high-tech trainers in the stream, recognition and wonder flashing across their faces, the magic spiralling down the generations as my daughter, B, takes her younger cousin’s hand to show him the water breaking through cracks in the tarmac in wild bubbles, as I once showed her, like it’s alive down there, which it is. I don’t remind B of all the coaxing I used to have to do to get her here, I’m just so chuffed she remembers those walks with more joy than I expected, that perhaps she did have fun after-all, and there were moments when she watched and smelt and experienced, even for a fleeting second, and it stuck so fast that now she not only wants to return, she needs to. Like me who can’t get enough of this place even though today it’s just a grey road next to sodden fields under a dull sky, but it’s my road, and my fields and sky. We’ve created a pattern, we are rooted, a homing beacon compelling us to repeat the ordinary for comfort, and in turn these habits become extraordinary. They complete us.
When I was in my early teens, I went through a pious period and took myself off to church. My dad was straight-up atheist, shaking his paper to cover his smirk at any chat about God, and my mum was more selkies, Machu Picchu and Bigfoot, but having gone to a CofE primary, I was fascinated by this thing called faith. I desperately wanted the God beam, like in the film The Ten Commandments when the clouds part, the angels sing, and Charlton Heston gets a massive bouffant in God’s spotlight. But Sunday school was boring, no kindly nuns recognised my saintly gifts and took me under their wing, so I stopped going, feeling I’d failed in some vital way to be chosen. Later, my kids also went to a CofE primary, this one particularly mainstream, and the first time they’d experienced being told what to think, which turned them both into non-believers (stick that in ya pipe). I remember some of the church-going parents petitioning the council for a new faith-based Secondary school, and I was asked to sign by a mum who told me it was important because We want a school where forgiveness and compassion is practiced, and I wanted to say, And you think non-faith schools don’t? But I bit my tongue because she was so calm and smugly certain that I felt a deference to her faith, left over from my own mostly benign schooling. (NB: I have warm and lovely Christian friends who never step on this ivory tower, so it was just this particular school, one parent, a moment.)
Forward-wind to today when I’m secure in my indecision – I welcome the uncertainty even though I’m not wholly without belief, I just have no need for faith. As Alan Partridge says, God is a Gas, and all that. So, at the most holy time of year, I worship my family and friends and all the feasting before we hunker down to the hard yards of bleak months to come. The stories we create through family slip so effortlessly into the simple stuff of life that we only recognise their significance at these times, and in reflection. Through repetition they become our rituals and ceremony. Our bond, our anchors. And here in connection, here is where I find grace.
Halfway up Mouse Lane, before we turn back for our customary pint, a large stone is set into the bank, a poem by John Stanley Purvis carved into it. Purvis was a local man and a soldier in the trenches in WW1 (always in the background, then as now, the weight and horror of war – stupid stupid humans.) We all stop and read, and I pretend not to cry, like I do every year.
Chance Memory (1916)
I can't forget the lane that goes from Steyning to the Ring
In summertime, and on the Downs how larks and linnets sing
High in the sun. The wind comes off the sea, and, oh, the air!
I never knew till now that life in old days was so fair,
But now I know it in this filthy rat-infested ditch,
When every shell must kill or spare, and God alone knows which,
And I am made a beast of prey, and this trench is my lair -
My God! I never knew till now that those days were so fair.
And we assault in half-an-hour, and - it's a silly thing,
I can't forget the lane that goes from Steyning to the Ring.
Purvis was one of the lucky few who made it home. I bet one of the first things he did was walk Mouse Lane to Chanctonbury Ring.