Mick Hart’s Christmas Message from Russia (Not to be confused with the Queen’s Speech)

Published: 23 December 2020

When I see and read about the mushrooming angst as my fellow Brits try to come to terms with the first coronavirus Christmas in the UK, I breathe a sigh of relief that I am out of it. Lockdowns, tiers, enforced mask wearing, has any of it been proven to work? Is it just too complicated? Is it really a neoliberal plot to ‘crash the economy’? Most people that I know in the UK are following the advice of Frank Sinatra and doing it their way.

Here, in Russia, Christmas is not celebrated on the 25 December, it is celebrated on 7 January, since the Russian Orthodox Church uses the old ‘Julian’ calendar for days of religious celebrations. Under the Soviet Union, Russia was banned for the greater part of the 20^th century from publicly celebrating Christmas. Christmas trees were singled out for special treatment. They were banned until the mid-1930s, at which time they made a comeback but rebranded as New Year Trees. Nobody thought to ask the trees what their opinion was.

This will be my first Christmas abroad, and the first time that I do not have to worry about how I should be celebrating it. I say ‘should’ be celebrating it as over the years I have reached the conclusion that Christmas is something that you have to celebrate, that you have to enjoy, that there is an onus on you, an unwritten but widely reinforced prejudice that Christmas must be enjoyed at all costs!  

It is not dissimilar to the rules of any other party. You know the scenario: you are sitting in the corner quietly enjoying a drink and some life and (R)soul of the party rushes up to you and says: “Come on, cheer up, it’s a party!”

Not that I am averse to Christmas. Looking back to my youth, up until about my 18^th birthday, we had some wonderful family Christmases. Indeed, when I was young, and right up into my teens, I looked forward to it, and not just Christmas Day but the lead up as well.

Coronavirus & The Ghosts of Christmas Past

When we were children Christmas was celebrated in the grand Victorian style. It kicked off at primary school, with Christmas carols and discussions about the meaning of Christmas from our esteemed headmaster, Ben Rowbottom, a man who clearly enjoyed Christmas himself. We made Christmas cards out of bits of cardboard, waterpaint and tinsel, and sometimes an Advent calendar, which we could proudly then take home.

As a member of the church choir, I would have been warbling Christmas carols for at least a month before the Christmas festivities commenced. One year we also performed a nativity play in church, which was received with such accolades that it was impossible not to concede that I was a second Laurence Olivier in the making.

We would decorate the school, decorate our home, choose and buy a Christmas tree ~ a real one, of course ~ sit down night after night to write our Christmas cards and even look forward to the not insubstantial task of Christmas shopping. Ours was a large family, and when friends and friends’ families were factored into the present-buying equation, Christmas shopping became a laborious task, but in those days it was looked upon as a labour of love, which, indeed, it was.

One of the most exciting moments in the run-up to Christmas was going to the supermarket to buy the Christmas booze. As I have said, ours was a large family and over the Christmas period three or four family parties would be thrown. I had no problem with this: family parties were enjoyable, others, alas, were not. Besides, Christmas was the only time of the year my father really pushed the boat out; for the other 364 days the boat was on a tight rope and very secure in its mooring.

Everything was so simple and so enjoyable then, so much so that it was easy to believe that Father Christmas would continue to drop down the chimney, eat the mince pie and swig the glass of sherry left for him, before depositing our main presents around the tree in the front room and the rest in boxes around the bed, until I was 65. All we had to worry about in those days was trying to sound convincing when we opened the Christmas presents: “Just what I have always wanted! (Sorry? What did you say? I can’t hear you over the noise of this very loud Christmas jumper)”.

Although Father Christmas stopped plummeting down the chimney at about the time we started to drink in the village pub, at the age of 14, looking forward to Christmas carried on until and into my teen years. As a teenager, I would spend Christmas Day with the family and Boxing Day (appropriately named) with my Rushden friends, a dodgy salt-of-the-earth lot if ever there was one, drinking over the odds at The Welcome pub.

The landlord of The Welcome, Ernie, was a cheerful soul. I can see him now standing on the elevated platform behind the bar, which made him look twice as intimidating as he really was, peering at the occupants of the bench seats that ran along the window. Old people used to sit there, and it was fondly referred to as Death Row. Said Ernie, cynically, eyeing the people seated on Death Row. “I hope they enjoy their Christmas. I wouldn’t bother if I was them booking a summer holiday.”

Coronavirus & The Ghosts of Christmas Past

These were the heydays of Christmas for me, after which, I am sad to say, it was all downhill. Then I entered a period of truly lack-lustre Christmases and even more appalling New Year’s Eves. However, I did get a perverse pleasure out of the office Christmas parties whilst I was working in London. At this time, I was skiving in the publishing industry, living my life in my own soap opera.

Let me say immediately, however, that office Christmas parties are truly the pits. After an entire year incarcerated together on No-Love Island (the office), all those people, who on any other day cannot wait to get away from one another, are now concentrated in one room along with their oppressions, petty grievances, festering confrontations, envy, resentment and old scores to settle, together with unlimited supplies of the Demon Drink. It is bound to go horribly wrong. How could it not?

There are many tales that I could tell on this subject, but my favourite has to be the one when after throwing a lavish Christmas office party with no expense spared, ie our boss hired out the function rooms at London Zoo with pre-dinner drinks in the reptile house (no comment), the following day at work both my friend, who was the production manager, and I, were summoned to the boss’ office, wished a cheery Happy New Year and then peremptorily sacked. My friend’s behaviour at the Christmas party had not gone down too well, particularly when the paranoid management thought that he was reaching into his inside jacket pocket for a gun when in fact he was about to submit his written resignation. He always did like a drama!

All’s well that ends badly, as they should say, and it was good, in hindsight, that this door slammed shut. Sometimes, especially in the early days of your career, you need to dust the boot marks off the arse of your pants to find that new direction.

Coronavirus & The Ghosts of Christmas Past

In later years, my Christmases followed the downhill trend. I never had much time for New Year’s Eve in England. It is a cattle market.

Once, whilst in London, I went out on New Year’s Eve day, and started drinking early in the pubs around Borough Market, the idea being that I would have had enough by six o’clock, would go home, crash out and miss the midnight hullabaloo. All went well at first. I was in bed before midnight as planned, but at midnight sharp a firework display at the Working Men’s Club at the rear of our house woke me up. The daytime booze had worn off, and I was unable to get back to sleep until five o’clock in the morning: Bah Humbug & Bugger!

Fast forward to the early 20s of the 21^st century. My wife had been invited to go to Paris for Christmas, and I did not want to go. I tried to explain to her that the Paris that she was dreaming off, the Paris of high culture, of little Parisian cafés and atmospheric nightclubs with cabaret and table service had been sentenced to death by Adolf; it limped on into the 1960s and had since been swept away by the EU’s culture-destroying multicult tsunami.  In short, the Paris of the past was no more. Like many other capital cities in the western world, it had been stripped of its heritage character and consigned to a predictable, unpleasant and ironic homogeneity. My wife learnt the hard way and wished she had never gone.

Nevertheless, off she went leaving me to spend Christmas Day alone (nice thing to do to your husband, isn’t it!).  I spent it sitting in our antique shop office, watching through the security cameras as families and friends rolled up at our neighbour’s for Christmas. It was a surreal experience, made more so by the beans on toast I had for Christmas lunch. It felt as if the world was having a Christmas party and I had not been invited. In a word, it was blissful.

This time last year I was in England, staying with a friend. It was just the two of us. Christmas day brought brilliant sunshine. We went to the pub. The streets were deserted and even without coronavirus constraints the Banker’s Draft in Bedford was exceedingly quiet.

The pub shut promptly at two o’clock, and the only people on Bedford’s High Street were two young Polish workers. I knew that look and that feeling: They had obviously had a damned good drinking session the night before, were well hungover and in need of a fix.

When they asked us which pubs were open, this was a tough one. After all, this was England, the land of childlike opening hours. It had not been that long ago when we had been led to believe that British pubs would be adopting continental opening hours. Pubs, we had been told, would be open all day and, as a result, the country would sink into the abyss of chronic alcoholism, anti-social behaviour and unspeakable depravity. It never happened, possibly because with or without the extension to the licensing laws, it already had.

The pub we had just exited from was on the verge of closing for the day, and the Polish lads had posed us a difficult question, but then good old Wetherspoons sprang into my mind, and the Polish lads were saved.

My friend and I walked down to the Embankment in the hope that there might be some life there, but this wonderful old pub/hotel was as dark as Kipling’s chocolate cake, so there was nothing left to do but return to my friend’s house for a makeshift Christmas lunch. Luckily, our last bid gambit paid off. The nearby Ship was open, and open until 5pm.

I must confess that, with the exception of when I was young, Christmas has always been problematic for me. I’m not a Knees-up Mother Brown type, loathe loud, vulgar and jostling pubs and avoid parties like the plague.

In the run up to Christmas, the UK becomes a truly awful place. The pubs are packed, usually with a surfeit of people who, thankfully, you never see at any other time of the year. Drunken hysteria sets in, anti-social behaviour rockets, every street corner has a pool of vomit on it and all sense of dignity and social etiquette ~ what is left of it ~ runs for cover. I have never been able to fathom whether this Bedlam, this parody of a Victorian lunatic asylum, is the product of mass excitement leading into Christmas Day or mass despair as the anti-climax approaches. There is little doubt, however, that the hysteria stems from 12 months of wage-slave institutionalisation. At the end of the year, those who have slaved to make money for their bosses are given a two-week holiday to spend the money that they have managed to save in a bumper spending spree that will line the pockets of a privileged few. What does it matter if the masses all drink more, too much, and what is a bit of bad behaviour as long as it oils their purses and wallets and keeps those Christmas tills jangling!

This year even the Bah Humbugs have been deprived of their anti-pleasure. By all that is written and read, this year Brits face a Christmas so monstrous, so unbelievably harsh that even Scrooge himself would welcome the ghost of Christmas Past.

I know that you won’t believe this, but I am often accused of being one of that fraternity who regards half a glass of beer as being half empty and not half full, but I would argue otherwise. This festive season, for example, with its tiers, lockdowns, bubbles, restrictions, limitations … is truly a Christmas with a difference. It is the first Christmas of its kind, and may we hopefully say the last, so just try to look at it this way: You are taking part in history. You are living through an event which will be a source of nostalgic fascination and intellectual examination by generations to come. You are a living piece of history about which someone, somewhere out there in the future even now beyond your grave is already examining, re-examining and writing about ‘that difficult time’, the 2020s. They are digging for the truth and History will judge …

Thus, this is not just any old Christmas — it is the contentious coronavirus Christmas of the Year of Our Lord 2020. And when you think of it like this, somehow it seems to put everything clearly into perspective …

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️Misinformation or simply mis-management? Mixing in Pubs & at Home Illegal!

Feature image: ‘Marley’s Ghost’ in the Public Domain
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Scrooge_and_the_Ghost_of_Marley%27_by_Arthur_Rackham.jpg] {Link inactive as at 12/04/2022]

Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.