There's usually the giddy whirl of work-related lunches, dinners and parties in London. Though it's never returned to pre-financial crash profligacy, that world usually has enough madness to deprive sleep and stress the liver. Add one or two black tie balls, gift exchange dinners with close friends, at least one night at the theatre for someone's Christmas production and special events like Christmas markets or illuminated gardens. At the same time I'm inevitably pushing to complete a busy work year, and somehow squeezing in the requisite home decorating, card writing and baking. At the end of it all I collapse with exhaustion and welcome the quiet of the holidays. Every other year that collapse usually takes place on board a plane heading for more exotic places.
Not this year.
There was enough work to trigger the usual collapse into exhaustion ... in fact, much more than usual given the new role I started in February ... but thanks to the ongoing scourge of COVID-19 there was little in the social diary to balance it. Or to provide source material for blogs. December brought the hopeful news of approved vaccines ready to deploy, but balanced it with escalating diagnoses, hospitalisation and death figures to match the initial spring surge. Restrictions escalated day-by-day, leaving cancelled plans and closed businesses in their wake.
By the second week of the month, however, experts started raising red flags. A surge was upon us, and anything approaching the usual socialisation between households over the holiday season would super-charge the problem. London escalated to Tier 3 on 16 December, shutting down the restaurants, museums and theatres that had created socially-distanced experiences and were hoping to put some cash on the bottom line during the holiday season.
I ventured into my office in The City the day before and thanks to a quirk in the existing legislation we managed a Christmas lunch for the team. (People weren't allowed to eat or socialise indoors together but the government was trying to keep the business world afloat, so a "working lunch" sanctioned otherwise illegal fraternisation.) It was a pale shadow of the real thing; six of us around a table in a half-empty restaurant, sharing a bottle of wine and observations on the odd year. What it lacked in merriment it made up for in the sheer joy of being together rather than on a Teams call. It was hard to stay cheerful, however, when we talked to our waiter about another undefined period of unemployment stretching ahead of him. All restaurants were to close in London the next day, and the most practical pundits suggested they wouldn't be allowed to open again until the vaccination programme had made a significant dent in the vulnerable population.
While things looked bad in London, the area around our house and the Southwest, where we planned to escape at New Years, remained in a liveable Tier 2. But not for long. Next came the news that we would jump up to a newly-created Tier 4, along with London and much of the rest of the country, on Boxing Day. This was essentially the same as the spring's total lockdown, but with a few more stores classed as essential and therefore open. (Wine shops and garden centres both managed to keep trading.) Bovey Castle remained in Tier 2 but wasn't allowed to welcome anyone from Tier 4, and thus cancelled our reservations. Our French friends who were planning to "bubble" with us for the second half of the holidays were now told not to travel, and further discouraged as the French closed their borders for several days in reaction to a new strain of the virus that seems to have originated in the UK.
The most heart-breaking story came on the 30th, however, as restriction levels moved up once again and the last Tier 2 areas disappeared from the UK mainland. Thousands of hotels and restaurants were given less than a day's notice to close on New Year's Eve morning, when their kitchens would already have been full of supplies for the night's festivities. Yet more waste and financial trauma for an industry that provides nearly 10 percent of the UK's jobs.
The only event left standing in our holiday diary was the Christmas Illuminations at West Green House. When I reported on Wisley's "Garden Glow" back in 2016, such things were still innovative newcomers on the holiday events scene. Now, the idea has spread beyond major gardens like Wisley and Kew and scores of smaller places are getting in on the action (and the revenues). Though they're working with far less acreage, West Green's display has much in common with the bigger shows. There are giant illuminated flowers to walk beneath and illuminated blooms floating on water features. (I'm convinced there must be one company providing these to gardens across the country, so identical are they.) Coloured spotlights turn bare branches of enormous oaks into giant sculptures. Dense fairy lights form tunnels to wander through and use as selfie backdrops. Living up to its reputation as "the opera garden", there are bursts of music throughout West Green ... most memorable when the Cinderella waltz plays as illuminated fountains dance, and later when Tchaikovsky provides the backdrop for a tableau from Swan Lake in one of the outbuildings.
Though owned by the National Trust, West Green is managed and run by its tenants, and the Abbotts' personal touches make this a more intimate, quirky experience than the giant events. A Tudor-style chequerboard herb garden has become a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Fairies hide behind mounds and dance in the garden follies. There's a charming nativity scene in which each character is painted on a fence picket. The famous Chinese chicken run has been decked out with Chinese lanterns, including one that's a giant blue-and-white teapot. The poultry appear to be sleeping somewhere else for the season. But the most striking feature of the night was the one that used nature most effectively: a small pond, graced by floating, glowing blooms, reflecting the blue- and green-lit trees above it in a perfect mirror, as if those fairies indeed had an alternative universe on the other side of the water's surface. It was magical.
Gardens aren't the only ones turning up the decorating wattage. With the outside world barred to them, people have taken their home decorating more seriously. When I came to England in the late '90s Christmas lights were for city centres and department stores, not really seen as something for individual homes. I remember finding my first December here remarkably gloomy. The country has been edging towards an American level of home lighting for years, and 2020 seems to have tipped it over the edge. Once the front-runner in this game, I found myself at a local shop looking for additional lighting options and was told I was far too late. People had wiped all the good stuff out in late November. There wouldn't be much left for Boxing Day sales, even if stores were allowed to have them.
You'd think with all those cancelled social appointments I would have glided into the Christmas break better prepared than ever. Not so. With a bigger, higher-pressure job than I've had for years, all that spare time went to work rather than play. I rushed the Christmas cards, never bothered with some of our interior decorations and didn't start menu planning until after I'd turned on my out of office reply. (My husband took over the last, thankfully, and came up with an impressive spreadsheet.)
I even forgot to use my hard-won, pre-booked grocery delivery slot, opening the door on the 18th to a Sainsbury's driver holding a single bottle of Bollinger, my go-to placeholder to spend the required £40 necessary to clinch a reservation. I was supposed to return to update things with a real order. "You're not the first, and won't be the last," he laughed, placing the bottle on the doorstep. The consequence was a frustrating in person shop at our local Tesco on the 19th, where "covidiots" crowded, ignored social distancing and generally made me feel like the outing was the most dangerous risk I'd taken on the COVID front in months. Any other groceries needed over the festive period came from Waitrose or local farm shops.
While I missed the usual social whirl, I confess to enjoying our solitary, quiet Christmas enormously. We've cooked lovely things, created fun cocktails and liberated some fine bottles from the cellar. We've read good books and watched an enormous amount of quality television. We even did a bit of household admin.
The ultimate effect of this unnaturally quiet Christmas, however, was to remind me of the real point of the holiday. I felt it most strongly as London newspapers splashed "Christmas is Cancelled' across their headlines as the country slid into complete lockdown.
Christmas continued.
The parties, events, shopping and general frolics of the holiday season are ways of celebrating, but they aren't Christmas. Christmas is a commemoration of beginnings. A celebration of hope. A reminder of an event that transformed human life and thought. Even if you are not a practicing Christian, the legal systems, social mores and governmental foundations of the Western World are based on Christian thought. (If you're interested in this idea, read Tom Holland's Dominion) Christmas is, first and foremost, a time to contemplate and be grateful for the revolution created with the birth it celebrates.
Attending mass is, of course, the essence of the holiday (the clue is in the name), and with effort we might have grabbed tickets to be live attendees at one of the severely restricted services. Thanks to this year's forced embrace of digital tools, however, we were spoiled for choice on the services we could live stream. We sampled the Vatican, considered Winchester Cathedral and settled on St. Mary's Bourne Street, where we got married. While it lacks some authenticity and offers no community spirit, the broadcast was still an uplifting hour with a potent sermon and great music; Haydn's Christmas mass is hard to beat. Not having to drive more than an hour to get home after the service added to the appeal.
The hand-wringing over "cancelled" Christmases was a potent reminder to me of just how badly the secularisation of the holiday has ripped the heart out of it. Perhaps the COVID-constrained Christmas of 2020 will have reminded people of what all the peripheral stuff actually celebrates. A hope-filled message of salvation is, after all, what we're all desperate for as 2021 rolls in.
