Jilly Cooper is a journalist, writer and media superstar. The author of many number-one bestselling novels, she lives in Gloucestershire with her rescued racing greyhound Bluebell.
She was appointed OBE in 2004 for services to literature, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Gloucestershire and Anglia Ruskin.
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First published in Great Britain in 1986 by Methuen London Ltd
First paperback edition published in 1987;
reissued in 1992 by Mandarin Paperbacks,
an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Limited
1998 hardback edition published by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2007
Copyright © Jilly Cooper 1986
Illustrations copyright © Timothy Jacques 1986
Cover image © Helmut Heintges/zefa/Corbis
The lines of poetry here are from ‘Christmas Shopping’, from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds, and are reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
The lines here are from ‘Christmas’, from John Betjeman’s Collected Poems and are reproduced by kind permission of John Murray Ltd.
Jilly Cooper has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409032090
ISBN 9780552155663
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
to William and Susanna Franklyn
with love
Wicked!
Pandora
Riders
Rivals
Polo
The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous
Appassionata
Score!
Animals in War
Angels Ruth In
Araminta’s Wedding
Class
Hotfoot to Zabriskie Point
(with Patrick Lichfield)
How to Stay Married
How to Survive from Nine to Five
Intelligent and Loyal
Jolly Marsupial
Jolly Super
Jolly Super Too
Jolly Superlative
Men and Super Men
Mongrel Music
Super Cooper
Super Jilly
Super Men and Super Women
The Common Years
Turn Right at the Spotted Dog
Women and Super Women
Work and Wedlock
Little Mabel
Little Mabel Saves the Day
Little Mabel Wins
Little Mabel’s Great Escape
Bella
Emily
Harriet
Imogen
Lisa & Co
Octavia
Prudence
The British in Love
Violets and Vinegar
BEING A LOUSY cook, a rotten planner, and the worst wrapper of presents in recorded history, my only real qualification for writing this book is that I have the example of my brilliant husband, Leo, who is not only an ace cook, but having been in the Army, knows all about organization and delegation. I also have some marvellous friends, who with true Christmas spirit came up with countless anecdotes and ideas.
They include: Ewa Lewis, Roger and Rowena Luard, Rosemary and David Nolan, Candida Crewe, Christopher Chamberlain, Susanna Franklyn, Bob Kay, Susan Kyle, Jennifer Sherborne, Christopher Moorsom, Angela Sallitt, Pegotty Henriques, Rosie Cheetham, David D’Eath, Antonia Hunt, Tita Carter, Lesley Garner, Don Grant, Adrian and Felicity Rowbotham, Carole Taylor and Johanna Powell.
I should also like to thank my publishers, Geoffrey Strachan and Anne Askwith, for editing the book, and Annalise Kay and Beryl Hill, for so nobly typing the manuscript.
I AM PARTICULARLY pleased that How To Survive Christmas is back in print again in this lovely new edition because I think Christmas needs all the help it can get. What should be such a happy time for families to get together and enjoy themselves is so often regarded with unholy dread.
I have only made minuscule changes to the text where things were inaccurate or seemed totally out of date. This is because I think one must remain loyal to one’s prejudices.
Flipping through the pages, however, I did notice that, although the book was written only twelve years ago, life has changed so much that it already seems a period piece. There are no chapters, for example, on how to cope as a working wife or a lone parent, or who should shoulder the burden of cooking and putting the fairy on the Christmas tree in a gay relationship, or how to stop animal-rights campaigners lobbing bombs into Santa’s Grotto because his reindeer aren’t being paid double for working the Christmas night.
But if things have changed, problems remain. In a spirit of goodwill, my favourite divorcé asked a woman who’d been kind to him in New Zealand to spend Christmas in his tiny Chelsea flat. A week later she rang to ask if it was OK for her father, who was nearly eighty, to come and stay as well. As soon as this was agreed, she asked if Daddy could bring his new boyfriend. As it was Christmas, my divorced friend said yes – and a riotous time was had by all.
I was amused when a much younger friend of mine pointed out that it was such bad luck for Jesus having a birthday so near Christmas. But how many of us, as we bellyache about taxpayers’ money and Dome-improvements, remember that the millennium is supposed to be celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace?
Just as a new-born baby was the centre of attention 2,000 years ago, it is vital not to forget – as the whole fabric of marriage collapses, to be replaced by serial stepfathers, single mothers, extended families, live-in lovers, gay and lesbian relationships and goodness knows what other permutations – that it is the children who matter at Christmas. And as they loathe adults fighting, do try and wait until Boxing Day to murder your ex-husband.
A FEW YEARS ago on Woman’s Hour, I heard a farmer complaining about the cruel way in which he was compelled to rear turkeys. Because the housewife wanted a cheap Christmas dinner, the wretched birds were force-fed, and put on weight so quickly that they had to stagger round on legs too weak to support their vast bulk, and often had heart attacks long before Christmas. He was caught in a trap, the farmer explained, because he needed the money, and if he didn’t rear turkeys in this way, other farmers would.
Ever since, I have been haunted by this image of the farmer and his turkeys. It seems to symbolize today’s family – particularly the housewife – staggering under the unnecessary toil and financial pressures of Christmas, which should be a season of love and joy, but which many of us dread, feeling only passionate relief when it’s all over.
The reason for this, I think, is that Christmas goes on too long. Not only does the entire country grind to a halt for a fortnight over the actual holiday, but Christmas starts in the shops in September, so that by the time you get to 25 December you’re absolutely fed up to the walnut-filled cavities with the whole thing.
Matters are not helped by journalists – me included – who not only have to write their Christmas pieces weeks, or even months, before Christmas week and before the full horror has started, but who are all so frantic for a new angle that they make their readers feel madly guilty if they are not disguising unsightly loo chains with homemade tinsel, and fricassee-ing burst balloons and cracker mottoes on Boxing Day.
Christmas is also an uneasy mingling of festivals. Originally, midwinter and the return of the sun after the shortest day were celebrated by a prolonged booze-up, a mixture of the Roman Saturnalia and the German Yule, in which people decked their houses with evergreens, exchanged presents, visited friends and generally made merry. It was only later, in about the fourth century AD, that this midwinter holiday was chosen as the most suitable time to celebrate the birth of Christ, with its message of peace on earth and looking after those less fortunate than ourselves.
The conflict thus comes because we feel that we deserve – like the early Romans – to be enjoying ourselves and having a blow-out, but feel – like the early Christians – that we ought to be doing good to others at the same time. Alas, those we should invite to spend Christmas with us – widowed Rich Great Aunt Phyllis who grumbles all the time or the lonely friendless colleague at work – are often the people who bore and irritate us the most.
Stress is also added these days because so many people are out of work; and the only thing most of them can afford to do over Christmas is to watch television, which bombards them with images of plenty and exhortations to spend more and more. But Christmas in any family is a time of financial pressure, when breadwinners feel they are falling short. Any family can do without a holiday, or a new carpet, or central heating, but at Christmas, because everyone is doing more or less the same thing at the same time, comparisons are inevitable. If you can’t afford a turkey, a tree or presents, you can’t run and hide. This applies whether you are on the breadline in Belfast, or being badgered by your wife in Belgravia to give a party for 300.
One comfort, however, despite the journalists’ constant harking back to the good, old, simple, noncommercial days, is that nothing has really changed. Thus we find poor Lord Fermanagh, on 12 January 1712, wearily writing how relieved he was that Christmas was at last over: ‘It has been a troublesome time, every day with the noise of either drums, trumpets, hautboys, pipes or fiddles, some days 400 guests, very few days under 100, so that, besides the vast expense, it has been very tiresome.
Having decided to write a book about surviving and simplifying Christmas, which would at least help myself, I was then faced with the problem of research. Looking back through my diaries from 1971 to 1984, I found a distressing number of blank pages between the beginning of each December and the middle of each January, because Christmas itself always took over and I was too frantically busy or knackered to chronicle events.
Last year, whether exhausted, elated, drunk or sober, I made a point of writing my diary every night, right through December and into the New Year; and I hope that this book, drawn largely from these observations, will perhaps help people to avoid some of the pitfalls, or at least realize that their disasters are shared by others, and thus have a happier Christmas.
In the pages of this book you will meet a Christmas family. They consist of a housewife, Scarlett O’Aga, so called because she is always bustling about not very efficiently, saying she’s ‘got to get on’, and has a shiny red face all Christmas from toiling over the Aga. Like many women, Scarlett is an Xmasochist, who only feels she is doing the festive season properly if she worries herself into the ground. Scarlett is married to Noël, so called because he is absolutely no-elp-at-all. Noël has a Scroogian attitude towards Christmas, a mistress called Ms Stress, and an undemanding job in the City, which he feels justifies his spending most of the festive season slumped in front of the telly, or boozing with his cronies in the Dog and Trumpet. Noël and Scarlett have two teenage children, Holly and Robin, two little ones, Carol and Nicholas, and a dog called Difficult Patch.
Finally, if this book appears a little jaundiced, I must apologize. It is simply that, having lived through Christmas 1985 from October to December, I then had to relive it all over again from January to March, as I wrote the book; and two Christmases in six months is rather too much.
Bisley, 1 April 1986
‘THERE WAS A point this Christmas,’ said a girlfriend, ‘as I was struggling to get the turkey out of the oven, and my husband was sweating away over the roast potatoes, when I asked myself for the hundredth time whether it was all worth it. The eager little faces all round the table – knife and fork at the ready in each tight little fist – were not those of the children but of the collection of geriatric grandparents, great aunts and uncles we seem to feed each year.’
The reason why so many couples resort to home fixtures – knackering as they may be – is that away fixtures are often infinitely worse. At least at home you can drink as much as you like, keep warm and not worry the whole time about your children breaking the place up.
At first sight this might not seem like a major issue; but the problem with Christmas – rather like having a baby – is that it occurs infrequently enough for us to be able each time to blot out the horrors of the previous one. Let me refresh your memory.
If you’re newly married, or married without children, the Christmas fixtures row begins in October and goes as follows:
Wife: ‘We’re not going to your parents. No drink, paper napkins used twice, and plates whipped away before you’ve finished your last mouthful.’
Husband: ‘We’re not going to your parents. No central heating, no washing-up machine, and those bloody dogs.’
Whatever decision is taken, the row then continues until Twelfth Night.
The arrival of children in a marriage complicates things even more. Away fixtures, unless grandparents live nearby and are used to the children, can be an utter nightmare. If Grandpapa puts his hand on his somewhat dicky heart, he will admit how much he is dreading the visit; Granny is more hypocritical.
‘Such fun to have a houseful,’ she flutes, upstaging her bridge friends. ‘All the grandchildren are descending.’ (Rather as though they were coming down in a spaceship. As a matter of fact, if you don’t see your grandchildren very often, they can seem as alien as Martians.)
The day of the visit dawns. Suddenly there’s the bang of the Volvo door and three under-threes with frightful colds, snot cascading in parallel lines from their nostrils, erupt into the beautiful, ultra-tidy house, and start destroying the place far more effectively than any bulldozer.
Grandpapa shouts a lot, because having so many people around makes him nervous, and this unnerves the children even more. Soon Ribena is spilt all over the new lemon-yellow sofa, sticky fingers are edging towards the Rockingham, and at lunchtime a precious glass (belonging to a complete set, given as a wedding present forty years ago) is dropped and smashes on the flagstones. Finally the Virgin Mary goes missing from the crib, and, after the whole house has been up-ended and World War III has broken out, is discovered under the spare-room bed in the gross clasps of a lascivious Action Man.
Almost worse for grandparents than the helplessly permissive mother is the progressive daughter-in-law, the Après-Spock health freak, who goes into orbit if poor Granny slips little Carol a few Smarties between meals, or gives her Coke, fried beefburgers and bubble-and-squeak for lunch. Then, having been gratuitously beastly in conversation about the Daily Telegraph, the progressive daughter-in-law proceeds to whip out a long grey tit and breast-feed in the middle of a Boxing Day drinks party.
And if the visiting mother gets uptight because her children are behaving badly or being spoilt by Granny, her husband will soon be complaining about his father-in-law. ‘Mine’s so mean,’ admitted one son-in-law. ‘He not only waters the logs, and keeps turning the light off outside the children’s bedroom at night, but, worst of all, he winces if I open another bottle of wine from the two crates I’ve brought him.’
Even if you do take your own booze, you don’t want to appear a soak in front of your in-laws. ‘One year,’ said a friend, ‘we took up a crate of claret to my in-laws in Lancashire and, having polished it all off, were asked to bury all the bottles in the garden, as my mother-in-law was so embarrassed by what the dustmen might think.’
On this subject I have never forgotten a hideously shameful occasion when my children were very young and my in-laws were staying. Having announced sanctimoniously, and untruthfully, that I never drink at home at lunchtime, I then laced my orange juice with gin to get me through the ordeal of grandparents’ and children’s lunch. My daughter, then aged two and a half, seized my glass, and, thinking it was straight orange juice, took a great swig. She swiftly spat it out all over her grandmother and declared that she’d been poisoned, whereupon Granny took a tiny sip, and recognized gin.
Some grandparents love and enjoy their grandchildren, and it seems sad that others only meet theirs at Christmas when everyone is at their most overwrought. One devoted grandmother said to me this year, ‘We had Christmas for the first time in thirty-five years without children or grandchildren; absolute heaven, out to parties every day – result total exhaustion.’
Another equally devoted daughter-in-law told me: ‘This year was the best Christmas I’ve had for sixteen years, because I finally plucked up courage to tell my extended family of in-laws and step-parents to get knotted, and that they couldn’t all bum a free holiday off us. I hardened my heart, and in the process lightened it considerably.’
If you feel compelled to invite both your parents and your parents-in-law to spend Christmas with you, do consider asking them on alternate years or at least staggering the visits. This is because there is invariably rivalry between the two sides, caused by a very natural desire to be the most popular grandparents.
If there are two widowed grandmothers staying at the same time, the problem becomes even more acute and there’s bound to be granny-mosity. There are also likely to be battles over who is the most helpful granny. A friend, faced with the unedifying sight of two grey-haired old ladies in dressing gowns battling over the kettle early on Christmas morning, slipped a Valium in both their cups of coffee and had a very peaceful day.
If you’re determined to stay with people other than relations at Christmas, do make a recce first. Their place may be ravishing in summer, sitting on the terrace, drinking Pimms with all the roses out, but winter can be a very different proposition.
de rigueurrigor mortis