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You can’t write a book about the British Christmas without speaking to a load of British people, and I’m indebted to the many kind souls who spared me time on the phone or in person to recount their stories and dispense their wisdom.
Special thanks are due to Selena McCubbin, Sarah Bee, Jenny McIvor and Keith Adams, all of whom spent a number of hours sitting at my kitchen table talking about Christmas when they had far more pressing matters to attend to.
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On Christmas morning the tradition was that we’d wake up and feel at the end of the bed for the stocking, which was filled with small presents and maybe a tangerine or a mini Mars bar in the toe. But one year we woke up and the stockings weren’t there. I would have been nine. My brother and my sister and I all congregated in one bedroom, saying, ‘Oh my god, I’ve not had a stocking, have you had a stocking?’ Then we looked in our parents’ bedroom, and they weren’t there. This was really weird.
It was still dark. We ran downstairs, and the lounge door was shut, and I remember us saying, ‘Oh god, what if Santa is still in there? Do we go in?’ My brother pushed the door open and we saw that the light was on. We peered round the door, and on the sofa were my parents, asleep, with empty wine bottles around them, halfway through doing the stockings, and my dad with his hand inside one of them. And I swear, because I believed in Santa so much, my first thought was, ‘Mum and Dad are stealing our presents!’ We woke them up and they were horrified. My mum was indignant (‘What are you doing down here?’) but my dad was really upset. He knew that he’d ruined Christmas. There was some weak attempt at explaining it away, but that was the end of believing in Father Christmas. At that point, we knew.
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