A Very British Christmas by Rhodri Marsden

Author:Rhodri Marsden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

‘You’d think that you might escape Christmas on the International Space Station, wouldn’t you.”

Liverpool, Christmas 1995

My relationship with my folks wasn’t great in the 1990s. Any excuse not to do Christmas was just fine by me. I worked for a computer games company, and my job was games testing, which was mostly good fun. Indoor work, no heavy lifting! So when I was offered triple time over Christmas, I took it. I explained it to my parents and they didn’t mind.

But on Christmas Day the job was more about fielding technical support calls from customers, and I wasn’t prepared for how awful it would be. There was a particularly harrowing type of call where irate parents complained that their new PC games didn’t work, often with children screaming in the background. Most technological solutions would be beyond the caller, so we’d have to post out discs (with the inevitable delays, because it was Christmas), which would make them even more angry. On one occasion a cockney guy threatened to ‘come raahnd and crush (me) like a beetle.’

C. S.

Defeating Christmas completely, however, isn’t easy. Some people attempt to make a run for it, jumping on an aeroplane to a part of the world you wouldn’t normally associate with Jesus, Santa or Noel Edmonds. But the twin forces of globalisation and commercialisation can make Christmas pop up in the unlikeliest of places. If you head to Taiwan, where Christmas Day isn’t a public holiday, you’ll still see the odd bus displaying a Merry Christmas message, a few people wearing Santa hats in glorious sunshine and department stores co-opting Western sales techniques. From festive markets in Delhi to shimmering lights in Tokyo, Christmas seems to lurk everywhere, even in states where Christianity is not the official religion.32

Riyadh, Christmas 1998

For six years I lived on a compound of about forty houses in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a very inclusive, friendly community, but very few people celebrated Christmas, and the thing I remember most is that you couldn’t buy decorations. The last year we were there, we heard that the Riyadh branch of IKEA had got Christmas baubles, and they were selling them as red and green glass ornaments. I don’t know if that was a calculated decision on the part of IKEA or a mistake, but the rumour spread around, and it felt almost like prohibition – ‘Oh wow, IKEA has got Christmas decorations!’ I remember us going there and buying boxes of them. We were jubilant, like we’d just snapped up the newest iPhone.

Of course, when we got back to the UK, where you can suddenly get twelve baubles for a quid, a lot of that excitement went away. In fact, it suddenly felt a bit much, with so much pressure on families to ‘perform’; if you don’t have a magical elf sitting on the shelf dispensing a handwritten note to your kids, you’re the crappiest parent ever. It was such a contrast from Saudi, where Christmas wasn’t something we were supposed to celebrate, and as a consequence felt really exciting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.