Category: Christmas

What makes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections my perfect Christmas read?

3/12/2021

On Christmas Eve last year, when many were struggling to adapt to a curtailed coronavirus Christmas, I was in my element with a long walk in the Peak District followed by settling down with a mince pie to reread one of my favourite novels. This would be the third time I’d spent the festive season with the Lamberts, and I relished their company as much as the first time I met them in the freshly-published hardback I gifted myself (with money from my mother) almost twenty years before. I love this book at the sentence level, at the level of the eternally disappointed characters, and at the level of the ridiculously sprawling 500-plus page plot.

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Belatedly cancelling Christmas is a missed opportunity for growth

20/12/2020

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How lovely to see the Prime Minister’s delusions of Churchillian grandeur cast aside as he’s forced to adopt his rightful role as Scrooge. Sadly, not because he required a twenty-three-year-old footballer to pinpoint the appropriate response to childhood hunger but, in this year of disappointment and deprivation, we must grab consolation where we can.

How distressing, however, for the millions whose hopes for Christmas gatherings are scuppered with little time to make alternative plans. But hey – silver lining alert! – we can use it as a dress rehearsal for a no-deal Brexit, this Liar of Liars’ principal vanity project. As he didn’t say at a recent press conference: What, no croissants? Let them eat sovereignty instead!

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Dreaming of a coronavirus Christmas?

6/12/2020

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Ho Ho Ho, bah humbug! This blogger who feels a misfit each December, finds herself, in topsy-turvy 2020, miraculously on track. Or is she? (Am I?) If everyone’s having an alternative Christmas, am I once again out on a limb? If I always opt for a minimalist Christmas, then my festivities will be (unlike most people’s) little different this year to last.

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Can you crack Christmas or does Christmas crack you?

9/12/2019

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Hark! Is that the jingle of an overladen shopping trolley or the bells on Santa’s sleigh? Is that the screech of a fractious parent or a chorus of preschoolers singing “Away in a Manger” out of tune? Yes, Christmas is out to get you, whether you dread it or welcome it with open arms. To help you prepare yourself for the onslaught, I’ve identified four different Christmas personality types; which one are you?

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Violent fathers: The Frank Business & Blood

1/3/2019

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Two British novels about the legacy of paternal violence for adult children, although the father’s tyranny in the first isn’t apparent until later on.

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Beneath the surface calm: Stories We Tell Ourselves & And the Wind Sees All

11/12/2018

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Reading these books consecutively, I doubted I could legitimately pair their reviews. The first focuses on the tensions in an Anglo-French family Christmas, the second an Icelandic fishing village anticipating a celebratory concert in mid-summer. But both are about the pain beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, and the psychological distance between people living in close proximity.

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The Annethology Christmas message: Just say no!

7/12/2018

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Okay, so moaning about frenzied shopping and family fallouts is as integral to Christmas as turkey and tinsel and, for some, that’s part of the fun. But if the pain of Christmas surpasses your pleasure, I’ll let you into a secret: unless you have young children, or frail parents to whom you haven’t yet paid your dues – in which case, bookmark this post for when you’re free to prioritise yourself – you’re not obliged to join in. Okay, it can be tough to go against expectations, and it might require some negotiation with your nearest and dearest, but isn’t life too short to stick to the familiar, if the familiar isn’t what you want?

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8 fictional Christmases #amreading

17/12/2017

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Although I’m not enamoured by the prospect of Christmas in real life, I do appreciate it makes fine fictional fodder. With a fixed date recognised across the world, it’s better for marking time than Easter. With raised expectations and family get-togethers, the season also provides the perfect backdrop for the conflict that fires a story. My second novel, Underneath, dedicates around twenty pages to Christmas and its buildup: from a new couple’s negotiations over where to spend it through a flashback to boy being painfully disabused of the myth of Santa to a retreat from the outside world with a love nest in the cellar that subsequently becomes a prison. You can read an extract later in this post, but let’s unwrap some other fictional Christmases.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

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It’s not humbug, I just don’t like Christmas

17/12/2016

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If you trade in trees and turkeys, I wish you a prosperous one. If you’re a Christian, I wish you a divine one. If you can’t get enough bling, I wish you a glittery one. If you like old movies, I wish you a nostalgic one. If you’re an extrovert, I wish you a carousing one. If you’re happy to devote hundreds of hours to food creation and consumption, I wish you a gastronomic one. If you’re skilled at shopping, at giving and/or receiving presents, I wish you a gratifying one. If you have children, or an uncomplicated relationship with your roots, I wish you a familial one (and if you don’t, you might appreciate this flash from Sarah Brentyn). If you appreciate being nudged to consider others less fortunate, I wish you a charitable one. If you’re getting to know a new partner, I wish you a romantic one. If you’re in need of a break from a hectic job, I wish you a tranquil one.

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Christmas chills: Time of the Beast by Geoff Smith and Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

24/12/2015

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As Christmas Eve is the traditional time for ghost stories and the Gothic, so today’s the day to share a couple of my recent reads to have you scared to go to bed.

It’s the year 666, and Britain is a battleground; not only warlords fighting for territory but shamans and priests at loggerheads over people’s minds. After daring to challenge the views of his abbot, Athwold, a young monk, opts to become a hermit in the misty swamps of the Fenlands, in an attempt to reconcile himself to his own truth. But this isn’t a story of spiritual seclusion (as in The Anchoress) as his exposure to a scene of horrific demonic carnage (possibly a hallucination brought on by eating mouldy bread) moves him to join the itinerant monk, Cadroc, on the quest to root out the evil once and for all. Here Athwold finds his faith continually tested, as his mind becomes a battleground between rationality and superstition. Are these killers mythical monsters or merely men gone mad? Whose talisman has the power to defeat them, the pagan or the Roman church?

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The Christmas narrative: Dickens versus Franzen

23/12/2013

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What’s left of the Christmas narrative once you’ve given up on Santa and the divinity of the Baby Jesus, when you don’t eat turkey and there’s no magic left in buying gifts for friends and family already drowning in possessions? Well, quite a lot as it happens because, stripped of the tackiness and tinsel, Christmas is a celebration of our interdependence and connectedness. So (especially after the previous post about the need for writers to shrug off our parents) I couldn’t let the occasion go by without posting my virtual Christmas card and thanking readers old and new for your support of the blog over its fledging year.

Of course, relationships are at the heart of fiction – at least the kind I like – all year round. Having spent the last few days arranging my published short stories into themed categories (obviously avoiding more pressing tasks), I’m struck by how many are about family, parent-child and couple relationships. And many of those I didn’t list under those headings still touch on how we rub along together, for better or worse.

My favourite Christmas stories have a hint of the supernatural, although their morality is firmly grounded in the harsh realities of the societies we humans have created for ourselves. The movie (originally a short story), It’s a Wonderful Life, where a guardian angel convinces a suicidal James Stewart his life has been a force for good, still brings a tear to my eye. It’s a kind of reverse A Christmas Carol, where it’s the visions of his coldness, greed and loneliness that persuade Scrooge that human relationships are worth more to him than his mountains of money.

If the Christmas narrative oozes redemption and inherent goodness, where do the cynics get their seasonal kicks? Who writes for those who don’t believe in happy endings, whose families are dysfunctional beyond repair? My favourite anti-Christmas story is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the antidote to the schmaltzy home-for-Christmas movie. Determined to gather her adult children around her for ‘one last Christmas’, Enid is unaware how distant her version of the cosy family is from theirs.

Christmas hasn’t served as much of an inspiration for my own writing, although I do have a holiday-hideaway scene in my work-in-progress novel Underneath, and I’ve found it useful in longer works as a marker of the passage of time. I’m also quite chuffed, in a business-as-usual way, that one of my short stories, The Seven Dudley Sibs, is actually published on Christmas day. Of the two seasonal stories I have published, I’ve got one for those who go for feel-good and one for the bah-humbugs: in The Front Legs of the Pantomime Horse, Jo finds the local pantomime a lot more rewarding than she expected; in The Wilsons Go Shopping, an ordinary supermarket shop reminds the family how much they’ve lost.

(Sorry there’s no link to this story, as Beat the Dust, where it was first published, seems to be defunct and I’m in the process of trying to find it another home. On the other hand, perhaps it’s just as well, as it’s not terribly jolly.There's a taster here in this Twitter version I posted for short story day on Saturday.)

@shortstoryday Holly, ivy, mistletoe circled and bound with satin ribbon. The house is unadorned this Xmas, I'm off to the cemetery. #nssd
— Anne Goodwin (@Annecdotist) December 21, 2013

How does Christmas impact on your own writing? Which type of Christmas narrative do you prefer? And, whatever your take on Christmas, hope yours is everything you'd like it to be.

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