Photo credit: Derwisz via Flickr
Growing up in the U.S., Dec. 26 is a letdown, unless it’s your birthday, in which case celebrate!
In fact, the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s is a descent into depression.
It marks the end of the most beautiful season and the beginning of that squishy, not-so-exciting few days before the absolute worst holiday of the year that is not celebrated in heat: New Year’s.
I’ll admit the heresy: Not even the Philly Mummers make me have a holiday pulse. It’s a noisy, annual Eagles Championship parade, just with more feathers, glitter and minus the greased poles.
And New Years Eve is an excuse for women to squeeze into dresses that make Cher’s Bob Mackie wardrobe look like Carmelite nun hand-me-downs, while their escorts look stiff in penguin suits.
And the drinking? The sloppy kisses? The pathetic attempts to resolve to be better people when we know we are doomed to congenital mediocrity for another 365?
Can you tell how much I hate New Year’s?
And get off my lawn, the one with the deflated Santa.
Anyway, Dec. 26th is, for all intents and purposes, a sad return to reality.
Except, that is, in England.
In 1981, as I’ve written here before, I was spending my junior year in Paris not allowed to come home for Christmas.
Daddy was dying of cancer, only no one wanted to let me know how sick he really was.
The family refused to let me come home and sit in a chair by his hospital bed at Lankenau, understanding that I’d all too soon be sitting in a pew at his funeral. Their gift to me was blissful ignorance of the sad reality.
So my parents arranged to have me stay with friends of theirs who lived in Canterbury.
We can pause to heckle poor little Orphan Chrissy, forced to spend the holidays in Europe.
Anyway, between my self-pity and scones, I did manage to enjoy myself.
My foster family, Roz and Karl Mueller, were deeply kind and loving.
They showed me a right proper holiday. On Christmas Eve we went to a pub for bangers and mash and bubble and squeak and other sorts of strange things that sounded like they belonged in a zoo but tasted delicious.
And I had ale (gross) and Irish coffee (please, sir, might I have some more? Of course, Oliver!)
Christmas Day we sat around the hearth, a real one with glowing embers emanating glorious, likely toxic tendrils of smoke, and opened presents.
Then we had crumpets with clotted cream. Believe me it was the most delicious thing I ever ate that sounded like a serious medical condition.
And we went to Mass at Canterbury Cathedral, pinch me St. Thomas a Becket!
The rest of the day we alternated between walks through a very light snow and eating at a table that looked as if it had been catered by Dickens. If you took Nigella and crossed her with Ina, then ran it by Mrs. Claus, you’d have a general idea of the bounty.
But the revelation was the following day.
I awoke on Dec. 26 expecting … nothing.
But it was a Groundhog Day repeat of the day before, with food and visits from friends who all spoke like the Upstairs denizens of “Upstairs, Downstairs” — for the young’ins, that was the original “Downtown Abbey” — and more food and some extra food. And joy.
They call it Boxing Day, and I doubt it has anything to do with Mike Tyson or, more appropriate to this Philly chick, Rocky Balboa. Must refer to boxing up all those presents.
I have one particularly exquisite memory: that evening, the BBC screened “Brief Encounter,” the poignant story of two oldish people who unexpectedly find themselves in love.
But since they were married to others, they had to choose between duty and passion.
They were British, and this was filmed when virtue mattered in the early 40s and people didn’t prioritize finding their bliss at the expense of their children, so of course they chose duty.
And I sobbed, in front of the hearth, eating my scones with embolism, I mean clotted something.
The next day I packed my few things, hugged these dearest friends who I’d never again see, and headed back to Paris.
But every year on Dec. 26, that piece of my heart I left by the hearth in Canterbury pulses with a memory that warms me in the chill of winter.
And it helps me remember that there are places in the world where the glittering joy of Christmas is not extinguished at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 25.
This article was originally published in the Delco Times.
