My dear friend

I hope this email finds you far from the scourge of the post-viral malaise that has plagued my recent days. This is what happened: I got some kind of virus, went to bed and could not get out for the next six days. Then I spent a week with a foggy brain. And then I was a long way behind in my work and couldn’t catch up, and at the same time I was being shadowed by the afore-mentioned malaise. And I have very much missed writing to you.

But now it’s December! My tree is up, the lights are on, and it’s not long until I buy my first bag of Haigh’s spiced chocolate almonds. (Oh, and tickets are on sale for this year’s Annual, World-Famous, One-Night-Only, Live Christmas Letter Reading (this year for two nights)).

Something I do love to do is return to my big, enormous pile of Christmas books and lose myself in the gentle reading rhythms of this time of year. It’s niche, but my favourite is The End of Term by Antonia Forest. Antonia Forest’s series of books were among the most loved of my childhood books, possibly my most favourite books. I recently invested considerable time and some expense in collecting the first editions. I will save it until the final few days before Christmas because it has that lovely sense of closing in on Christmas; it captures the melancholy of the goodbyes that often happen at the end of the school or work year; the expectation and anticipation of Christmas; and the particular stress and celebration that is a school Christmas concert (I am genuinely sad that I don’t currently have any young people in my life who need me in the audience of their music concerts).

I start my Christmas reading with the obvious: Charles Dickens. Everyone knows A Christmas Carol, and I will skip through that as a reading h’ors d’oeuvre, but A Christmas Carol is only the first of five Christmas novellas that Dickens wrote. I think the most interesting one is the final novella, The Haunted Man. The haunted man is Stephen Redlaw, a man who spends a lot of time reflecting on the past and on the grief that he has suffered. Like Scrooge, Redlaw meets a spirit. This spirit tells Redlaw that he, the spirit, can allow Redlaw to forget every sorrow, wrong and trouble he has known. Not only that, but Redlaw will have the power to bestow this same gift on anyone he meets simply by touching them.

Redlaw accepts the spirit’s gift. Of course what he learns is that when we lose our capacity for pain or sorrow, we also lose our capacity for compassion and for love and Redlaw begins to feel increasingly numb and uncaring. On top of that, he is horrified that when he passes on this gift, he inadvertently makes people miserable.

At first glance, this story seems to reinforce the cliche that grief is the price we pay for love. But I interpret it differently. I sometimes think that grief is our truth and love is our compensation. Or perhaps the truth is simpler still—love and grief are one single thing that are felt differently at different times.

(Please know, I don’t mean to romanticise pain or grief here. I’m only talking now of the types of grief that we can’t avoid by being human. The deaths of the people we love; lost friendships; our mistakes.)

Dickens is often accused of being the person who ignited the romanticising of Christmas, but the more I’ve read, the more that I have found his Christmas writing more nuanced than I had thought it was. In his short story, ‘What Christmas is as we Grow Older,’ Dickens recalls an ideal childhood Christmas. But we know that Dickens’ own childhood was far from idyllic, and in the year that he wrote that story his daughter, Dora, had died. It is not surprising then, that he extends the story. He encourages us to hold on to our capacity for wonder, but to not pretend that there was, there is, or there will ever be some perfect Christmas. By the end of the story, he becomes explicit and in one beautiful passage he suggests that we should remember not only the people who have died, but our other losses too. Our failures and abandoned plans, relationships gone wrong.

He writes: ‘…as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.

Welcome everything! Welcome alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open-hearted.’

There’s a lot going on in December, I know. We all have the stress of deadlines. My city is living with a very real climate change impact in a coastal algal bloom which weighs heavily on many of us. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine continue seemingly without end. No one can simply switch on their Christmas lights and pretend that all is calm and all is bright. But within the small world of my own life, in the things which I can influence, I do what I can to take Dickens’ advice—to make peace with what is and to feel the presence of the people I have loved and who have loved me.

I will write again next week (or the week after or even the week after that). Until then I will think of you often and with love,

Your friend,

Tracy x