From walking home after Midnight Mass down star-lit lanes to crunching through frost on Boxing Day morning to the sound of hounds and horses, there is nothing like a country Christmas.
True, the robin makes his home anywhere – but he is at his most festive on a snow-dusted hedgerow. Strolling off the turkey and stuffing is best done along farmers’ fields under a broad sky, not shuffling through a park. In London at least, even the crackling fires featured on millions of Christmas cards are beset with environmental red tape (though they are in the green bureaucrats’ crosshairs everywhere). What is the Christmas tree, but an attempt to bring inside a bit of this outdoors tradition?
Doubtless born-and-bred city folk would disagree. They would point out that Bob Cratchit didn’t live out in the sticks, and that the metropolis has its seasonal joys, too. They will wax lyrical about tumbling out of a packed pub onto a bus that actually runs and the fact that shops still cater to the disorganised deep into Christmas Eve. They may even cite the existence of “winter wonderlands”, inexplicably popular hellscapes dominated by drunken Santas, fighting elves and feral dogs passed off as reindeer.
Yet whether you prefer town or country, one thing that unites us is how much we have missed a proper Christmas. Up and down the land, and in and out of our towns and cities, Covid has had a miserable effect on our most important national holiday not once, but twice.
Boris Cromwell’s attempt to cancel Christmas again was mercifully stymied this year. But the national game of omicron roulette has had plenty of losers. Instead of the twelve days of Christmas, it was all about the ten days before Christmas, trying desperately to avoid picking up the virus and being consigned to house arrest for the big day. For many, that is exactly what they face as they wake up this morning. Could anything be less festive, 21 months since the first lockdown and with most of the country at least double- and triple-jabbed?
I suspect even the most gung-ho of us missed some social event or other either to keep down the risk of infection, or because those we were supposed to meet wished to do so. Along the way we have created an almighty headache for pubs, restaurants, theatres and museums. I will be saying a Christmas prayer for the taxi driver who last week lamented to me that the official omicron advice had scared his usual passengers indoors, devastating a busy period that would usually tide him over the quiet start to the year.
Yet if I were to take a moment of Christmas optimism, it would be to observe that these things are at last starting, slowly, to be given their due. The acronym-laden prophets of doom and gloom have lost their role as philosopher kings. The Cabinet and a sizeable number of rebellious backbenchers have made clear that they will no longer accept endless trade-offs in the name of keeping down case rates.
There is at last some semblance of acknowledgment not only of the suffering of those who have fared worst from lockdown measures – children, the isolated, those struggling with mental health conditions – but of the fact that it is bad for us all to live in a state of semi-permanent paranoia and social restriction. At times, scientists gave every impression of believing that human interaction was something troublesome and irritating, that could and should be manipulated in the pursuit of public health.
Such an outlook comes with the territory, but the reality is that social mixing is not something we can take or leave, it is what makes life worth living. It puts bread on our tables, smiles on our faces and presents under our trees. Without it, our economy withers, but so do our souls. There was a time when such a view seemed heretical, or at least some mix of callous and unpatriotic. This Christmas, it is on its way to becoming the orthodoxy.
The lump of coal in the stocking is that we are still some way from following that idea to its logical conclusion. Nearly two years into the pandemic, some of the old habits are proving hard to shake. We are still struggling to realise that, thanks to the help of vaccines, the chance to live with this virus as we do flu is within our grasp. The nation-wide booster programme still betrays a worrying failure to identify and focus on those most at-risk or least likely to have had their first two jabs. The promise of anti-Covid treatments as a weapon in our arsenal against the pandemic still feels underappreciated. Efforts to reduce self-isolation have been slower than we might have hoped.
Yet on a day when we look beyond the mundane, whether lifting our eyes to God or simply downing tools to share time with family, the belief that there is more to life than avoiding death is starting to break through.
