The paradox of Christmas is what makes it so compelling

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Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is the author of novels, cookbooks, and poetry anthologies. Ha Her most recent book is The Dinner Table, a collection of food writing

There is something paradoxical about Christmas. Maybe this is all between God and the child. Perhaps this is the pagan dichotomy between light and dark. Perhaps this is how we inexplicably cram the hibernation season, with more social engagements than in the previous 11 months combined. Perhaps the escapist nature of the thing is only possible because we cannot escape it. Here’s my revelation of the year: I’m great at Christmas only because I’m so terrible at Christmas.

I start thinking about it early, like October: buying something nice for the tree, looking at the ribbons, looking at my subjects (!). I always have a tree, usually one that’s too big for wherever we live. There are two wicker baskets living on a high shelf and I start fantasizing about opening them as soon as daylight saving time rolls around: the minute, basically, I start succumbing to the blues of the year.

Like many people, my instincts are toward avoidance and seasonal affective disorder. If I were a bear I would be fine (salmon sashimi; long nap), but instead I’m a person with a large, lively family. We have traditions to uphold! Places to be! People to see! I have too much to do for stillness to be a viable option.

Also, I will miss her. For a few years I’ve had, for various reasons, a very bad December and I couldn’t help myself even then: mince pies in the hospital lobby, miniature trees on wipe-clean critical care window sills, making advent calendars on the ward floor with a tiny scalpel. And some Brett stick. In the year the world shut down, and it might have been possible to get through the whole thing, I ate caviar and potato chips in the bathroom and watched… Carol Solo on Christmas Eve: Festive, cheerful, and the only way out of the complete abyss of doom.

Christmas cannot be ignored. The alternative is not a pure bear life: the alternative is the hole.

Which is why, I guess, if I were in a house fire, I might consider grabbing the Christmas box first. Nowhere else in my life had I built such an advanced system of self-defense against the dark: velvet ribbons in six different colors, bamboo angels, crystal Indian charms the size of two fists and as small as marble. Polished goat bone collar and some Polish stained glass. Miniatures of all kinds: toasters, toucans, tinned fish – fresh from the latest National Theater production – shiny glass ballet shoes on taffeta ribbon.

I’ve saved these parts for my ruin, by which I mean the reality of what we’re living through now: canceled cat sitters, troubled secret Santas, loneliness resulting from misunderstanding or lack of appreciation, regular loneliness, last-minute deadlines, delayed trains. Luggage allowance, burnt beef, crowded highways, quarrels between families, heavy rain, darkness, shocks, too much talk, insufficient return on effort, and the impending imposition of income tax.

As my mother likes to say (in one of many family traditions) and quotes the neighbor’s mother of her childhood teenage boyfriend: How was Christmas? Oh, you know: a few rows and a few mistakes. These matters, or some of them, are inevitable.

However, there may be other unavoidable things as well. If you can’t beat them, join them: if you can’t escape fromhe runs away toor inside.

There is a technique to calm a panic attack that relies on the sufferer carefully observing his surroundings through the prism of the senses: five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one. Something you can taste.

This is useful pretty much all the time, but it’s especially good now. The irony of Christmas is that it has to have it all at once, which is what makes it so compelling: the joy, the pain, the loss, the longing, the big sandwiches. It transforms your life with a microscope and a magnifying glass, however you live it.

Such high-intensity immersion can only be balanced by careful observation of detail: the swirl and sparkle of, say, a violet glass garlic bulb on a fine gold thread; Wooden interior of Angela Harding’s advent calendar; Demerara sugar sparkles on a mince pie covered in stars. The cheerful pink pop of Netflix 4K Birch Wood Fireplace for Your Home: Crackling Edition. A bowl of easy crusts. Quality Street cover under the coffee table. A paper hat rips off someone’s huge uncle’s head. Shorten the day as soon as it begins. Leftovers at midnight. Joy wherever you find it, wherever you fly.