The Christmas Room

 A room dedicated to an annual Christmas season – a room not used for the rest of the year – was queer in itself. But your mansion had so many rooms it seemed a shame for someone like you – a truly Christmassy person – not to have a home with a purpose-‘built’ Christmas Room.

This year, however, owing to your recent illness – one that had kept you in bed for the whole of November and December to date – many of the usual Christmas preparations had been delayed, including the refreshing of the Christmas Room itself. Gathering new twinkly decorations at the posh Department Store in Knightsbridge (they had to be new), the ordering of a ripe Turkey, the arrangements for a freshly axed Christmas Tree, the careful making by your nephews and nieces of the fresh angel doll for the yet invisible Tree’s topmost branch and, last but not least, the summoning of the Christmas Spirit and Good Will, the clearing of throats for Carol Singing, and new smiles on old faces…. these things had all been delayed, despite your nephews and nieces, implicit in that list of Christmas scheming, paying regular visits and chivvying you into a new smile on your increasingly old face.

One day, on Christmas Eve by all accounts, the nephews and nieces – presumed orphans who lived elsewhere in inscrutable hovels – gathered outside the Christmas Room ready to take matters into their own hands, without the explicit instructions from yourself, still bed-ridden upstairs. Too late to order the Turkey, unless they resorted to the fishy-smelling ‘bloaters’, even at this late stage, lined up in beef dripping, and hopefully providing a specialised ripeness for any leathery poultry flesh, such ‘bloaters’ usually available from outside the Butchers shop in their own neighbourhood. Too late for felling the Tree. Most men had given up work for their families’ Christmasses. Even Knightsbridge was now darkened and unforgiving, still with shop windows mobbed by unsold toys. Somebody had over-ordered and their own job would be for the chop come Boxing Day. 

Not too late to exhume old decorations that you had managed, despite illness, to stow away in the darker niches of the Christmas Room as a fail-safe preservation of seasonal reserves at a last resort, rather than simple abandonment of them in such oubliettes. Above all, not too late for fresh Carol Singing. The oldest niece, with a smile, took up the strain. God Rest You Merry Gentlemen. Hark The Herald Angels Sing. The nephews mumbled along in wordless near-tunefulness as they had not been given a hymn-book. Humming rather than singing, There was possibly a hymn-book in the Christmas Room along with the old decorations. Custom meant that each year a brand new, if identical, hymn-book was bought. Presumably, your household was insulated from recession and poverty by the strength of such traditions. Meanwhile, the oldest nephew, managed to blur his own fear of ghosts by actually facing the Christmas Room on his own: a crafty form of psychological warfare that came naturally to budding heroes. He heard the increasing cacophony of voices below as a niece gradually lost control to the forces of childish impatience. He also heard the grunting snores of yourself in a bedroom nearby.

He held the candle high as the door swung wide easily enough on good old-fashioned hinges. Not even a single squeak accompanied his initial survey of the Christmas Room, crammed as it was by many years’ worth of decorations still twinkly enough to steal hope from despair. It was when he saw the whole line of angelic dolls with fragile wings squatting together under the white ceiling on a special shelf that Colin took due cognisance of his sadness. Each had once proudly stood the highmost …. upon the many Christmas Trees each of which had only one tour of duty in the Christmas Room. Or should have.

He gasped as his view expanded. Surely not. Whom had you employed (and why) to lug all the previous Christmas Trees to this room, then allowed them slowly to wilt and decompose in various corners. Even the candle spluttered at this sight. Such a candle was hardly capable of illuminating even the self-help-twinkly decorations – but succeeding to pick out these dark shapeless age-long soddennesses of grey walls and a trinket trunk? But how had the ceiling managed to stay so white? But manage, it had. The whole integrity of the past as well as the mansion itself was surely at risk. The brave nephew wept his heart out. Carols curdled in his imagination even as he failed to blot out their earlier loathsome implications.

The grunting snores in a nearby bedroom ceased as he watched a ghost pick up a plaster-white angel doll and wield it towards a feasible tree – certain in its ghostly self that this one ancient token of the Christmas Room could a true Christmas make. But a ghost’s fingers do slip even more readily than a butcher’s. The angel crashed to the floor, because the nephew’s  fearful suddenness of disbelief in ghosts was more focussed than he could hope to control with any competing longer-term belief. The ghost had evidently lost the optimum moment. But please give the nephew his due. He did manage to man-handle (during that Christmas Eve) whole heavy armfuls of Tree-muck from the Christmas Room and dispose of it in the garden – and then joined in joyfully with the other nephews and nieces in refreshing some Carols as far from that room as possible. You could not hear them sing, but you still managed to smile as you watched your own bedroom ceiling whiten and widen. A doll’s ghost, if not an angel’s.