Shame descended on the Young household last Christmas. When my wife, Caroline, picked up our nine-year-old son from school on the last day of the term, she was intercepted by his teacher, who wanted a quiet word.
Oh no, she thought. What’s Ludo done now?
In fact, it was more a case of what I’d done—or failed to do. The teacher explained that she’d asked the children to write “letters to Santa,” saying what they wanted for Christmas. At the top of his list Ludo had written: “Light bulb.” When the teacher asked him why he’d chosen such an unusual present he told her that the bulb in his bedroom had stopped working six months ago. Ludo’s hope was that if Santa put a bulb in his stocking, his deadbeat dad might finally get around to replacing it.
One of the reasons I was so embarrassed by this story is that, for years now, I’ve been complaining about how greedy my kids are when it comes to Christmas presents. Ludo has never asked for anything as modest as a light bulb before. On the contrary, he has presented me with endless lists, some stretching to several sides of foolscap, nearly all of which contain items like Xbox and PlayStation accompanied by detailed drawings. When he was four, he spent the best part of an afternoon drawing a picture of a “Roket” and then painstakingly explained that this rendering wasn’t supposed to be actual size. He wanted a real rocket, one that could take him to the moon.
The sheer ambition of Ludo’s requests is quite endearing. Clearly, he is still an innocent when it comes to money. Not so my daughter, who’s two years older. Even as a five-year-old, she knew that if she asked for anything costing more than £25 she’d be unlikely to get it. Where she went wrong was in asking for more or less everything in this price bracket. She was so suggestible that she only had to see an advertisement for, say, Hot Wheels Shark Bite Bay, and she wanted it. And I mean, really, really wanted it, as in ran down to my garden office and told me she absolutely must have it. I often thank God that we’re not yet in the era when you can purchase something advertised on television with one click of a button on the remote. If we were, the ground floor of our house would look like a Toys“R”Us warehouse.
Some parents don’t allow their children to watch commercial television for precisely this reason, but I’m not sure whether that would make much difference. Mine would only get to hear about the same must-have toys on the playground. Two years ago, five-year-old Charlie announced he wanted a Nintendo DS for Christmas. Caroline asked if he knew what it was since he’d never shown any interest in video games before. “Of course I do,” he said. “It’s this really cool machine for making sweets.” We managed to fob him off with a Pez Machine that year.
"On Christmas Day, they tear off the wrapping paper, glance at the present and then immediately move on to the next one. They're like velociraptors hunting for fresh meat."I’m a typically annoying father in that I agree beforehand that Caroline will be in charge of buying the children’s presents, and after she’s wrapped them up and attached labels saying they’re from both of us, I then go out and buy additional gifts on Christmas Eve. I hand them over the following day, explaining that they’re “special presents from Dad.” Last year I got Ludo a “Lollipop Factory,” which went down like a cup of cold sick with Caroline. “There’s nothing I hate more in the world than lollipops,” she said.
The depressing thing about buying my children toys is how little pleasure they sometimes seem to get from them. On Christmas Day, they tear off the wrapping paper, glance at the present with barely concealed disappointment, and then immediately move on to the next one. There’s something predatory about it, like velociraptors hunting for fresh meat.
Often, they have to be coaxed into playing with the toys I’ve bought them, even though they were begging for them just days before. This involves them opening the boxes, emptying their contents on to the carpet, and then mixing up all the little bits into a potpourri of multicolored plastic. After they’ve gone to bed, late on Christmas evening, I spend several hours on my hands and knees sifting through the pile, trying to put the right bits into the right boxes, like a low-level CIA grunt trying to piece together secret documents after they’ve been shredded. As a general rule, you lose about 10 percent of the detachable parts every time a toy is played with.
The worst offender in this respect is Playmobil. Last year, one of Ludo’s godparents bought him the Playmobil Large Pirate Ship, a build-it-yourself scale model that consists of over one hundred separate parts. Within minutes of Ludo opening it, some of these bits had fallen through the floorboards and others had been kicked under the fridge, while still others had been snatched up by Charlie and added to his Lego collection. By the time Ludo and I had finished building it, even a bunch of Somali pirates would have turned up their noses at it.
Read more on Christmas:
Wine: how to pick a great bottle for Christmas
Should we try and reimagine the Christmas feast?
Unsuitable Christmas presents: extracts from memoirs and diaries
To date, the most successful present I’ve ever bought Ludo is a Thomas the Tank Engine train set. While Magnetix and Moon Sand are still sitting in their boxes, having been played with once and forgotten, the train set is constantly being bro- ken up and reassembled. Ludo has now lost interest in it, but eight-year-old Freddie has been gripped by Thomas mania, and in time I daresay Charlie will be, too. My only caveat is to advise against buying battery-operated engines. All three of my sons love nothing more than switching them on, leaving them on their side so the wheels spin around endlessly, and then abandoning them.
My three least favorite words at Christmas time are “batteries not included.” I’m sure if I actually sat down and calculated my greatest expense each year, the spreadsheet would say: batteries. If I had half a brain I’d give up journalism entirely and start selling the damn things door to door. Earlier this year, we rented a cottage from a retired couple living very comfortably in Cornwall. As they were off to the local yacht club one day, pulling a sailboat behind a brand-new SUV, I asked them how they’d made their money. “Batteries,” they said.
Christmas time was a very different affair when I was a boy. My father, Michael, was a big believer in Christmas. That is to say, he liked the idea of it. My older sister and I were the products of his second marriage—to our mother, Sasha—and he would usually invite the children from his first marriage to our house for lunch. It could be quite tense, with undercurrents of rivalry and resentment, but all the children made an effort to keep the atmosphere festive. We did this to protect our father’s feelings. He was the opposite of a paterfamilias. His strategy for holding the family together was to cast himself as the weakest and most vulnerable member. His hope was that we’d pretend to get along in order to avoid upsetting him. And by and large we did.
"there was Vincent Brome, an elderly literary gentleman in his nineties whose main topic of conversation was sex. He, at least, was a repeat guest."Michael, who died in 2002, was a left-wing intellectual who helped set up a number of institutions that are now part of the fabric of British public life: the Open University, Which magazine, and the University of the Third Age, among others. He was also a genuine eccentric. On the eve of a trip to Australia he once told me about a brilliant wheeze he’d come up with to minimize the amount of luggage he took with him. It involved wearing two of everything in transit. He proudly showed me how he’d prepared for the eighteen-hour flight by putting on two pairs of socks, two shirts, two suits, and so on.
Michael didn’t simply want his children to come to Christmas lunch. He would also invite a variety of waifs and strays. For instance, there was Vincent Brome, an elderly literary gentleman in his nineties whose main topic of conversation was sex. He, at least, was a repeat guest. Quite often, the people seated around the table were complete strangers to us—and, indeed, to my father as well. He would disappear to his office in London’s East End on Christmas morning, and if he spotted a tramp on his way back home at lunchtime he would bundle him into the car. It wasn’t beyond him to turn up with two or three homeless people. He would give a great deal of thought as to where to place each guest at the table, making sure they were seated next to the person he thought they’d get on with best. He was the perfect host.
I remember one Christmas lunch being interrupted by a loud knocking at the door. It was the tramp who lived in the park across the street. As I was fishing in my pocket for a couple of quid, Michael appeared behind me and said, “Ah, Mr. Murphy, come in, come in. You’re just in time.”
"Michael was generally fascinated by the subject of death—it was guaranteed to come up at every Christmas lunch"This generosity didn’t always go down well with my mum, who had to feed all these people, but she did her best. She only lost her temper with Michael once, and that was when he failed to show up for Christmas. We usually sat down to lunch at 2:00 p.m., but the hour came and went and there was no sign of him. We had a particularly fruity group of waifs and strays that year, and their only connection was that they had all been invited by my father. Without him there, the conversation didn’t exactly flow. It was like the bar scene in Star Wars, rewritten by Harold Pinter.
Michael finally materialized at 4:30 p.m. and explained that he’d taken a detour via a cemetery in Bethnal Green, one of London’s most deprived neighborhoods. He was generally fascinated by the subject of death—it was guaranteed to come up at every Christmas lunch—and he’d heard that on Christmas Day this particular cemetery was full of elderly, working- class women sharing “a cuppa” with their late husbands. The “sharing” consisted of pouring tea into their graves, while they updated them with all the latest family gossip.
Even when he turned up on time there was no guarantee we’d eat anything. I was about to tuck into my roast one Christmas when Mr. Murphy appeared at the door again. Michael immediately invited him to join us, but, having done so once, the gentleman wasn’t inclined to repeat the experience. Instead, he asked if he could “borrow” five pounds, explaining that he’d been mugged earlier that day. It was obvious to everyone that this was just a ruse—everyone, that is, except my father. Like many liberals, his ability to see the best in people was allied to an essential innocence. However, instead of simply giving the homeless man a fiver, he rounded up a posse and insisted we go out and search for the thief. I spent the next hour patrolling the streets of Islington with my father, my half-brother, and the elderly Vincent Brome. Mr. Murphy trailed behind us at a distance, dumbfounded that his words had been taken at face value.
All this do-goodery makes my father sound a bit like Mrs. Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist” in Bleak House who places the interests of the poor and needy above those of her own family. There was certainly an element of that—nearly all high-minded socialists have a touch of Mrs. Jellyby about them—but his compassion was also rooted in experience. As a boy, he’d been neglected by his own parents, an Irish bohemian painter and a rackety Australian musician. It wasn’t uncommon for his birthday to go completely unnoticed by them and on Christmas Day they often disappeared to the pub for hours, leaving him to fend for himself. Consequently, his heart always went out to those who were alone at Christmas—he didn’t want them to feel unloved, as he had.
The reason he’d been so late the day he visited the cemetery is that he’d been so moved by the sight of these widows sitting by their husband’s gravesides that he felt obliged to strike up conversations with them. Not surprisingly, they’d been eager to talk. And that’s why he had difficulty getting away.
We had all been furious with him for keeping us waiting, but within fifteen minutes he managed to reduce us to tears, telling us about these wonderful, stoic characters, full of British pluck and able to laugh at their misfortune. We went from being angry that he was late to feeling ashamed that we’d put our own comfort and convenience before the needs of these heroic women. It was deeply manipulative, of course—suddenly, we were in the wrong!—but we didn’t mind being manipulated by him. At some point during every Christmas lunch, my father would find a way to remind us of how lucky we were, usually by telling a story full of Dickensian pathos. It was part of the ritual.
As I watch my own children tearing through their piles of presents, I often reflect on how different their Christmas Days are from mine. My home is not a soup kitchen, and none of the local tramps would think to knock on my door for a bit of charity. Instead, it’s just the usual round of eating, drinking, and rampant consumerism. My four children enjoy it and so do I—I’m a capitalist, damn it—but I often think of my father and his unconventional attempts to spread a little Christmas cheer. I miss him, obviously, and I also miss my half-siblings and Vincent Brome. More surprisingly, I miss the homeless men. Under my father’s roof, Christmas was always a little strange and unsettling, but there was also something magical about it. Even though Michael wasn’t a Christian, there was a connection with the tradition of sacrifice and generosity—of sharing your good fortune with others—that isn’t much in evidence in my household.
Perhaps next year I’ll take some time out on Christmas Day to visit his grave in Highgate Cemetery and share a cup of tea with him. Perhaps we’ll talk about this.
Excerpted from "The Christmas Virtues," by Toby Young. Copyright © 2015 by Templeton Press
