Darker side of Christmas lurks in every living room

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 27 DECEMBER 1998

CHRISTMAS IS THE great leveller. Perhaps if I had risen from a Muslim tradition I would be writing: “Eid is the great leveller”; but such are the vagaries of birth and life.

It is easy to be flippant about Christmas, to make sly references to Boney M and that new terror from the north, Helmut Lotti, to dwell on the Coca-Cola origins of Santa Claus and his red-and-white suit, but ultimately Christmas, with its memories and hopes and its excessive consumption of cheap sparkling wine from glasses bought at Clicks, comes down to one thing: fear. Christmas is the great celebration of deep, unshakeable, inescapably personalised fear.

Whether it be fear of the past or fear of not being able to recreate the past, our frenzies of eating, buying, drinking, remembering, forgetting are driven by the ghastly apprehension that we are alone, that childhood has gone, that that fugitive sip of champagne at the lunch table between the first cracker and the first roast potato will never again taste as good as when we were not allowed to take it.

I have in my possession a small plastic compass that came tumbling from a Christmas cracker when I was a chubby lad of nine, testing my strength against my sad-eyed Aunty Lynn, who wore too much make-up, even for the 1970s, and always smelt inexplicably of Old Spice. The needle of the compass was wobbly, but always pointed north, no matter which way I twisted it. Even at the bottom of the next-door neighbours’ swimming pool, with a large magnet and, for some reason, a brick, that needle never moved away from the big N.

“At least you’ll never be lost,” lied Aunty Lynn. “And you’ll always be able to find your way home.”

It was an obvious lie – a lie that became increasingly more obvious as I grew older – but at least it was a comforting one. I will take one comforting untruth over a thousand desolate honesties. That is what I appreciated about Aunty Lynn – for all her unsettling personal characteristics and easily imagined personal unhappiness, she was a comforting figure. Isabel Jones is like that too.

Aunty Isabel is a true South African hero – the local equivalent of the men of 911, or a similar service in a fantasy world where free, speedy, efficient assistance is but a phone call away. Whenever I shut my eyes and think about the nativity – an increasingly less frequent occurrence – the three wise men always have the faces of Desmond Tutu, Willem Heath and Isabel Jones.

Isabel was doing her bit for the festive season this week on Fair Deal (SABC3, Mondays, 6.15pm). Her target, for a change, wasn’t a swindler, charlatan or mail-order shyster but mince pies, traditionally a subject of some indifference in the Hot Medium household.

Mince pies, I have always felt, are the unwelcome relatives at the Christmas table. While not exactly prone to getting drunk, feeling up the host’s wife and telling loud stories about the good old days in Rhodesia, they still don’t really fit in, do they? Offering neither the comfort of a solid meat-’n-potatoes scoff, nor the hot, silently screaming fuzziness of a healthy tot of Yuletide spirit, they seem to lurk without fixed intent, undesired, a strange remnant of someone else’s idea of Christmas.

“Ooh, I couldn’t possibly, I’ve had so much already” – those are the words most familiar to the veteran mince pie who’s seen a Christmas or two in its time.

Undaunted, Isabel rounded up a trio of what she called “celebrities” to blind-taste a selection of retail pies. Mark Gillman was one, and a pair of actors from Isidingo (SABC3, weekdays, 6.30pm) were the others. That should tell you something about how many celebrities hang around in Johannesburg over the Christmas season.

They boldly tucked into their samples. “The pastry’s crumbly,” complained the first Isidingo gourmet.

“The pastry’s supposed to be crumbly,” murmured Isabel diplomatically.

“I’ve never tasted a mince pie before,” mentioned the second connoisseur. Isabel smiled bravely.

Gillman, meanwhile, was fumbling for some wackiness. His entire radio career is built upon the twin pillars of being wacky and shouting into the microphone. On television you are not allowed to shout into the microphone. “This mince pie tastes like … tastes like … this!” he mugged, grabbing something from the table in front of him. Unfortunately the camera failed to follow his hand, so we will never know what he grabbed. I suspect, however, it was another mince pie. How Isabel must have wished she was still dealing with swindlers, charlatans and mail-order shysters.

On Christmas Eve I shunned SABC’s various treasure troves of festive tunes (if it’s not sung by Sacha Distel, I just ain’t interested), and turned instead to the baubly wonders of satellite. Sadly, there was no Christmas Channel – which makes me wonder exactly how the Osmonds make a living these days – but I happily settled down to The Wizard of Oz (TNT Classic Movies, 11pm).

I have always considered The Wizard to be a far more appropriate Christmas film than those other staples, The Sound of Music (in which Julie Andrews tries to sing the Nazis into submission) and It’s A Wonderful Life (in which Jimmy Stewart demonstrates the socially productive aspects of attempted suicide).

It is an unsettling film. Things stir beneath the surface of the story – fearful things, only half-apprehended by children, and the more powerful for that. With its witches and flying monkeys and unreasonably cheerful midgets, there is a dark shadow rimming the candy colours and heel-kicking tunes of Oz. It is, I think, the shadow of adulthood, of the farm back in Kansas with its mortgage and its freak tornadoes and failed crops.

Watching the young Judy Garland, pumped to the pigtails with diet pills and amphetamines, turning her face to the skies and to the future, yearning to be somewhere over the rainbow, I couldn’t stop myself whispering: “Stay right where you are, babe.”