Christmas Special Preview

You will be visited by Three Christmas Stories

Christmas time

Over the next week, JellyBread will be taking a tangential break to bring you a festive interlude. A Winterlude, if you will. And in this Winterlude we’ll be taking a look at some Christmas stories dug from the corners of the Christmas past of a few of our characters from the main narrative. So, with this in mind they might be unusual Christmas stories, or even subversive ones, but they are definitely Christmas stories.

Here’s what you have to look forward to, and what you can look forward to not having to look forward to.

I would love to have a story for you of a kid who made good, who maybe doesn’t come from such a wealthy or healthy family home background life and through the powers of the Christmas spirit is somehow given a chance at a better future, I really would, or perhaps the story of the other characters in that kid’s backstory, ones that are lost and mean and have wizened blackened cores and long ago have given up hope and some Christmas event – a miracle perhaps – a Christmas miracle (reflect… inane smile to the middle distance… back in the room) – sorts them out, realigns them, reminds them that they were once a good person and an ember in their forgotten centre builds to something and by god if they don’t do something good and the kid, the one from earlier, gets everything they want (which isn’t much, because poverty of both ambition and material items has taught them the greatest Christmas gift of all: humility). I would love this to be a story about redemption or stepping into the light or finding out Santa Claus is real after all, I really would, but it’s not.

For a start, it’s three stories we have here, and they’re all true, and nobody sees a flying reindeer or falls in love with an elf or even takes a sabbatical from their job in the city to return the small town from whence they sprung only to find themselves entangled in saving the family saw mill while falling hard for the local handyman/person (thank you for that evergreen plot line, Hallmark). No, not even that.

What this (these) story(ies) are… what they represent… what they say… is that Christmas is a time of reflection, of family, of tradition… yes it is all those things… but it is also, if not primarily, a time of alcohol, of falling over, and of the building of half-memories around alcohol-induced falling over. And it is also a time of childhood (mild) trauma that is very difficult to shake, and if those traumas do not destroy us or make us stronger, they give us stories to be told every year.

In the first story , Oink Oink Oink!, a child learns a harsh Christmas lesson and vows to make his tormenters learn their own. In the second story, Christmas Fuck, we see how a fight in a car park can teach us the true meaning of Christmas anecdotes. And finally, in The Loneliness of Not Knowing How To Leave a Party, we see how childhood Christmas trauma can be found in the places you least expect it.