Christmas at Covid-time: Even in this bleak midwinter, the past shows how to have a simple but happy Christmas – Christine Grahame MSP

There are three carols I particularly like: Silent Night, sung in German, I Saw Three Ships and In the Bleak Mid-Winter.

An old-fashioned Christmas might be just the thing this year (Picture: Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images)

The lyrics to the last are haunting and beautifully written by Christina Rossetti. I have liked these three since childhood when in my youth I attended the Christmas Midnight Service at St Nicolas Church, Sighthill.

The minster was called Father Strange, a beautiful, almost beatific man who wore a long shabby cassock and was appropriately as poor as a church mouse.

Those were the days before I became sceptical, then an atheist where I remain to this day. But I miss the silence and peace in the church, the candles, the Christmas hymns and carols.

In those days, there were no facilities for us so we made the church our focus. It was sociable and a way of meeting the opposite sex without stress.

We all loved Father Strange, even my late dad who once gave him a load of apples packed with straw in a wooden crate for him to distribute.

Why remember this? Why not? Christmas is for unashamed nostalgia to cling onto in these Omicron days (and that’s the last I’ll mention about that).

Cheap homemade paper chains which fell apart, paper decorations which pulled open to form bells, a real tree with no posh stand but stuffed in a coal bucket and propped upright with earth and bricks. Real candles on flimsy metal holders.

Fairy lights which could give you a shock if you touched them against the condensation on the windows and hearing sleigh bells as my brother and I stood on our beds on Christmas Eve failing to sleep.

He delighted in showing me one year where the presents were hidden as I was determined to cling onto believing in Santa Claus.

There was the doll of my dreams, hidden in a large cardboard box doubling as a bedside table, with her yellow dress, white sandals and, most crucially, a straw hat. Next day I had to feign surprise as I opened the wrapping to find her there.

The table somehow looked glamorous in the cramped living room with fruit piled high and Mackintosh reds polished and shiny as baubles. The smell of turkey from the kitchen where mum was lost in the steam and rattle of pans. My Grannie Grahame (now me) with burly Uncle Dod unusually here for the day.

He was a wine connoisseur and so we had good wine (the only time we had wine). There was Advocaat and sherry for mum, shandy for the older kids and whisky for dad. I had no idea money was tight but then in our street we were all in the same boat and there was no 24-hour TV to show us what the rest were having.

Am I remembering through rose-coloured lenses? So what? You see, in these awful bleak midwinter days, when perhaps the earth is no longer hard as iron or water like a stone (that’s global warming for you) you can still have a simple but happy Christmas. This year, with my oldest son and family emigrating in the New Year to Nova Scotia, of all places, it’s seeing them which matters most to me. Best wishes.

Christine Grahame is SNP MSP for Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale

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