6. What PGS Staff are reading, watching and listening to this Christmas

Portsmouth Point editors asked PGS staff their favourite Christmas books, films and songs. 

Mrs Burkinshaw

I love the film, Meet Me in St Louis, starring Judy Garland who, in one scene sings the impossibly beautiful 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas'. I have so many memories of watching this movie, year after year, sitting on the sofa next to my mother who adored Judy Garland and this film above all.  It was wonderful introducing this film to my own daughter this year. 

Although filmed in 1945, Meet Me in St Louis is set in 1904 in a time that must have seemed innocent and unspoilt to a generation that had been through two world wars and the Great Depression in between. Having said that, the film, for all its celebration of family joy and togetherness, is not afraid to explore the fears and anxieties that are an inherent part of growing up. 

When it comes to music, there is only one possibility: 'All I Want for Christmas is You' by Mariah Carey. From Mariah's uplifting vocals to the background jingle, not to mention the image of Mariah in her (unintentionally?) hilarious white snow suit, this song brings me nothing but joy. 

Christmas book? You can keep A Christmas Carol. For me, it has to be the genius that is Julia Donaldson's Stick Man, which both my children (and husband) also love - this magical, and deeply strange, tale of a lost stick desperately trying to return home to his family - and, in the process, saving Christmas - competes with the John Lewis 'Man in the Moon' advert for my most emotional Christmas moment (sorry, Mariah).

Mr Burkinshaw

Since Stick Man has already been taken, I'm choosing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - an anonymous, fourteenth-century poem that retains its magic even today: spectral winter landscapes, a charmingly sinister knight (part-Green Man/part-Satan) and the idealistic but haunted hero, Gawain. Originally written to be read aloud (in front of a roaring Yule fire), this is a book to be listened to; I'd recommend the audio of Jasper Britton reading Benedict Flynn's modern translation, which retains the alliterative power and Northern dialect of the original.  

My go-to era for Christmas music is the Fifties/Sixties: Dean Martin slurring his way through 'A Marshmallow World', Eartha Kitt purring her way through 'Santa Baby' and Jimmy Durante's gravelly rendition of 'Frosty the Snowman'. However, I agree with Mr Wiggins that the one indispensable Christmas soundtrack is Vince Guaraldi's 'Charlie Brown Christmas' .

My two favourite Christmas films (ideally watched as a double-feature) are Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner and Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Ostensibly romantic comedies, these are movies in which the happy endings are hard-won and tragic alternatives are barely averted (both films feature an attempted suicide - as does the Christmas classic, A Wonderful Life). Love is presented not as an all-conquering force but as something fragile and threatened. Set in pre-War Budapest, Shop Around the Corner, is lent further poignancy by the fact that, during its Hollywood production in 1940, the elegant, civilised Mitteleuropean culture portrayed so magically in the film was being obliterated by the brutal and barbaric forces of Nazism. A Jewish émigré from Germany, Lubitsch had a profound sense of tragedy  underpinning comedy, as did his protégé, Wilder, a refugee from Hitler's Austria. That lack of sentimentality, that impatience with schmaltz, is what makes both Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner and Wilder's The Apartment so darkly, sometimes shockingly, funny, but it is also what lends them their emotional honesty and moral force. 

 Mrs Kirby

My favourite films are: White Christmas (a Christmas eve MUST) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (the definitive version of the novel and set to reclaim its former glory with the reinstating of Belle’s song, ‘When Love Has Gone’, inadvertently lost for a decade but now rediscovered!). ‘T’was the Night Before Christmas’ is my book of choice. I have a beautiful, miniature very old edition that my children have fallen as deeply in love with as I did as a child. Although I love ‘Fairytale of New York’, Greg Lake’s ‘I believe in Father Christmas’ is an underrated Christmas song and comes in as at a close second. I also love Judy Garland’s version of ‘Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, originally from another cracking film, Meet Me in St. Louis.