My Perfect Christmas

 Portsmouth Point editors and PGS staff recount their favourite Christmas books, films, music and food. 

Nikhil Patel

My favourite Christmas book is A Christmas Carol. In Year 6, a teacher recommended it to me after I read the more sombre Tale of Two Cities. Since it was seasonally appropriate I read and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have always enjoyed novels with an element of the supernatural and quickly found that the three ghosts of Christmas were what made this book so interesting to me. Furthermore as a lover of history, I really enjoyed reading Dickens's descriptions of a Victorian Christmas. However, my favourite Christmas film is the Shrek Christmas special Shrek the Halls. I remember when I was much younger, we were snowed in over the holidays. My Grandad turned on CBBC for me one evening and there it was. Although slightly confused at first, I found the world's most famous ogre (and his donkey accomplice) hilarious, and whenever I see it on various streaming services it takes me back to when I was little.

Flixy Coote

“Where are you going?" "To the North Pole, of course, this is the Polar Express!” The Polar Express will forever be my favourite Christmas movie.  I think the story itself represents the build up to Christmas, with the train ride summarising Advent and the little boy summing up the feeling of being a little child at Christmas. But it also highlights how the magic of Christmas never fades, no matter your age, because the story tells of a boy who is reaching the age of having doubts about believing in Father Christmas. Not only is the film the first-ever movie filmed entirely with motion capture, the book it is based off was also written by the man that wrote Jumanji. The movie will also always remind me of my Mum, and of the evening of Christmas Eve after laying out carrots for the reindeer and a mince pie for Father Christmas. Although when I was younger, I never understood the true meaning, the film has always been special, and it has got more special as I have grown up and realised how the meaning of it relates to so many of our older, grown-up perspectives on Christmas. So, if you are to watch one Christmas movie this year, let it be The Polar Express; it’ll show you how magical Christmas can be, no matter your age. 

Reverend Hunt

My favourite Christmas book is the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, particularly the description of the shepherds. It is really important, to me, that the first people to be told of Jesus' birth are the least privileged members of society, which was central to Jesus' message during his ministry. My favourite Christmas song is 'O Holy Night' - although it has to be a version with a great soloist; I love this song so much I am usually still singing it by the time we get to March. As for best Christmas film: well, obviously, it has to be Die Hard - part of Hunt family tradition, which I am delighted my son has now begun with his family.  

Mr Sadden

You can’t beat A Christmas Carol – that traditional story of how a stone-hearted, miserable, misanthropic Tory almost becomes a Socialist – but which filmed version is the best?

For me, Michael Caine - a real-life Tory – plays the role of Scrooge in the spirit of both Dickens and the Muppets – not an easy balancing act – and delivers one of his best ever performances. But the all-time best adaptation was filmed 70 years ago in black and white (avoid the “colourised” version) and has some wonderful British character actors headed by Alastair Sim – a real-life Socialist – whose performance as Scrooge makes this film an enduring festive highlight. Sim, with his unique physiognomy, is perfectly cast and his journey from lugubrious to joyful is wonderful. “Merry Christmas and God Bless Us Everyone!”

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.

 

Mrs Burkinshaw

Like Mrs Kirby, 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, 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.