“Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained competitive consumption. But I fear the things he probably hated most about Christmas were precisely those which decent people most treasure, what John Betjeman, the elegist of the everyday, called “the sweet and silly Christmas things.” In the Twin Cities, the sweetest, silliest Christmas thing is the seasonal willingness of comparative strangers to invite each other into their homes. Newcomers here, even those like me who are accustomed to British levels of reserve, find formidable the willingness, during the rest of the year, Minnesotans exercise to respect one another’s privacy. This is the state whose largest university has for several years been without a faculty club, and no one has even noticed. But across the cities, Christmas seems to free up the flow of the soul, rather like Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week.
Of course, the midwinter social thaw does not occur on the scale it did in the Roman Empire. In the ancient world, the Saturnalia—the festival of Saturn, coldest, oldest, and most coagulative of the Gods—filled the last days of December with a free-and-easy spirit. (There is, incidentally, no need to believe in any continuity between Saturnalia and Christmas. The first mention of the Nativity of Christ on the 8th day before the Kalends of January comes as late the year 354. The Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, was more important to early Christians, and neither was half as important as Easter. Besides, the Early Church was keener on conversion than continuity.) The Saturnalia was quite a party. It was meant to recall the long-past Golden Age of prosperity and peace when Saturn himself ruled on Earth.
Festivities in both ancient Rome and modern Minnesota have in common a need for wine. Bernard Shaw didn’t of course. He was a teetotaler as well as a Noelophobe, so the whole of this column would have passed him by. But the rest of us like to be well lubricated (though not, of course, our designated drivers), and large parties require good bulk wine.
There are few things nastier than the carpet cleaner some people serve their guests—and it is the impurities, they say, which produce the hangover. So let me recommend some decent big bottles: a brand of wine called Vendange, made in the central valley of California, but with a rather French character to it (the name is French for “grape harvest”). At less than $8 locally for a double bottle (1.5 litres), it is certainly affordable and the reds have the added merit of making hearty mulled wine. Vendange wines can be provided in quantity when that’s what’s needed. They also have quality. (Loyal readers of this column may recall my contention that, when it comes to wine, excess is the enemy of appreciation. Let the boozers chunder on the wall-to-wall, or “talk on the big white telephone.”)
Vendange produces wine from a wide range of grape varieties. A host who selects several contrasting bottles can find amusement educating himself about the tastes of different types of grape, knowledge which is basic to intelligent imbibing. The Cabernet, it must be admitted, reminds me why the French mix this variety with the milder-tasting Merlot when they make Claret. But the Pinot Noir slips down pleasantly. My particular favorite, the Malbec, is a dark red wine with a distinctive, refreshing character. There is a good range of whites as well, Chardonnay, Semillon, and so on.
These are wines which will please at parties. Or they can be sipped, while you perform your own sweet and silly seasonal rite. Mine is to read with the children a short story of Alphonse Daudet set one Christmas Eve in 17th century Provence. Whatever yours may be, I wish you every joy at the dark time of the year. Shaw was a bore.
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