Cathy Rentzenbrink’s favourite Christmas reads

‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.’ Oh Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, how I have loved you all my life, and imagine I will keep rereading you until the end of it. This story of four sisters is a perfect antidote to the excesses of festive consumption as the hard-up girls spend all their money on a gift for their mother, and then agree to give up their Christmas breakfast to a local poor family. I sob buckets of tears over it – I love a cathartic cry – and finish feeling glad and grateful to be safe and warm, with no one I love being away at war or catching scarlet fever. 

Enright’s skewers many festive absurdities in this tale of grown-up offspring coming back to Ireland for a family Christmas. Here is Constance at the supermarket: ‘Sausage and sage for the stuffing, an experimental bag of chestnuts… She got wine, sherry, whiskey, fresh nuts, salted nuts, crisps, bags and bags of apples, two mangoes, a melon, dark cherries for the fruit salad, root ginger, fresh mint, a wooden crate of satsumas, the fruit cold and promising sweet, each one with its own sprig of green, dark leaves… She went back for more sausages because she had forgotten about breakfast. Tomatoes. Bacon. Eggs… She searched high and low for string to keep the cloth on the pudding, stopped at the delicatessen counter for pesto, chicken liver pate, tubs of olives.’ Out in the car park, Constance realises she has forgotten sprouts. And brandy butter. And honey to glaze the ham: ‘It was as though she had thrown the whole shop in the trolley and bought nothing.’

This volume of festive diaries from the author of the hugely bestselling This is Going to Hurt shows hardworking healthcare professionals coping with champagne cork injuries, turkey bones stuck in the trachea, and finger amputations due to enthusiastic parsnip chopping. The urology department is busy too as ‘egged on by egg nog, there is a definite uptick in objects that have found themselves in orifices and are struggling with the return journey.’ Kay suggests that if we want to help the NHS and all who sail in her we could send thank you cards, give blood and register as organ donors. At the very least we could, ‘Stop sticking root vegetables, remote controls, chocolate wrappers, fairy lights… up your internal cavities for one day a year. It’s only 24 hours, guys, and you’ll make all their Christmasses come at once.’

‘My mother is not a foodie. She would prefer that all meals be taken in pill form but once a year, every year, she becomes possessed of a deep and profound need to serve up a roast turkey. It’s some kind of grim personal quest.’ This joyous collection of essays, stories and tips from the author of Love, Nina includes a guffaw-inducing celebration of the round robin and a useful guide to present buying: ‘Don’t start a funeral plan for anyone or buy them a carpet shampooer. Death and hard work are un-Christmassy and upsetting.’ Time and hassle-saving strategies include agreeing as a family to go ‘book only,’ which is an excellent idea. And I like this advice re sprouts: ‘Ignore Nigel Slater, just boil, do not roast or fry or add anything. You’ve got enough to do.’

On Christmas Day 1914 a series of unofficial ceasefires took place on the Western Front. The soldiers stopped shooting at each other and instead showed each other photographs, swapped souvenirs and played football. I loved this story as a child and it only becomes more resonant as I age. It feels very pertinent now when I feel we are being encouraged to hate and feel suspicious of other people: we should always remember that more unites us than divides us. Carol Ann Duffy made the wartime truce the subject of her Christmas poem in 2011, part of her series of tiny beautifully illustrated books that warm the heart. 

One of my all-time favourite books is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and I am always soothed by the wisdom and generosity of Maya Angelou. Both are in abundance here in this poem she wrote for the 2005 tree-lighting ceremony in the White House. She talks about our hunger for peace, not only the absence of war and hostility but ‘A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies/Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.’ She offers a vision that Christmas is a ‘glad season’ and ‘a halting of hate time.’ She invites all religions, ‘Angels and mortals, believers and non-believers’ to offer peace to each other, ‘without shyness or apology or hesitation.’ And so I do to you, dear reader, whoever you are and wherever you are. Peace, my brother, my sister, my soul. 

Cathy Rentzenbrink has always been a reader, from a childhood spent with a nose in a book to taking comfort in reading in times of tragedy. Her love of reading led her first to a career as a bookseller and then as a writer, and no matter what the future holds, reading will always help. This moving and joyful exploration of the impact books can have on our lives is packed with recommendations from one reader to another.