Why love Christmas? Winterson lays out her thesis in two essays that bookend the collection. It is also a cookbook, creating a hodgepodge form that suits Winterson’s love of the holiday’s motley, improbable spirit. The result is a book for cold, clear nights and roaring fireplaces. For years, Winterson has written a new story every year at Christmastime, and here she collects them for the first time. Perhaps you write a book like Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days. But what do you do if the old symbols still tug at you-if beneath the tacky wrapping you find an impulse toward mystery and community worth preserving? Grit your teeth and get through it, or, if you have the option, just opt out.įair enough. And Christmas? A consumeristic nightmare, filling the airwaves with treacle and littering the snow with tinseled trash. Thanksgiving: a bad-faith papering-over of colonialist oppression. Halloween: a time for tooth decay and racist costumes. It is customary, in certain enlightened circles in the U.S., to find our holidays embarrassing or worse. ‘Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days’ by Jeanette Winterson
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |