Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

We're humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don't know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We've been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We're pessimists who believe it's too late so what the hell? We're the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance.

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.

Odd that a festival to celebrate the most austere of births should end up being all about conspicuous consumption.

Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling. Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do. Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect. There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6)

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn't our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

And memories, sometimes, are places we go to honor the dead.

Memories can be tools for change; they don't have to be weapons used against us, or baggage we have to drag around.

Most of us can only see the world we know.

The reason I suggest making some of this small meal yourself is because ritual hs an anticipatory relevance - we prepare for it, practically and psychologically; that’s part of its benefit. It’s about making your own raft of time. Your own doorway into Christmas. You can do this with family and friends, of course, if they’re in the zone. And yes, you could do it while wrapping presents, but it wouldn’t be as powerful. Ritual isn’t about multitasking. Ritual is time cut out of time. Done right it has profound psychological effects.

Our memories change as we do.

He liked city walking. He didn't want to have to go to that place called countryside to take a walk. He wanted to stuff his hands in his pockets, set his internal compass vaguely east or south and wander till he was tired enough to get the bus home.

A good job, money, more money, travel, happiness. Christmas-time swivelled the lens and brought these things into focus. If you had some, all, any of these things you could feel especially pleased with yourself over the twelve days of feasting and family. If you didn't have some, all, any of these things you felt the lack more keenly. You felt like an outsider.

What's the big deal? Snow's just rain that's been left out in the cold.

The point about food is that a lot of it used to be left-overs and recycling.

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'. It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

When I am climbing I understand that gravity exists to protect us from our lightness of being, in the same way that time is what shields us from eternity.

What is a miracle? A miracle is an intervention – it breaks through the space-time continuum. A miracle is an intervention that cannot be accounted for purely rationally. Chance and fate are in the mix. A miracle is a benign intervention, yes, but miracles are like the genie in the bottle – let them out and there’s a riot. You’ll get your Three Wishes, but a whole lot else besides.

And light a candle to the living; the world of friendship and family that means so much.

The future is not fixed unless we allow it to be so.

Even being good has unintended consequences. You're only human, after all.

I ate, I drank, I wondered why love is so hard and life is so short. I went to sleep.

time is what shields us from eternity.

There's mountain snow. And polar snow. And ski-snow, and deep snow, and snow in flutters like tiny moths, and snow in flurries like moths in a hurry, and snow in flakes like someone (it?) is grating the sky. And show sharp as insect bites and snow as soft as lather and wet snow that doesn't stick and dry snow that does, and wraps the world like an installation to the point in the night where you wake up and the sound is gone, to the point in the night where you turn deeper into the bed, to the point in the night where there's snow in your sleep and your sleep is deep as snow.

Stories are where I live - they are physical three-dimensional places to me. When I was a kid and locked in the coal hole for various crimes, I had a choice: count coal - a limited activity. Tell myself a story - an unlimited world of the imagination.

Being a great poet doesn't always mean that you write great poetry.

Dreams were so tiring that she wondered how anybody ever dared to go to sleep at night.

Love affairs are discoveries of new worlds.