by A London diary on the city’s festive ego, honest doubt, and a card I will never send
London believes it is the centre of Christmas the way it believes it is the centre of everything, with total confidence and no evidence. This December I found the perfect thing to deflate that ego: a letter from a child in Buenos Aires who does the whole holiday in summer and finds our version faintly ridiculous.
The city that thinks it owns the season
We Londoners carry on as though Christmas were a local invention, all our grey skies and mulled wine and superior complaining. Then I read the letter where Santa answers a child in Buenos Aires who explains, with perfect confidence, that summer Christmas is completely normal and only confusing to foreigners, and I felt the delicious vertigo of being the foreigner. To that child, our frosty, self-important London Christmas is the strange one. The same holiday runs everywhere, in whatever weather the place happens to have, and every city thinks its version is the definitive one. London is just the franchise most convinced it is head office.
It is genuinely good for this city to be reminded it is not special. Somewhere a child is having a perfectly wonderful Christmas in the sunshine and finding our snow bizarre, and the sheer London arrogance of assuming everyone shares our grey drizzle deserves exactly this gentle puncturing.
My genuinely frantic personal week
Let me report on the state of me. I attempted, once again, to enjoy the festive season at a sensible pace, and once again London made that impossible, because this city does not have a sensible pace, only frantic and asleep. I queued for a coffee behind a man having a full existential crisis about oat milk, got jostled by a tourist photographing a pigeon as though it were a landmark, and paid an amount for a mince pie that I have chosen to forget. This is a London December: chaotic, overpriced, and somehow, underneath it all, completely wonderful.
According to the tourism board, London is a world-leading festive destination, which is the official way of describing a place where you pay a premium to be jostled while a stranger photographs a pigeon, and honestly, world-leading is not wrong.
Even I question the whole thing sometimes
Somewhere around the third overpriced market I found myself wondering whether any of it means anything, so I was oddly comforted to find the letter where a child asks straight out whether Santa Claus is really real. That is the honest question underneath all the London cynicism, the one we are too cool to ask directly. The child asks it plainly and gets an honest answer, while we Londoners perform our ironic distance from the whole thing and secretly, every year, cry at an advert. The child’s honest doubt is braver than our practised detachment, and it gets a better response.
We hide our sincerity in this city under a big coat and a bad attitude. The child just asks the real question out loud, unashamed, and I have decided that is the more London thing to aspire to, even if this city has trained every instinct against it.
The card I will not send
I bought Christmas cards again this year, and I read the North Pole’s guide to Christmas cards and what to write in them, and I felt the familiar seasonal guilt of the Londoner who buys cards with genuine intent and never actually sends them. They are in my drawer right now, blank, judging me, a small stack of good intentions with no stamps. Every December I mean to be the sort of person who sends handwritten cards. Every January I find them, unsent, and add them to the pile from the year before. It is a tradition now. The cards are not for sending. The cards are for buying and briefly feeling like a better person.
According to the broadcasters, the handwritten card endures despite everything, which quietly shames those of us with a drawer full of intent and a shortage of follow-through.
The ego, gently punctured
I love this city with the desperate, unreasonable love of a person who cannot afford it, but London does itself good when the season reminds it that it is not the centre of anything. The same holiday, the same honest questions, the same unsent good intentions go out from every corner of the planet. Our grey, expensive, self-regarding version is just one among thousands, no more real than a sunny Christmas in Buenos Aires. It is healthy for us. We need, occasionally, to be a franchise rather than head office.
Where the Londoner lands
So I will keep loving this chaotic, overpriced, pigeon-photographing city through its most frantic month, keep questioning the whole thing at every market and crying at the adverts anyway, and keep a drawer full of cards I will never send. London thinks it invented Christmas. A child in Buenos Aires knows better. The same holiday runs everywhere, and there is a real freedom in finally admitting that our version, for all its grandeur, is just one more franchise doing the same warm, ridiculous thing the whole world does, in worse weather.
For festive London mischief, The Poke works the crowd.
