Main content

Adrian Chiles' Christmas Meditation

Adrian Chiles

The late hours of Christmas night have always felt profound to me, as rich as any moment of the season, and it doesn't get the attention it deserves in my view.

I suspect this is because it tends towards the melancholic, or perhaps that's just me. Christmas, after all, is for looking forward to.

Looking forward to for days, weeks or even months. It's less fun looking back at it, and this is the moment we must start.

To look back has always given me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. A quietly kind of turbulent mix of gratitude, sadness, relief, and maybe some residual excitement too. When I was little the thrilling, impatient, ache of anticipation would have been with me for so long that I couldn't remember how I'd felt before the waiting started. The build-up went on forever. I thought Christmas would never come. Not anymore, and this is the biggest, saddest difference I've noted over the years. The run up to Christmas Day seems to get shorter and shorter. Now it all seems to be over as soon as it starts.

How did this happen?

It's sad. I'm bang in the middle of my 50s now and I've been looking back at the ghosts of Christmases past from each of my five decades.

Now I know ghosts are supposed to be of those who've passed on, but when I look at children, teenagers, young parents and whatever else I used to be, they often feel like my ghosts haunting me, but in a nice way I suppose.

So to my first decade when Christmas took the longest time of all to come around; it can't have helped calm the torment of anticipation that the Pinky and Perky Christmas album was the first festive LP I listened to endlessly.

It's nerve-jangling stuff. No wonder I was highly strung. I also played carols on the piano while my ancient teacher, Mr Frewin, fought in vain against the urge to doze off.

More devout than ever – on paper

It's an odd thing that while this was the least religious phase of my life, there was more religion in these childhood Christmases than any that have followed, right up to the present day, even when, as a Catholic convert and church-goer, I'm more devout than ever – on paper at least.

My grandmother, my mum’s mum from Croatia, my lovely “baka” was with us every Christmas. She was known to go to church every now and then and she made the sign of the cross on a loaf of bread before she got into it for the first time. Apart from her, my family were and are all non-believers. Their only nod to the divine was the Nativity scene. My mom used to put this under the tree. The cat also, apparently a non-believer, soon set about vandalising it.

I, for some reason, possibly something to do with my “baka”, was always a believer and at Christmas there was plenty of religion for me to believe in. At the age of nine I was, to my consternation, cast in the Nativity play, as the Angel Gabriel. I was surprised not to say appalled because I'd always thought of angels as girls, but the teacher dried my eyes and showed me a picture in a book which suggested otherwise.

My mum ran me up an angel's outfit from a bed sheet and on the night I felt as if I nailed the part even though I was distracted by the sight of my mum, my dad and my little brother sitting next to the headmaster on the front row.

My performance did seem to have a profound effect on my brother, as in the quiet moments immediately following my leaving of the stage, he broke wind at a length and volume, quite remarkable in a six-year-old. That's atheist families for you, I'm afraid.

Rich tapestry of experience

The Angelic voice singing once in Royal David's City outside the front door turned out to belong to the school bully.

So at this time on Christmas night my little self would have been sound asleep, quite exhausted by this rich tapestry of experience. Disappointed as I would have been about it being all over, I don't recall being downhearted; I suspect that given what I’d had drummed into me about the birth of Christ being at the heart of it all as well as feeling like the end of something nice, it might also have felt a little like the beginning of something good too.

The nativity still played its part in my teens – I sang in the school choir, treading uncertainly in the no man's land between tenor and bass. We performed Handel's Messiah in the local church and I, for one, was rather pleased with "Unto us a child is born".

And then there was the time the Angelic voice singing once in Royal David's City outside the front door turned out to belong to the school bully. My dad smiled at him. He smiled at my dad while glancing at me – a glance which conveyed with great clarity the grave consequences that would ensue if I bring the word of this terrifying young man's pitch-perfect soprano. My dad gave him a couple of quid.

It was at the conclusion of the Christmas days of my early teens, that the melancholy started to creep in.

The reality of mortality

It was the death of my Croatian “baka” that woke me up to the reality of mortality, which was a great source of disappointment to me. Now every Christmas night as my English Nan and Grandad left us all, I’d be gripped by a terrible fear that this moment marked the end of my last Christmas with them. Harbouring this unshared sadness, I'd slope off to bed, and at this hour I'd be sleeping an uneasy sleep. But my late teens would have found me at this time lying awake, wondering when I could see my mates again, preferably in a pub.

Now an appetite for alcohol had washed away many preoccupations with both the birth of Christ, and indeed the passing of my loved ones. I’ve a memory of a Christmas Eve in a local pub – I was slumped next to the jukebox as the whole place sang along with the Pretenders hit at the time – the Christmas world felt wonderful even as the meaning of it all had rather started to dissipate.

"Personally, I was falling apart..."

Adrian Chiles explains how "getting God back into my Christmases" helped.

I look back at the Christmases of my 20s and I come up with well, not very much really. Now don't get me wrong, it was always nice, but the visceral joy of it all seemed to have gone missing. I was making my way as a broadcaster now working every hour God sent and loving it. I believe the most peaceful of sleeps I had on this night in my 20s was after I'd worked overnight on Christmas Eve, well into Christmas Day. I was on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ World Service and at the top of every hour it was my privilege to send seasons greetings to everyone in the time zone where Christmas Day happened to be dawning at that moment.

By my 30s, I was married with children and the Tweenies Christmas album rang out loud and proud through November and December and deep into the New Year too.

On Christmas Day, the general joy was marvellous to behold, and so was the number of dishwasher cycles it took to restore order. I doubt I would have made midnight by now. I'd be in the deep and dreamless sleep of exhaustion. I'd never known what grownups meant when they talked about surviving Christmas. Now, I did.

At the start of my 40s I became a Roman Catholic and surely broke some kind of Vatican record by getting divorced shortly afterwards. Professionally, I was thrilled to find myself enjoying extravagant success. Personally I was falling apart. The church was a handrail. Mass was a help, although it was an exhausting, bruising battle between giving, guilt and comfort. Comfort always won out, if sometimes only narrowly on penalties.

Standing room only congregations

It was great to have God back in my Christmases, although I had the temerity to be a bit sniffy about all the unfamiliar faces in the swollen standing room only congregations. I felt the same way about the huge attendances for Boxing Day football matches. Where have you lot been for the rest of the year then? Lightweights, honestly.

Christmas Eves not spent under the same roof as my daughters were amongst the lowest days of my life. But we were together on Christmas Days all muddling our way through to something approximating the childhood Christmases in which I was once lovingly wrapped. I didn't realise then just how blessed I was. How could I? I had nothing to compare it to. I was a kid. Just a very lucky kid.

The Christmases in my 50s are better, more settled. My girls are young women and Christmases like the rest of my life, hopefully, are more about meaning than money and stuff.

To this day my mum says she only ever really sleeps soundly when my brother and I are under the same roof.

And that’s where I’ll be listening at this moment, at my parents' house, while she sweetly sleeps as warm and secure as I was in that home a lifetime ago?

Christmas on Radio 4