jeanette winterson christmas days review

The novel, which focuses on Winterson’s childhood faith and developing lesbianism, is bitingly funny, heartbreaking, and strange in turns, freely incorporating biblical intertext and magical realism into its coming-of-age story. In it, Winterson relates her eccentric upbringing as the adopted child of a fanatical Pentecostal woman living in 1960s England. Winterson is perhaps most famous for her autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and though a knowledge of that book is by no means necessary for understanding Christmas Days, it provides fascinating context. Though the recipes and stories vary wildly in content and tone, there are a few motifs that appear throughout: hauntings, both literal and figurative the holidays as a time of holy mischief and misrule and the persistence, despite cynicism and saccharine commercialism, of real, sincere, simple love.

The book contains 12 short stories set on and around Christmas as well as 12 holiday recipes. Winterson’s description of Christmas-a gaudy ragbag, topsy-turvy and eccentric in its offerings-could just as easily apply to her 2016 collection Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days. It was a holiday-holy day-of the best kind, where devotion has joy in it. “Christmas was banned by the Puritans in the UK and the USA,” Jeanette Winterson reflects, “because it is such a gaudy ragbag of a festival, with something borrowed from everywhere-pagans, Romans, Norsemen, Celts, Turks-and because its celebratory free spirit, its gift-giving, topsy-turvy misrule, made it anti-authority and anti-work.

Jeanette winterson christmas days review