Emilia Clarke I would say, and I think anyone who knows me would agree, I’m more of a giver than a receiver. Christmas was always my time to shine. I would get giddy with the planning, mastering and presenting someone I loved with the ultimate gift. The entire process gave me unbridled joy, from lying awake at night going through every option and then scribbling notes before landing on The. Perfect.Chapters. Gift. As December rolled round I would go into overdrive. Distribution. My dad, however, was oneor of the hardest people to buy a gift for.Sample He had me stumped every year. I would spend an unnatural amountSale of time trying to work out just what to get him; the forresponse on giving him something would always be Notthat of sincere love and grateful noises but I was never sure I’d got him something he wanted, or as dads often say, needed. (I ‘need’ shoes and chocolate; he ‘needed’ food and shelter – you see the predicament.) I get this gift-giving mania from my mum, whose gen- erosity knows no bounds. Christmas always consisted of navigating a path to the kitchen from the tree that had more presents pooled underneath it than the four members of our 49 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 49 29/08/2019 15:22 Last Christmas family (five including Roxy, the dog, who obviously didn’t miss out here either) could ever hope to open on one day. Very quickly, our 24th and 25th December days turn into a massacre of ripped paper, ribbons and cards, presents once lovingly wrapped, now discarded in the name of all things CHRISTMAS. But throughout, my dad never really shared wholeheartedly in the festivities. The gifts for my brother and me were always from both parents but they had the undeni- able trademark Mum stamp all over them. You could also tell from her beaming face as she tried to hide the sheer excite- ment of us jumping for joy. Throughout, my dad remained quiet and occasionally . erm . soporific. As I grew up I was determined to get him involved and stuck in, with The. Perfect. Chapters.Gift and firing up that spark. I kept trying for many years, and as my earningsDistribution. went up my gifts got more extravagant (up until orthat point they had been a little more onSample the homemade side). Every time, he made all the right noises and woreSale the jumpers/jackets/cashmere socks all year round,for but I could tell that something was missing. NotThen in 2015, I had the idea of taking my family away for Christmas. It was going to be a surprise present. Throughout my and my brother’s childhood we had all gone away on breaks many a time but they mostly consisted of walking holidays in the UK, or quick trips to neighbouring European countries. It had been a fair few years since we had all been away together. The family holiday had become a forgotten relic revisited only in our photo albums. 50 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 50 29/08/2019 15:22 Emilia Clarke I kept my plan a secret from them all, and instead enjoyed keeping my mum on fretful tenterhooks as I insinuated I may not be able to stick around much after the 25th due to tight filming schedules (lies, all lies, to throw them off My. Perfect. Gift scent). I waited until Christmas Day arrived. As we started tuck- ing into a Dad Clarke Christmas dinner (he was honestly the best cook in the world), I presented them with a wrapped package. In it was a red robin onesie and inside the onesie I had hidden the itinerary for the trip to the North Pole I had planned for us. Safe to say they, Dad included, were speech- less, mainly at my ability to keep a secret from them, but also at the fact that we were leaving the very next day. It was on this trip that I realisedChapters. what made my dad giddy with joy: it was the gift of us. TheDistribution. holiday could have been down the road for all it mattered,or the important thing was that weSample had proper time together as a family, sharing the love and the laughs, andSale remembering how lucky it was that we all got on. for NotThis would be my darling dad’s last Christmas. I don’t know if on some level I knew it might be and had spent my years waiting to give him this, his perfect gift, that of time. We knew he was sick but the cancer was lying in wait, we were told, till a time when it would make itself known, and I guess I wasn’t very accepting of what that might look like. But this, his last Christmas, was simply the best family holiday – heck, the best holiday even – I’d ever had. 51 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 51 29/08/2019 15:22 Last Christmas After that particular week away and after losing one of the most brilliant men I will ever know, the giving and receiving of presents – all that ‘stuff ’ – just became less joyful. And in truth I’d give it all back in a heartbeat, every single chocolate orange, every single shoe, for one more moment with him. So, Christmas. The perfect gift. What it all means to me is just an excuse to look around at the people you love (or the people you love to have fights with in December) and take time. Take time to remember, take time to laugh, to cry, to feast and feel alive. For me this is now what Christmas is: it’s for holding on to who you have got. Chapters. Distribution. Sample or Sale for Not 52 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 52 29/08/2019 15:22 Emily Watson So, when Greg and Emma ask me to write a piece about Christmas, of course I say yes, because you’ve just gotta love them, haven’t you? But inwardly I’m horrified – ‘I’ll give it a go but I kinda hate Christmas,’ I email Greg hoping to be let off; he shoots back immediately ‘We all do. That’s the point.’ I’ve got a couple of months till the deadline and I put it off as long as I can, groaning every time I remember. And here I am at the eleventh hour contemplatingChapters. why this is so difficult. I’m being asked to define myself. OhDistribution. shit. I’m not sure who I am. ButSample I’ll have a crack. or There are a lotSale of obvious reasons to loathe Christmas. It’s so damn forcommercial, cynical. Characterised by advertising. NotSuch a generator of plastic and waste, propelling that carbon curve ever upward, teaching our children to tread the neural pathway of desire and rampant gratification pushing us ever closer to that extinction tipping point. Not really an act of love. Not very Christian. Not that I am one. Then there’s family. Well we all know how that can go. The collective need for everything to be perfect turning people you love into passive-aggressive total control freaks, creating the family equation that true happiness can only be achieved 53 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 53 29/08/2019 15:22 Last Christmas through superhuman levels of stress. All this while your friends dazzle from their social whirl that you’re never really in or up for. Which can all make you feel, well, low, yeah, just low. Which brings us to the food. Oh god. Just so much to regret. And then there’s the Christ Child and every act of violence that has been, is and will be committed for or against his name. His church that keeps millions of women and children world- wide in poverty by the suppression of birth control. So I guess that’s it. I’m angry at Christmas. It seems like the poster child for everything that humans get wrong. And yet . I think about my blue watch and the walk home. I’m nine? Ten? Eleven? We’reChapters. at midnight mass in the tiny Norman church in my granny’s DorsetDistribution. village. The farmer’s wife, Rachel,Sample is squeezing everyor last drop of glory out of the tiny organ and asSale we launch into the last verse of ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’,for I glance down at my watch, blue face, white Nothands, blue strap, to check. Yes, it’s gone midnight. It’s really Christmas and yes we are allowed to sing that last verse: Yea Lord We Greet Thee, Born This Happy Morning. And it is a happy morning. I am so happy. I beam up at my parents who are singing lustily away – even though I know they’re not Christians so I’m not really either I suppose. But something is making my heart sing. We refuse all offers of a lift back to the cottage and walk home. The four of us. Mum, Dad, my sister and me. As we pass the farm, we listen out in the utter quiet 54 9781529404227_Last_Christmas_V7.indd 54 29/08/2019 15:22 Emily Watson for the bird of dawning that singeth all night long. I know of course it doesn’t – but it’s just a thing, our thing, a Shake- speare mum thing, and a thing that makes us all hold hands. The only sound in fact is our feet crunching in the frozen mud on the lane. We stop between the hedgerows and look up. It’s a clear night with a deep frost, the sky vast and full of stars, logic of daytime wiped from the earth.