The Festivities of Morkwood
by E.J. Babb
1st DECEMBER
I hate Christmas.
The tacky decorations. The irritating, repetitive songs. The forced cheeriness. The bland food that swells in your stomach.
The build-up throughout December is nothing but an empty promise culminating in bitter disappointment. And it’s worse in Morkwood, the village I live in. You’ve probably never heard of us – only neighbouring villages tend to recognise the name. And no one ever visits or travels through, because Morkwood is a dead end in the corner of nowhere.
Christmas is a real community event in Morkwood. It has to be – it’s against local law for villagers to refuse to take part. It’s one of those old, very English bylaws that no one has thought to get rid of. A few remain in London – pregnant women are allowed to urinate in police helmets, for example, and you’re not allowed to flag down a taxi if you have the plague.
In Morkwood, all villagers must participate in opening the doors of the Advent House.
The tradition began one hundred and fifty years ago with Lord Bartholomew Greville, the son of a penniless gambling addict. Greville somehow managed to marry rich, and with his newfound money bought all the land in Morkwood and built an enormous manor house on the outskirts of the village.
One summer, Greville hired some local carpenters to build a wooden advent calendar. He intended it to be the size of a dollhouse and filled with twenty-four gifts for his two young daughters in the lead-up to Christmas.
The lord was adamant about designing the thing himself – local records detail several occasions of where he referred to the villagers as ‘halfwits’ – yet in his plans, the measurements were written down incorrectly. Perhaps he wrote metres instead of centimetres, or there was some form of sabotage, I don’t know, there are a lot of conflicting accounts as to what happened. Either way, the carpenters he hired didn’t doublecheck the plans with the lord and spent months making a huge advent calendar the same height as the manor house. The structure completely covered the side of the it, like a huge wooden extension.
Lord Greville was travelling around Europe with his family while the carpenters worked. When he returned and the Advent House was revealed to him, it’s said he pretended it was exactly what he had wanted. Rather than a gift for his daughters, he proclaimed it was a gift for the whole village. A way to bring everyone together at a special time of year.
Many of the villagers believed him. Most worked in farms owned by the lord, so rumours began to circulate of pay rises and cooked hams waiting behind the doors. When Lord Greville announced the Advent House was to be an annual obligation for anyone with a Morkwood address, the villagers assumed it was because of contractual or tax reasons.
Lady Greville was an amateur artist, and her husband commissioned her to paint twenty-four backgrounds to go behind each of the doors. The paintings slid out at the back, so the order could be changed each year. However, much to the disappointment of the villagers, it was the paintings themselves that were the gifts – each one an activity or challenge for the village to do together. There were no hams, and certainly no pay rises. According to local documents, this led to a small-scale riot that cost three people their lives. Unsurprisingly, this part isn’t mentioned when the villagers retell the story to their children.
So that’s what we do each year in Morkwood. We get together every single day for twenty-four days and perform the same activities and challenges, all because a rich man wanted to save face over a century ago.
Today is the first of December. When the clock struck midnight, I poured myself two fingers of whisky and downed it in a single gulp. That is my own private tradition.
At half past twelve I pulled jeans over the top of my long johns, slipped my boots on and went out into the cold and dark and wet and miserable to traipse through the village to the manor house. The day of the month corresponds with the time each door is opened, so for the first of December it’s opened at one in the morning, for the second it’s two o’clock, and so on. It’s another exhausting element to the whole thing.
Most of the villagers were standing in a semi-circle around the Advent House by the time I arrived, shrouded in a hum of excited chatter. A few like to dress up in old fashioned clothes and carry flaming torches on the first day, but most, like me, just wore whatever was warm and used the light on their phones to guide the way.
I waved to a couple of people but made sure to stand near the back. I generally like to keep out of the way of village activities.
“Good morning, Margaret.”
I turned to see my Aunt Iris, dressed in a waterproof jacket and muddy jodhpurs, standing beside me. She had a battery-powered torch in her hand and a scowl on her face.
“It begins again,” I said.
“It does indeed. The year gets shorter every year.”
I nodded, too cold to laugh politely at her favourite saying. “What do you think it’ll be today?”
“Who knows. I just hope it isn’t the lake.”
William Greville, a descendant of Lord Greville, made his way to the front of the crowd, clapping his gloved hands to quieten everyone down. As a Greville, he’s exempt from proceedings and only has to open the doors, a technicality he pretends to be disappointed about.
“Welcome, everyone. It’s always lovely to see you dressed in your fineries and excited for Christmas. Before I start, is anyone missing?”
People glanced over their shoulders. A few pointed fingers attempted to count the crowd.
“We’re all here!” someone called out.
“Good,” William said, “that’s what I like to hear. We don’t want to force everyone to sign a register like we did in ‘93 – that took bloody forever. And let’s keep things nice and calm as well, shall we? Let’s not push and pull, we don’t want another broken arm, do we Arthur?”
There were woops and giggles as Arthur, a forty-something man with slicked-back hair and a paunch, gave a dramatic bow. Arthur is a fairly ruthless person, but he’s even more so in December. He works in a small insurance firm outside of Morkwood and thinks of himself as some sort of high-flying investment banker rather than the small-fly car insurance salesman he actually is.
Thankfully, William doesn’t enjoy giving long speeches like his father used to. He wasted no time in walking straight over to the first door of the Advent House, which was on the bottom right-hand side. A large ‘1’ was carved into the wood. He took off one of his gloves and put his bare hand on the door handle, unable to suppress the grin on his face as he watched the crowd go completely still. Even the Harris’ new-born baby was uncharacteristically silent.
William twisted the door handle and slowly pulled the door towards him.
“Merry Christmas!” he shouted into the thick silence.
As William stepped back, I stood on my tiptoes to see over the heads of the people in front of me. I could just about see the painting inside, which was of six or seven prepubescent boys, all pink-faced with dark blond hair, holding red prayerbooks in front of them and wearing stark white albs. Their small mouths were open in an ‘o’ shape, and their large blue eyes were wide and worried-looking.
I let out the breath I had been holding.
“Wonderful!” William said in mock surprise, even though we all knew he had chosen the order of the advent paintings. “So today we will sing. Mrs Lassiter, would you be so kind as to conduct?”
Mrs Lassiter, a tiny, frail old lady who was once in charge of the church choir, shuffled to the front. She was wearing a brown Victorian dress that was far too big for her and looked as though it was in the process of swallowing her whole. She pulled her bonnet back a little so she could wince at the sea of faces in front of her, and then held up a withered, veiny hand.
“One, two, three…”
Come on, haste, let us open,
The Advent House doors await.
Wake up the children, wrap up warm,
Quick, best not be late.
For if we delay, no matter why,
The woods will know it first.
The trees will find and claim us,
And our Yule-tide will be curs’d.
And if we refuse the games and folly,
Thoust surely misunderstood.
There is fear in the night for those who scorn
The festivities of Morkwood.
There was applause. William and Mrs Lassiter merged back into the crowd as it descended upon tables of mulled wine and mince pies like a swarm of ants. I stayed where I was. All I wanted to do was go home and down another two fingers of whisky.
I looked at Aunt Iris, who wasn’t making any moves towards the tables either.
“While I do hate singing,” she said, “I’m glad it wasn’t the lake.”
I sighed, because the lake is still to come. It’s sitting behind one of those doors.
I looked back over to the happy crowd. Each year it surprises me how quickly they forget. It always starts off easy like this, but there’s still twenty-three doors left to open.
The Festivities of Morkwood is available in paperback and ebook!
