christmas days 12 stories and 12 feasts for 12 days

In addition to various ghost stories, animal fables and urban fairytales, there are instructions on how to prepare Susie Orbach’s Christmas Eve gravlax New York custard à la Kathy Acker (“Kathy could not cook – she could not even stir”) and a piquant red cabbage recipe perfected by Ruth Rendell, with whom Winterson used to spend part of the Christmas period until Rendell’s death last year.Īn Illustration from Christmas Days. “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me” was originally published as an illustrated children’s book in 2009 and is reprinted here as part of a curious Christmas fiction/cookery hybrid, in which a dozen stories are interspersed with seasonal recipes from Winterson’s celebrity friends. In her memoir, Winterson made it clear what this signified: “I was the runty little donkey.

The story is a retelling of the nativity from the donkey’s point of view, in which the ass receives a snout of gold, having nuzzled against the foot of an angel perched on the stable roof. The constant refrain throughout her autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was her mother’s assertion that “the Devil led us to the wrong crib” and these feelings are sublimated into Winterson’s Christmas tale “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me”. Perhaps it is no surprise that Winterson should produce a volume of short stories inspired by the season, given that her own experience reads like a grim parody of the miracle birth.

Christmas days 12 stories and 12 feasts for 12 days