A very necessary time, as it turns out, but a very odd one, all the same.
Christmas is of course all about overconsumption - before it was tinselled up and Christianised, this time of year was Saturnalia - banqueting, continual partying, gift-giving. Much of the point was, to quote comedian Mitch Benn, 'to eat until it hurts, then drink until it don't hurt any more.'
Of course, there were centuries between that and the Victorian Christmas which in many of the important ways has merely evolved into our modern version, but the notion of celebrating by having 'more than usual' at Christmas was a farily constant one. When the Victorians (and particularly the Germans) got their hands on a British Christmas, the good times rolled again, and everywhere, the imperial overlords promoted the idea of more, more more at Christmas, with the evolution of puddings and cakes, the enlarging of dinners, the development of sweet snacks and such, all of it more or less to say a right royal 'Screw you!' to northern hemisphere bitter weather, to give a sense of survival and celebration to the midwinter feast.
Dickens, of course, was an almost ridiculous genius, and one of his absolute best stories was A Christmas Carol. That works on so many levels it's practically a puzzle box, but one of the things it does, whether intentionally or otherwise, is to associate abstemiousness at Christmas with miserliness of spirit. Scrooge is pictured as a skeletally thin figure, a man who cares only for the making of money, not the filling of his clothes or, beyond the strictly necessary, the sustenance of his body. By comparison, Fezziwig, who embodies the 'right' spirit of Christmas, the joyful, carefree spirit of the season, while absolutely getting his cardio-funk on with Mrs Fezziwig and leading the dancing of the Sir Roger DeCoverley, is pictured as having a well-rounded pair of breeches, and the chubbiness associated with Victorian gaiety. It's been said before that for the Victorians, except when it came to the shape of their women, where they followed their diminutive queen, bigger was always better. So we get the idea of Christmas generosity represented by groaning tables, giant turkeys, plum puddings the size of small children, mince pies by the plateful, nuts, chocolates, yule logs and so on and on on, a feast which, like the Roman version, goes on for days, getting progressively more inventive and desperate to re-use the same ingredients in different ways.
Having a Disappearing Christmas then feels inherently far more miserable than by rights it should, because it feels like by not indulging in all the consumption, you're tacitly opting out of merriment and open-heartedness, and people begin to look at you with that sneer that whispers 'Scrooooooooge.'
Admittedly, the 'Bah, Humbug!' hat probably doesn't help to counterract that image, but still...
The point, really, is that your body doesn't know it's Christmas. Christmas is an entirely social construct, built on permissions and societal agreement that eating to an excess is somehow, suddenly, OK for everyone at this time of year. Your body though has no truck with social convention, it just understands biological mathematics - what goes in as food, what's in store as fat, what goes out as energy through exertion.
But what the social convention means is that if you're going to have a Disappearing Christmas, you need to get your head in the right space.
The right space, fortunately for me, is very much a 'Fuck You' headspace. Oddly enough, it's a headspace that being significantly overweight gives you little option but to get comfortable in, because some people who aren't overweight feel they have a right to judge you most of the year round for your appearance, and you won't get far as a fat fuck if you can't get into the headspace of 'Ffffffuck you, you're not me.'
So perversely, having a history of overindulgence gives you the armour you need to not necessarily follow the crowd.
We went out for Christmas Dinner this year, d, my mother and I.
Mulled wine, starter, family meat platter main (three kinds of protein), Christmas pudding and custard, mince pies, cheese and crackers.
For lunch.
And yes, absolutely, when you get water instead of wine, and when you have a main plate that's mostly meat and veg, and then you sit there watching a dining room do the last three courses without you, it's a surreal experience, and even in your own mind, the narrative plays. 'Oh, go onnnnn, it's Christmas, ya miserable bugger. Have a spoonful of pudding, go on...'
But as I explained yesterday, a single spoonful collapses all my resolve. Moderation is not something that makes sense to either my mind or my body. One spoonful and before you know it, I'd be face down in a box of Black Magic, pouring hot chocolate on my head.
The early stages of Disappearing are among the easiest bits, because you're on a new quest. But the trick to doing a Disappearing Christmas is re-wiring your behavioural instincts, because your instincts are to do precisely that, to grab everything there is for grabbing, especially during a period when grabbing it is smiled on more than it would be at any other point in the year.
Saying no when every instinct you have says yes is a particulary weird thing to have to do at any time of year. At Christmas, when the rest of society is practically encouraging you to eat everything that's available to you, it's extra weird.
But here's the thing. The extra weirdness made it stand out, gave me an alert to react to, and let me do the whole 'No thanks' thing in spite of the cultural convention and the instinct to go 'Gimme evvvvverything and twice!' So actually, a Disappearing Christmas, by virtue of the weirdness it entailed, was relatively easy this early on in the Disappearing process.
What nearly got me was the day after Christmas, when I went to my local Costa coffee shop for...well, coffee, clearly. It was such a natural instinct to 'pick up a little something sweet to help the coffee go down,' and the cultural permission had swung so naturally back to the way I normally experience it - 'Fat fuck, about to eat something sweet in public, oh my god, doesn't he realise what he looks like? Don't do it, you monster!' - that I got to the barista and stared at them like somebody'd hit me in the face with a trout.
'Is that all?' asked the girl, after I realed off my absurdly convoluted coffee order.
'Errm...' I said.
She smiled.
'Errrrrrrrrm...' I said, my eyes flicking to marshmallow biscuits, and Christmas pudding-shaped cookies, and weird rocky road brownies that appeared to have had a lab accident and grown to a size suitable for the incredible Hulk.
I snapped my jaws together, for fear of drooling. Smiled, through a shaggy, Santa's-drunken-brother beard.
'Yes thanks.'
And went about my decaff skinny day. A Disappearing Christmas can make you feel like the world's biggest Scrooge for not eating. But outside the Christmas window, your own historic routines can trip you up before you even have the chance to think about and amend them if you're not alert. Disappearing, for me at least, is a kind of war. The trick is to know how sneaky the other half of your brain can be, and stay alert for the patterns of behaviour that you need to re-wire.
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