Countdown to Christmas and Travel

Travelling at Christmas, especially travelling with gifts on Christmas Eve, is not restricted to a fat chap in a red suit.

Travel is famously connected to Christmas.  The whole thing started with a journey, when a young woman travelled on a donkey, a little donkey to be precise, with her husband to a small Middle Eastern town to take part in the census.  This was in more enlightened times, and the young woman was allowed to drive the donkey.  Also on the road that Christmas were three Oriental monarchs, using faith and what passed for sat-nav in 0BCE/0AD to guide them to the birthplace of the baby Jesus.  Add to this shepherds coming down from the hills, a little drummer boy and angels.

So the tradition continues.  Christmas is a time for visiting/inflicting yourself on relatives, and so the roads are full of folk who are going to spend various lengths of time with people they love, or people they are related to, or even people that are the reason Facebook was such a success, allowing people to keep in touch without actually having to spend time in one another’s company.

There are also, to be sure, those who actually enjoy the ritual of visiting at Christmas, and it’s the one time of the year when the parcel shelf at the back of a car actually fulfils the function it was named for.  Just as in September we see family cars on the motorway full of duvets and other paraphernalia of sending your sullen teen away to study so you can turn their bedroom into either a home gym, cinema room, or both, at Christmas you see cars with brightly wrapped prezzies in the back, a golden rule of hospitality being if you are going to spend three days at a relative’s house and you want to enjoy yourself, and enjoy the sporting subscriptions on their telly package that allows you to spend the wee small hours watching cricket beamed from a Caribbean clime, then you had best rock up with something substantial from John Lewis in a bow as a gift.  Of course a gift such as a crate of wine or a cheeseboard that weighs as much as a fully grown Labrador is also an excellent way of ensuring that you will have a fabulous Yule wherever you might be.

It’s a mystery why they shut down the train service on Christmas Day.  Executives who travel everywhere by BMW explain that it is because fewer people travel on bank holidays than at other times.  This is true for two reasons.  The first is a reduced or non-existent train service.  The other is that far fewer people are travelling to get to work.  Take it from me, if a train service ran on Christmas Day, people would use it and, what’s more, the people using it would all be happy to be using it.  If you want to shut down the rail network for two days for maintenance, can I suggest sometime in the second week of January, when everyone would be glad of a day or two off.

My favourite festive train journey was a few years ago, London to Ely on Christmas Eve.  There was a festive and upbeat atmosphere as people took their seats in the carriage, like a Christmassy version of everyone getting on the last helicopter off of the embassy roof, in this case everyone getting on one of the last trains leaving London before they closed down the network.  Lots of people had gifts, most were going home to loved ones, everyone had been drinking.

And car journeys can be pleasant too.  There’s traffic and there’s crap driving and there’s probably roadworks, but there’s the chance to put ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ on the car stereo, on a loop, and there is that sensation of turning off of the motorway, then turning off of the main roads and onto the minor roads before pulling up outside somewhere which, if all is as it should be, will be illuminated by twinkling lights and where somebody is putting on the kettle, thinking better of it, and uncorking the good stuff in anticipation of your arrival.