Paul McGuinness, editor@countryfile.com
A few years ago, I was reading about the different ways that Christmas has been celebrated in different periods of British history. Voices from the past endlessly fascinate me, although my increasingly unreliable memory omits the details of this one particular piece, but I do remember a report of a complaint from Tudor times that Christmas wasn’t as good as it used to be. And that’s the thing about nostalgia at Christmastime – no matter how far back we go, Christmas faces an uphill struggle to be as good as we remember it. Much of our modern impression of Christmas apparently comes from Dickensian times, thanks to A Christmas Carol. But dig a little deeper, as Simon Heptinstall does for us in this issue, and many of our traditions have unexpectedly distant origins, providing us with a festive season filtered through the Celts and Vikings, via the Middle East (see page 44).
However you choose to celebrate this year, we hope to have plenty of fuel for your festive fire, including wreath-making the traditional way (page 77), gift ideas for the whole family (page 39), a
