(courtesy Bloodhound Books)
Of all the seasons about which we section off and mark the calendar year, Christmas is supposed to be the one where all the good and perfect things happen, where all the drab and challenging realities of life are pushed happily aside by roasting chestnuts, peace & goodwill and a contented sense that all is right with the world.
If you’re a Christmasaholic like this reviewer, you will be well acquainted with the season’s formidable PR machine and glory in it, even if you know deep down that the stark reality of those days in December may be that they are not the most wonderful days of the year, after all.
One person, and the protagonist of Christmas Actually by Lisa Darcy, who knows that life doesn’t come with an off switch just because Santa is coming to town is Kate Cavendish, a wife and mother and onetime upcoming photographer of exceptionally intuitive talent who finds herself in the most intractable of ruts, one in which she’s many things but not the incredibly talented creative person she once imagined she would be.
Resigned to shepherding her sister through all manner of crises, social media-generated and quite, visibly real, helping her kids grow up, her mum navigate a new/old romance and trying to work out if her lovely husband Matt is having an affair, Kate isn’t feeling particularly festive, the silly season just another list of things to do and not especially exciting places to be.
What I needed to do was take some astounding shots, get my confidence back and leave Delicious Bites on a high note. That Katie Cavendish, now there’s a genius. A whiz with the camera, truly breathtaking. Have you ever met anyone like her? And the magic she can weave with potatoes? Brilliant. Something along those lines.
But then her old friend Fern, who runs a massive media empire and oversees a magazine staff of 90, offers her a gig working on one of her magazines, and while it’s as the assistant to a celebrity bachelor with attitude, Kate can’t resist getting back into the photographic business.
It’ll be tough juggling daughter Lexi’s volatile teenage mood swings and getting sweet gamer eight-year-old Angus to stay fully engaged with the world around him, and why is Matt never around, but Kate is determined to give it a go and realise a little of the fecund promise she once showed.
As you imagine, things don’t go exactly to plan.
But where Christmas Actually excels is the way in which Darcy doesn’t go so much the slapstick comedy jugular, but sticks instead to telling a gently funny but emotionally meaningful tale of one woman who just wants her life to mean something, Christmas or otherwise.
She knows her life is a charmed one in one sense but there’s a lot that isn’t right about it, and while one temp gig at a magazine won’t fix everything, it might just be the catalyst to reigniting her creative passion and maybe, just maybe, rejuvenating the rest of her life.
Not that Kate can’t get too carried away there when no one can remember where they left anything, her friend Diane is going through some pretty big stuff, her mum is insisting she has found, or rather re-found, the love of her life, and life, well, life, is determined to throw pretty much everything at her.
(courtesy official Lisa Darcy Twitter/X account)
And all of it, thank you very much, at a time of the year when there is almost no give in the expectations placed upon wives and mothers to have it ALL together, from being on top of all the domestic stuff of life that still falls mostly to them, excelling at their careers to navigating a thousand social and familial challenges.
What marks Christmas Actually out as something really special is Kate herself, a richly-realised protagonist who has the weight off the world on her shoulders and a significant amount of domestic pressure pushing against her – and who maybe shouldn’t have drunk as much as she did at work drinks – but who persists when so many others might’ve just given up.
She’s no superhuman – Darcy writes her characteristically too well and with too much bruisingly real humanity to fall for such simple depictions – but she is tenacious, partly because she has to be but also because once she realises she might be able to get her career going again, and finds real creative satisfaction is pulling off a major festive campaign online, she can’t let it go.
Not again, anyway.
Kate has flaws and obstinate black spots and falls into near inaccessible emotional chasms like we all do, but she’s grounded, she’s real and she’s ultimately the kind of person you want to be around and see succeed.
‘I can’t believe David would do that.’
‘He said ‘Boys will be boys’.’
‘Maybe they need some time apart?’
‘Of course. Just before Christmas.’
It helps that she’s also quite relatable.
Whether you’re a mum and wife or not, but especially if you’re a mum and wife (and daughter and sister and …), you will find much to identify with in Kate who, like all of us, wants everything, even if it begins to feel like she hasn’t got a hope in hell of pulling it off.
As she juggles a wedding (not hers; good lord, no) that doubles as a Christmas dinner, and thinks up really cool ideas for a month-long days of Christmas campaign, Kate wonders if she can do it all, and really if she even wants to.
While reality may not stop just because it is the festive season, and she has more, not less, realness pressing in against her, Kate emerges all the stronger and the more creative in a story of a person who wants to believe life is as good as the hype.
You’ll love the predicaments Kate gets into and laugh and cringe at how real her life gets, but also stand in awe at how impressively she handles it all, flaws and all – we often surprise ourselves with what we can do and Kate, flawed and all, is no different – and you will embrace Christmas Actually because while the myth of festive perfection is a seductive one (and yeah, you won’t be giving it up any time soon even though it has more holes than Swiss cheese), the truth of a real and honest one is somehow even more attractive, and you’ll want to see if Kate emerges from the tumult and swirl of all that tinsel and busyness as the person she wants to be, not just at Christmas but all throughout the year.