LAUSR

to do with leftovers, nostalgia (‘Christmas ain’t what it used to be’, 136), Morecambe and Wise and much more are included in Johnes’ analysis of the British Christmas. There is the potential for the analysis to be like a Christmas stocking – very full of presents but without coherence or connection – yet Johnes holds the argument together with the ‘big idea’ of the book, which he explains is that Christmas has been and is experienced as a good thing by the British. Despite changing social and economic contexts, there are substantial continuities of expression and articulation around Christmas, so that one poll in 2007 suggested that 93% of the population would celebrate Christmas – including, for example, Punjabi families in Southall giving presents in the 1990s. Whereas Mark Connelly argues that Christmas came to be understood as a peculiarly English phenomenon (Christmas: a social history, London, 1999, 2012), Johnes argues that it became part of the fabric of British society. Different experiences of Christmas across the UK were variations on a theme rather than alternative or contested cultural expressions. Johnes’ book is fact-packed. Its extensive evidence reflects the range and depth of Johnes’ underpinning research – and it is clear that as a compendium of Christmas stories it is also aimed at the general reader as well as academic audiences. My one question at the end of the book (which I read over Christmas) was whether Johnes considered that the Christmas experience had any autonomous agency or whether it was merely reflective of changes and continuities in British society. Does the exceptionality of Christmas remove it from contributing to developments in the everyday experiences of the British since 1914? Was it all over by early January until the next time?