Last year I was just about to leave the house to go to a party when I noticed a piece of tinsel had slithered down the Christmas tree into a small silver coil on the carpet, leaving a shaming bald patch among the higher branches. I picked it up and flung it roughly at the summit, banging into the tree as I did so and not only dislodging the sparkly fairy from her perch but knocking several other baubles on to the ground. I reached in to try to make things right again but something very strange happened. I felt the branches I was grabbing graze and jab at my face and then the whole tree lurched forward a couple of inches and I realised that the tree was practically embracing (and embarrassing) me and then, in one looming cartoon moment, there were branches in my hair and in my ears and under my arms and I heard the remarkably musical timbre of thin glass ornaments smashing against the mantelpiece and then came an odd forest-y swishing sound and a fierce crack and I was floored.

I lay under the 12ft tree, inhaling and exhaling the pine fumes, a little prickly spruce rash reddening my forearms. At my earlobes huge red glass baubles provided instant jewellery. This is perhaps the closest I will ever get to winning an Oscar, I thought. I tried to shake a leg without success. The tree was so heavy and dense with ornaments that I could not extricate myself. A part of me wished that an internationally acclaimed photographer was to hand (Cecil Beaton would have been my first choice) to capture this rather surreal portrait. My body lay uncomfortably among splayed vegetation, glass shards and red, green, pink, silver, mauve and gold decorations, but my mind was in a sort of heaven. Yet I couldn’t ignore one important fact. I had literally been flattened by Christmas. How could it not be a warning?

I attended very carefully to myself at that moment. I thought of a rabbi I admire who once said on the radio that he had slipped into an empty grave during a burial service years ago and could not make his way out again. During that time he had experienced some of his most profound thoughts about death. Death made sense to him during that quarter of an hour, he claimed, in a way that it never had before. Under the tree, unable and unwilling to move, I had a similar sense that something of enormous value was about to be communicated to me.

More gifts

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I thought about the best present I have ever heard of which is the school that Monsieur Paul gives to Lucy Snowe in the last pages of Villette. It’s a simple room, severe almost but with saving green benches; there’s a blackboard, I seem to remember, and some plain plants growing at the window and the rent is paid for a few weeks. But to the heroine this present means everything: freedom, an income, a new life, an acknowledgment of all her powers. Monsieur Paul has given her a means of surviving the loss of him, or any loss. He has ennobled her and communicated his sense of her worth. He has given her her future.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought (it was a sort of half-prayer), if I could discover one gift as irreproachable, acute and immaculately conceived of as M Paul’s, which would make the perfect present for everyone. From Grandma to milkman to husband, all would melt with delight at the stunningly acute sensibility of the donor, exclaiming at the perfect marriage of care, insight and daring. A gift so magnificent that it could soften a flinty heart or mend a hurt one, not to mention support, dazzle, inspire, exhilarate, champion and revive the people I love best.

I waited and waited but no ideas came to me. Sadly, not everybody wants a little school. Eventually I shaped a compromise. If there isn’t just one present that would fit all, might there be two or four or even eight that I could buy in bulk and distribute to the 72 people on my list? All you have to do, it struck me, is work out what the eight principal categories of people are and shop to type. How hard could it be?

Because the time to make up your mind about people is never, I looked to eight of my favourite literary characters for inspiration in this matter.

I conjured a rum Christmas gathering where Anne Elliot from Persuasion sat tenderly next to Maisie from What Maisie Knew, with George Harvey Bone from Hangover Square and Horrid Henry at the head of the table and Pauline Fossil from Ballet Shoes and John Berryman’s alter ego Henry chatting politely with Gwendolen Harleth from Daniel Deronda and King Lear’s daughter Cordelia looking on quietly by the door. If I could decide on presents for them all, wouldn’t that be a start?

I began with Horrid Henry, a young man soon to be world famous – the West End stage show has recently opened – for his frequently outlandish behaviour. (In Spain he is already known as Pablo Diablo.) I sometimes imagine Henry and his brother Perfect Peter and their despairing parents in psychoanalytic family therapy at the Tavistock Institute. The therapist is long-suffering and astute in beige merino wool. She tells the parents that it isn’t the best idea in the world to decide that one of your children is good and the other is evil.

For Henry I would buy one of the metre-long Toblerone they used to sell at Woolworths, Hamlet, a drum kit, a subscription to The Beano, and I’d buy one of those £25 gold chains they make to order at Argos with any word of your choice. I’d ask for “Horrid” with the provocative addition of a question mark. I think Henry’s naughtiness could very easily be channelled into some kind of terrifically successful entrepreneurial zeal. He’s a billionaire waiting to happen. The International Baccalaureate offers a business course option. Perhaps his parents should think of that as a gift one day?

For Anne Elliot, Jane Austen’s most intelligent heroine, I would put together a box intended to comfort and console. I would include The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader (Hamish Hamilton), a book that offers a great deal of insight into the way we are defined by our relationship to our losses. I’d also include some Charbonnel et Walker pink Marc de Champagne truffles and my latest new face cream discovery, which is the surprisingly reasonable Organic Pharmacy Double Rose Rejuvenating Cream (£35.19/50ml), as we’re told early on that Anne has lost some of her bloom. And I’d buy some of the charming and stylish grey cable-knit mittens on sale at Margaret Howell’s Wigmore Street shop, which would be practical and cosy should Captain Wentworth ever choose to reprise his naval career and take his new wife along.

For Pauline Fossil, a girl living out my dream of a life on the stage, or for any star-struck soul, I’d buy The Half by Simon Annand (Faber and Faber), a book of highly atmospheric photographs depicting actors in the precious half-hour before they go on stage. I’d also buy Robert Kaplow’s Me and Orson Welles (Vintage), a charming coming-of-age novel set in New York theatreland in the 1930s.

Children who inhabit a world that is super-sophisticated are difficult to buy for because they often feel distinguished by gifts that are grown-up while hankering for presents that belong in the nursery. For James’s Maisie Farrange, a sensitive girl with a sturdy morale, I’d buy a red-and-white-spotted flamenco dress with frothy tiers edged in white satin (from El Mundo Flamenco in London’s Duke Street), in which she could allow herself to feel both childish and exotic. I’d also order her a luxury French knitting set from the Letterbox catalogue so she could make a nice striped scarf for her nanny and stepfather Sir Claude, and a grand-looking red leather notebook from Aspinal or Smythson or Letts of London in which to record and dignify her impressions of life, as I can’t help feeling her childhood will make a writer of her.

For George Harvey Bone, the extremely endearing and remarkably delicate alcoholic hero of Hangover Square, I would buy Freud and Man’s Soul by Bruno Bettelheim (Vintage), a book that is full of insights into the inner workings of the human race and has made two people I know decide once and for all to stop smoking. I would also buy him a set of the very handsome wine glasses they use at the Wolseley, which are now available from their website, in case the book did not work.

For Gwendolen Harleth, a heroine whose imperiousness and spectacular looks make her a fitting candidate for high fashion, I would buy the navy satin bias-cut dress with white beading that for me was the high point of Dior’s autumn-winter collection. I’d have bought it myself if it hadn’t been £4,000 (available at Harrods). I would also buy her the burnt orange wide-legged silk satin vintage cocktail pyjamas currently on sale on the ground floor of Alfie’s Antique Market in Marylebone.

For John Berryman’s alter-ego Henry, an ailing, romantic, blustery, high-spirited minstrel hero of mine, I’d plant a shallow wicker basket with paperwhite narcissus bulbs (or contact Tom & Smith, who’ll do this for me) so that they’ll be at their best on Christmas Day. Paperwhites carry all the hope of spring with none of its sentimentality. I’d also buy him a pale blue cashmere dressing gown (with silk piping) from Daniela Besso in Marylebone High Street, a garment so luxurious and glossy it looks as though it’s been brushed with dew. Then I would make him the celebration fruit cake from the baking bible, Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book (BBC Books), with marzipan and plain white icing but no decoration whatsoever. John Berryman was a man whose idea of small talk was analysing Macbeth.

I was just trying to think of something for Cordelia, that difficult but blameless soul, when my husband and daughters returned home, heard my muffled cries from upstairs and slowly and carefully prized me from my scented festive jail. I had a small tinsel burn I was very proud of and a tiny bruise on my forehead from where the tree had struck. It was my own personal Wizard of Oz.

“Oh no!”

“Are you all right?”

“Poor mum!’’

“Sweetheart!”

“It must have been awful!” the family cried.

“It was time well spent,” I replied.

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Louisa May Alcott’s solution: ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents’

Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s novel ‘Little Women’ (1868) begins with the March family’s preparations for Christmas in the absence of much money. In the following extract the girls rush to the table, eager for breakfast.

“Merry Christmas, Marmee! Many of them! Thank you for our books. We read some, and mean to every day,” they all cried in chorus.

“Merry Christmas, little daughters! I’m glad you began at once, and hope you will keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there, and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?”

They were all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour, and for a minute no one spoke, only a minute, for Jo exclaimed impetuously, “I’m so glad you came before we began!”

“May I go and help carry the things to the poor little children?” asked Beth eagerly.

“I shall take the cream and the muffings,” added Amy, heroically giving up the article she most liked.

Meg was already covering the buckwheats, and piling the bread into one big plate.

“I thought you’d do it,” said Mrs March, smiling as if satisfied. “You shall all go and help me, and when we come back we will have bread and milk for breakfast, and make it up at dinnertime.”

They were soon ready, and the procession set out. Fortunately it was early, and they went through back streets, so few people saw them, and no one laughed at the queer party.

A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm.

How the big eyes stared and the blue lips smiled as the girls went in.

“Ach, mein Gott! It is good angels come to us!” said the poor woman, crying for joy.

“Funny angels in hoods and mittens,” said Jo, and set them to laughing.

In a few minutes it really did seem as if kind spirits had been at work there. Hannah, who had carried wood, made a fire, and stopped up the broken panes with old hats and her own cloak. Mrs March gave the mother tea and gruel, and comforted her with promises of help, while she dressed the little baby as tenderly as if it had been her own. The girls meantime spread the table, set the children round the fire, and fed them like so many hungry birds.

That was a very happy breakfast, though they didn’t get any of it. And when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.

Susie Boyt is the author of ‘My Judy Garland Life’ (Virago)

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