Away in a manger - in East Sussex

Tom Meltzer jumped at the chance to discover the true meaning of Christmas. How hard could it be to sleep in a stable ? and would it inspire a personal epiphany?For me, this is how Christmas began. I turned up at a sprawling Victorian farmhouse around half past seven, by which time it was already dark. Rain was falling from the sky in the kind of thick, exploding drops that go down your back and ruin your evening. I had no raincoat and no umbrella. I was cold and wet, and I wondered why exactly I'd said yes to this, and why I'd not thought to bring either an umbrella or a raincoat. I had traipsed here by the light of passing cars along the side of an unlit woodland road, soaking both my flimsy trainers in puddles. I was bedraggled. That is the best ? perhaps the only ? word for it. Bedraggled and begrudging.I was here in response to an ad posted on room rental site Wimdu. The ad offered open-minded travellers a chance to rediscover "the true meaning of Christmas" by spending a night in a farmyard stable. Not just any stable, either, "a little Bethlehem, nestled in the South Downs close to Brighton", complete with donkeys, a manger and a bed of soft, fresh straw, all mine for a meagre �12, every penny of which would go to charity. The ad had gone up just a couple of days before. And I was the first to actually stay the night.Inside the farmhouse I met Fiona Turton, middle-aged and unashamedly middle class, and infectiously enthusiastic about the joys of a back-to-basics Christmas. She poured me a glass of mulled red wine and introduced her husband Charles ? a "hospital doctor", in contrast to her, a GP ? and their three boisterous dogs. It was Fiona who posted the ad, with a little help from her son's girlfriend, Abbi Broadbent, in a bid to do something a little bit different to raise money for charity this Christmas."This isn't necessarily about being religious or whatever," said Fiona. "We are not religious people, but as medics we see quite a lot of unhappiness and quite a lot of families who are no longer families together. I think a lot of Christmas has just got too commercial. The first thing kids do is say: 'What are we going to get?'"Here it was as much about what they'll give ? Fiona will spend Christmas morning on duty at the accident and emergency department, and return home to a Christmas meal with around a dozen guests.Charity comes naturally to the Turtons. Fiona has run six marathons, and raises around �100 a week gathering bird feathers and selling them on eBay, to milliners, modellists and designers. The money from the stable is going to Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research. This was Abbi's choice; she has lost relatives to both. Although the fee for a night in their stable isn't much, the publicity has already brought in more than �600 of donations from well-wishers unable or unwilling to bed down in the straw themselves.The mulled wine finished, we headed out into the yard and surveyed my lodgings for the night. The walls were brick but the stable was unheated, the air inside a stagnant chill. They had brought in an electric heater, but I decided not to use it. My quest for the true spirit of Christmas demanded that I sleep, where possible, as they slept in the nativity. The bed had been covered with blankets, but beneath them bed and carpet blended into one, both straw, one just a deeper pile than the other.Their stable, it turned out, was more like the one from the nativity than their advert had divulged. It too had been the birthplace of a miracle child; an unlikely messiah by the name of Buggins, with long ears and cloven hooves, on account of his being a donkey. When mum Sooty gave birth a year after coming to the Turtons ? having lived in donkey solitude ? it took the family entirely by surprise. Donkeys spend 14 months in the womb, but the farm she'd come from couldn't explain it either. "They said she hadn't been near another donkey," said Fiona, "so I suppose it was an immaculate conception."Buggins and Sooty normally share the stable in winter. "We used to do school fetes and nativity plays with them," explained Charles, "but you can't get insurance now." The donkeys are docile but can kick, so they spent the night in their hovel in the field next door. (If donkeys are liable to kick, I wondered, was it an act of shocking negligence on Mary and Joseph's part to birth the messiah surrounded by livestock? Wouldn't the holy couple have been better off ushering Christ into the world in a ditch somewhere?)Moments later, it occurred to me that ? kicking or not ? animals would at least have brought warmth, which in the stable was hard to come by. I didn't dare take off my shoes or my jacket. I turned off the lights, pulled the duvet tight up to my neck and lay, cold and confused, thinking in the darkness. There was the constant sound of dripping, the occasional distant purr of a passing car, and nothing else.Many of the guests who will stay in the stable this December have come for this moment of quiet contemplation. "We've got several people coming entirely on their own," said Fiona, "and their reason for coming is just for some quiet time ? a 24-hour period on their own. I think it's just a little bit of time to think."I lay in the dark, determined to reach a festive epiphany, for an hour. Then I nodded off. I woke again just after midnight, dripping sweat. Though the air was still freezing, under the blankets I was now far too hot. The bed of straw had become a slide of straw, and my wriggling had slid me down to ground level, so that I opened my eyes staring up at the underside of what had been a bedside table, and panicked for a moment that the Turtons had somehow buried me alive in a coffin. The blankets had fallen with me, exposing the pile of straw I'd convinced myself was a bed. I kicked off my shoes and struggled out of my jacket, made a weak attempt to reshape the straw, and eventually dropped off again, both figuratively and physically.The next morning I woke on the floor refreshed but deathly cold. I headed over to the house, where the Turton family, already up and dressed, offered me toast and tea, and asked how I'd slept, and to be polite I pretended I'd slept just fine. It was then, at last, that I had my epiphany. It wasn't a particularly good one, but it would, I knew, have to do: Christmas is about pretending.It is built on a wilful suspension of our collective disbelief. We all agree to pretend a hundred different lies: that Christ was born on 25 December, a fact we've no good evidence for, and a decent amount against; that he was born in a stable, when for all we know it may have been a cave, a house, a ditch or a graveyard; that he slept peacefully in a manger of straw, which I can now say, firsthand, would have been his first and most impressive miracle. We pretend that the turkey's perfect; that the children haven't grown up; for atheists, that this means anything at all; for the religious, that crackers, the Queen and stodgy puddings is what Jesus would have wanted.We pretend a lot of things at Christmas ? to ourselves and to each other ? not because we're idiots or fantasists, but because, put simply, it's good for us to have an excuse to be around our families, and have something to do with them.That's the lesson of a Bethlehem on the outskirts of Brighton: yes, it's silly. Yes, it doesn't mean much. But if it gets us to do something good for each other, that's enough.? The Turton family are still taking bookings via Wimdu, and welcome donations to Leukaemia and Lymphoma ResearchChristmasTom Meltzerguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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