What is the Christmas story? A baby, a miracle, a rebuke to power. I am the generation who got a good deal out of the world the kids I love will not. Then I realise I am afraid too – of climate breakdown, of Brexit, of Trump. Watching the ordinary miracle that is snow fill up the cleat prints of boots, the precise imprint of cat paws. The real part was here, feeling the cold, but not being troubled by it. Inside the house, all of its concerns and busyness, seemed the unreal part now. I sat on it, clenching my toes in my boots, and watching the snow falling like stars. There’s a folding stool in there, made of wood offcuts, with a canvas seat. Good idea… until I realised, after he’d left, that my house keys were in the cubby box, along with my phone. Then my friend found he had left his wallet at home, and we had planned to go shopping. The bonus of the outdoor tree is that real live robins obligingly rummage in the foliage for the fat cakes I hide there. And Christmas is meant to be a time for reflection, isn’t it?

Outdoors changes the nature of objects, and when altered from their purpose, we actually look at them (and notice how strange they are). So do clear plastic bottles filled with coloured water. The fun bit is that everyone who comes visiting must bring a decoration anything you like, including washing-up brushes and bow-ties. Outdoors, I string the thing with big coloured bulbs like the Blackpool of my youth (no taste), and I plug in a light-up reindeer underneath. I have given up on indoor Christmas trees because my cats biff the baubles. Reaching home, we carried the tree through falling snow to its outdoor destination. We had tied a Santa hat on the cut end, as a red flag of warning and a Christmas salute. My friend sat in the back simultaneously holding on to the rear door and the trunk of the tree poking out the back. I drove home with spruce branches in my face. It was a La Bohème kind of encounter though, as we shared bars of chocolate and hoped that Christmas would be Merry. Che gelida manina (your tiny hand is frozen) was the best I could manage by way of conversation. The Italians spoke little English and my Italian is dependent on the opera. That morning my tall friend and I had dug out two Italians in a Fiat 500 a delightful car for a jaunt, but ill-adapted to waist-high wedges of the white stuff. Wanting the world to be better not doing enough to make it so.

As I get older I realise that who, or what we are, is really a cluster of contradictions. In the winter I am a one-woman rescue service tow-rope, snow shovel, Labrador. I was driving my Land Rover Defender 90 – the vehicle I use in the summer to terrorise tourists in Lower Slaughter. In mid-December last year I set out to bring home my Christmas tree from a small wood belonging to a tall friend.

Christmas days by jeanette winterson