Although Canadian born and bred (to coin a

phrase) and although I have spent most Advent seasons in this country, the week before Christmas always takes my mind back to England. One might think the reason to be Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”. Less remotely, and among other things, it is because of Agatha Christie and M. Hercule Poirot.

Next month, on January 12, Poirot and Marple fans will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Ms Christie’s death. In tribute, I have this month reread her 1939 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). More of that hereinafter.

During my first British Christmas I was living at St. Augustine’s College in Canterbury, on the site of the monastery established by the monk Pope Gregory the Great sent in 597 A.D. to convert the pagan English. That mission is still to be completed, say both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. Be that as it may, by the mid 20th Century St. Augustine’s was an international graduate school for priests from all over the world. During my residence, 10 countries were represented.

In the long Christmas break I went up to Cambridge to visit Jesus (the college, that is) where I had a Canadian friend. Then it was on to Ingoldisthorpe in Norfolk which is roughly equidistant by five or so miles from The Wash where the wicked King John met his death and from Sandringham where the Queen spends Christmas.

At Ingoldisthorpe Manor, a country house hotel, I joined a group of tweedy women and retired colonels and colonial governors in a small Christmas party that was reminiscent of an Agatha Christie story. I shall never forget the brace of rabbits lying in the flag-stoned entrance hall waiting to be skinned and baked into whatever. As it happened, Christmas dinner featured a gigantic joint of venison carried in procession behind a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth, both subsequently carved and served by our host. All was followed, of course, by a large round pudding that sat in a dish of blue flame and by the libations that belong to the season.

The parish church, where we attended midnight Mass, stood atop a hill where, we were told, a prehistoric temple had once been. A weather-worn phallic symbol, its significance now suppressed, was extant. We ignored it politely. From all directions the sound of church bells from all over that part of East Anglia reached us.

A churchwarden told me that after an 18th Century visit there the Revd Charles Wesley, whom a Toronto radio disc jockey the other day called Sir Charles Wesley, wrote a hymn that included the words “Hark how all the welkin rings / Glory to the King of kings”. A later editor changed that to “Hark the herald angels sing / Glory to the new-born King”. You may have heard that song.

On Christmas Day, as if for visiting Canadians, snow fell upon Norfolk and we drove over to Sandringham to see H.M. and her party emerge from church. Prince Philip, as I remember, was in the South Seas that year. As children we had always heard that the Royal Family was at Sandringham House. After Bethlehem, Christmas seemed to be focussed there.

The current plight of Bethlehem should concern all people of goodwill. It was, until recently, Palestine’s most populous Christian community with 22 churches, including the Church of the Nativity. In the past five years one-tenth of its population has fled and the monthly average of 92,000 visitors has fallen to 7,000. The Dufferin visitors who encountered violence in Jordan recently had not been allowed to visit Bethlehem. Jewish as well as Muslim hoodlums have vandalised the churches. An Open Bethlehem campaign was launched in London and Washington last month to draw attention to Israel’s treatment of places that have other than Jewish significance. The matter is, however, hushed up. AntiZionism is cleverly represented as anti-Semitism. The fact is that Bethlehem, like Jerusalem, should be international, neither Palestinian nor Jewish, cities.

But – oh, yes – I was remembering Christmas in the U.K. and my appreciation of Agatha Miller Christie Mallowan, obit. January 12, 1976. She left us 66 crime novels, 13 plays including the eternal The Mousetrap and 154 short stories. They have all been translated into over 100 languages including the aggressive U.S., misspelling of the English language. She married Captain Archie Christie of the Royal Flying Corps on Christmas Eve, 1914. That marriage ended in 1927 and took her to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Upon her publisher’s insistence, she continued to use the Christie name when she later married Max Mallowan.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was published on the eve of the Second Great War in 1939. In it M. Poirot reluctantly spends the holiday at an English country house even though he is assured that it has central heating. Between December 22 and 28 he is the guest of the extended family of Simon Lee, most of whom did not wish to answer their father’s summons to a seasonal reunion. They are a typical dysfunctional family. Two strangers, for one reason or another, are included in the party. Mr Lee ends up, his throat slit, dead in an overly large pool of blood. One son is an artist, another an M.P., another a philanderer. There are diamonds missing from the murdered man’s safe. What a great family Christmas!

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding did not appear until 1960. It is one story among six in a single volume, only the last one including Miss Jane Marple. The others feature Monsieur Poirot. The Belgian detective is not fooled by a sub plot to involve him in a bogus murder planned as a Christmas game but he untangles, as usual, a complicated and internationally significant intrigue that involves the hiding of a precious gem in a Christmas pudding. All such puddings should have surprises sequestered within them – let those who have ears hear – but with M. Poirot a member of the party the unexpected must be expected.

As my friend who is an expert saucier says, “Happy hollandaise”.