I have never been any good at Christmas. I remember feeling sick with the rising excitement at primary school, a nervous child afraid of people losing the run of themselves. I knew that most mothers dreaded the whole business, all the extra housework and shopping and cooking, the annual ritual of writing and delivering hundreds of Christmas cards, the fairs and performances, the wrapping (my family reused the paper from year to year and greeted any gift from outsiders wrapped in glossy new paper with a mixture of glee and scorn). The work always fell to the women, though many had full-time paid jobs.
My family had particular conflicts around food which made the traditions stressful, but no one would have been able to say this isn’t working, we’re all miserable and afraid and angry, let’s stop. On one side of my family of origin, only children begot only children for several generations. The other side lived on another continent, were mostly estranged and didn’t celebrate Christmas anyway, so six of us gathered every year and made our way through what had to be done.
Of course for children there was pleasure; the perceived excess that made everyone anxious was fun for kids used to very limited access to sugar and plastic tat, and it was pleasant to have time off school, mostly indoors with books and toys and grandparents’ attention. I have some good memories, but mostly they’re memories of half-condoned rule-breaking tinged with shame.
I’ve tried to do things differently as an adult, but we don’t have extended family around. No tribal jollifications available. We’ve made our own traditions, not founded in unacknowledged domestic labour. We do the bits we fancy, and it varies from year to year. There’s always a long walk because all of us enjoy it (mountains may be involved). I cook something more complicated than usual, but it’s a recipe that caught my attention over the previous weeks, nothing inevitable. We have candles, wine, a haphazard dessert of dried fruits and pastries and sweets from the Turkish and Moldovan and Spanish grocers nearby.
I’ve never cooked a turkey. None of us likes Christmas pudding. We exchange gifts, but for years there’s been agreement that no adult needs more stuff, so we give nothing that will be still in the house or on the planet by summer (except books. Everyone always needs books). Everyone gets time to themselves. I shed a foolish tear over choral Christmas music, not nostalgia but sentimental regret for a kind of belonging I never had. It’s all a bit loose, laissez-faire. I think it works for us, and also I feel that I’ve failed. That somehow I should be able to magic up Festive Spirit and Merry Revels, will into existence a host of jolly relatives and just for one day remake global history, family fractures and intergenerational trauma to manifest a heteronormative party hosted by a trad-wife in our tiny livingroom. (I don’t even like parties.)
I shed a foolish tear over choral Christmas music, not nostalgia but sentimental regret for a kind of belonging I never had
I know some of my friends envy our freedom. No long drives to spend hours enclosed with people who upset us. No great expense of time and energy on Christmas shopping. No wrestling with a dead animal and a bucket of potatoes before dawn. No anxiety that someone will get drunk or lose their temper or say the unsayable. And I know, because I used to volunteer in suicide prevention, that as the years pass Christmas becomes hard for more and more of us.
Most families have someone missing, one way or another, even if the table is holly-decked and groaning. Some of us are that missing person, because we can’t bear to be at that table or aren’t welcome there. Some of us are there and scraping our bones for the vestiges of self-control-verging-on-self-harm required to stay, already looking up the number of a divorce lawyer or therapist or suicide prevention line.
So looking forward, looking back, I hope to accept that Christmas - and the perfect family life it represents - is an oppressive fantasy, that there are many ways to celebrate, and some years when it’s hardly possible at all. Celebrations matter, and if you can find your people – maybe it’s your own company that day - and give your own kind of party, it’s good enough.