It’s twenty to four pm on Christmas day. The prezzies have been opened, dinner made, eaten and washed up. We’ve played scrabble, watched a comedy DVD, and the Queen’s speech. Nick’s side of the family phoned us, and I phoned Nan’s place. Later, there will be a ‘throwaway’ tea of leftover cooked meat, good bread, and pickles. A pork pie may be consumed, or cheese and crackers. There’s alcohol and fizzy pop in the house.
On a podcast a couple of days ago, there was a question about unique Christmas traditions, things that individual families have developed that aren’t in common with other people. Coming from the UK and having a Christian heritage, it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t a festival that is celebrated by everybody, everywhere, in identical fashion. I even forget that Nick and I invented our home traditions, a hybrid of his childhood and mine, passed on to our kids.
My side of the family don’t do Christmas, never have. I’ve not been given an explanation. They just don’t get it. During my 1970’s childhood, my Nan would prepare for Christmas by buying a large bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk Chocolate, a Mrs Peaks Christmas Pudding, and a bottle of what she called ‘ruby wine’ which by the turn of the decade I became aware was simply a bottle of the cheapest red offered by the local shop. She would get up on Christmas morning and cook a roast dinner (usually chicken but in the years when she bred ducks; duck, and one year when I was thankfully absent; pigeon). She didn’t do gifts, cards or decorations, although she liked to get them. My great uncles would come down for the meal and after, there would be squabbling.
My Mum would stay in bed until lunch time, then get up, eat and go to ‘work’. She didn’t have to, she had an office job, but we would dress up warm and drive over to the converted country house where all heating had been turned off. The electric typewriter would rap, sound echoing around the lino coated hallways and staircases. I would do drawing with blue and green biro on the bottomless supply of typing paper, or write stories, or just hop until told to sit still.
When we got home, Mum would go to bed. There would be a boiled egg, slice of tinned ham with the mysterious salt-sweet jelly that I would suck through the gaps in my teeth, and Mothers Pride bread and butter. The TV would be on, but at some time when we were enjoying it, my Mum would come downstairs in a temper and switch it off, or over without asking. The first time I ever shouted at her was because she switched over the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, the memory is so vivid that even now, it gives me a pain behind the eyes to think of it.
I never liked Christmas as a child. It was like an extra Sunday with the addition of ham. The usual loneliness of an only child in a rural location was amplified by schoolgirl jealousy. Other people got stuff, they knew what a selection box and an annual were, they decorated a tree. Over the years, I negotiated for improvements. My Nan bought me a tinsel tree, on which I put school-crafted stars, angels and paper chains. Occasionally, my Mum would buy me something around Christmas time, and hand it over unwrapped and without ceremony before the day. These gifts were quite at random. The year I coveted Electronic Mastermind (play the computer, no friends required), she gave me a hand held food mixer. One time, high on my favourite of her boyfriends, I was given a good digital watch that was the envy of my friends.
I went without nothing but traditions held in common with others, so I married a man whose family do convention in spades. Once we had children, we did the full thing: the carrot for Rudolph, stockings, smoked salmon breakfast, gift wrapped lovely things, tree, decorations, afternoon walk, Queens’s speech, family jigsaw, snooze, and populist TV. I still love it all, and feel the conventional sadness associated with children growing up and preferring money, booze and their own friends. We don’t just do it for the kids. In the words of Half Man Half Biscuit, ‘It’s cliché to be cynical at Christmas’.
Wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, hope you’re having a lovely time. Merry Christmas x
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