A “NORMAL” CHRISTMAS

As this Christmas has become nothing like a “normal” one for me (those stories are still waiting to be told but are a tad bleak for the season... You see? I AM capable of sensitivity about these matters…) I thought I might reflect on what is a “normal” Christmas hereabouts…

For many years I’ve struggled to find much joy in Christmastime, instead finding it to be one long inglorious rollercoaster ride of duty and damned hard work with precious little in the way of actual joy to be found. I think this dates back to the year my sister first got married and dared (for once) to be away from us on the actual day itself. The wailing and gnashing of teeth by the maternal grandmother, who seemed to have a general lack of a "grace" gene, had us treading on eggshells for the duration and set the template for many years of misery to come. After the deaths of first my grandfather and then my own father, the opportunities for sentimentalist lamentation and woe that this seemed to offer her tainted a lot of Christmas days.

For a couple of years I managed to escape with friends to the pub for a lunchtime tipple and a small tradition was kind of brewing for a while there but lives change and that fizzled out after only a very few attempts. Responsibility for Christmas tended to fall on my sister’s shoulders for the next few years after she had had her children as my mother was never the most dedicated of cooks, and after her departure (or was that "escape"...?) to pastures far away, and the death of my grandmother, responsibility for keeping Christmas fell rather uncertainly into my lap.

For a while we had managed to continue the only real “family tradition” we had, known as the “Christmas Pie” in which you would pull on a string with your name attached to one end and which disappeared into a box with a cotton wool snowy topping and receive an extra post-dinner Christmas present, but that fizzled out when there were just two of us.

So I found myself creating my own traditions. Christmas dinner now seems to need to be accompanied by Californian Zinfandel as it was the wine I found in Tesco the first year I cooked the Christmas dinner and it seemed to taste okay. The other traditions tend to basically include a hell of a lot of fretting that I’ve forgotten to buy something vital for the meal, a situation now compounded by having to track down Gluten-Free alternatives for one of my regular Christmas guests, and way too many trips to too many crowded supermarkets and a general requirement to prepare far too many vegetables.

Christmas itself usually starts for me when work finally releases me on my own recognisance, generally on Christmas Eve, although I always used to find that last morning at work the most misery inducing of the entire working year. I really never got to the bottom of all that, but I suppose it’s just that everyone else always seemed to have something to look forward to and I really, truly felt that I didn’t. I would drive home via a quick visit to my mother to be force fed coffee and Christmas cake (and the occasional sandwich) whilst collecting the joint of meat that I was due to be cooking the next day.

That done I would sit in a traffic jam for a while and eventually get home. I would put “Carols from Kings” on the radio and begin chopping all manner of fresh vegetables and making stuffing and prepping meat for a couple of hours. For many years - before I found my beloved - that remained the only "proper" festive moment I experienced each year. After all that was done, I would set the dining table for the following day before I might just manage to have perhaps the only real “me” time of the entire season and maybe, just maybe, settle down and watch a bit of telly, or, in more recent, happier years, go out for a meal with the beloved.

Christmas day itself then started to become a crazy, unrelaxing time, and I would have to get up at a time that even the most excited childhood version of myself might have considered unreasonable in order for the schedule to have a hope of working. In recent years, the beloved and I have managed to snatch at most a precious couple of frenzied and "stuff to do" filled hours together opening our Christmas stockings and other parcels and maybe grabbing the odd slice of toast before heading out into the empty streets in order to fit in a quick visit to Mum and her "Gentleman Friend" (can you call a man in his 70s a “boyfriend” reasonably?) before they had to go to the immovable object of their church service.

Whilst they were doing their “Praise-the-Lord” thing, I would take the beloved around to “Beloved Towers” and maybe get three quarters of an hour with her parents before leaving her there for a family Christmas without me, and heading back to retrieve my Mother and GMF and driving them back to my house where there would be an annual argument about how to light the coal fire (and whether I should have lit it in my tiny grate before I went out for four hours... Hmm! Somehow I never got to win that one...). There would then follow a swift – and usually fairly grumpy (the "grace"gene remains largely absent) – exchange of gifts, accompanied by me trying to jolly everything along by providing coffee, cake, mince pies, booze and whatever else I could think of to fill any gaping silences before disappearing into the kitchen for two and a half frenzied hours of cooking, followed by half an hour of silent cracker-free, hat-free (and for the driver/cook – i.e. me - wine-free) eating. I swear I put the same crackers out for five years before the beloved took pity on them one year and let them fulfil their destiny.

Of course, my guests always  had to claim to "not eat much" at some point - it's "traditional" - and tell me I'd made far too much food as they would leave masses of leftovers, despite my protestations, no doubt brought on by my profligate upbringing in a comparatively wealthy country, that I'd rather they had too much than not enough.

I would then spend another hour and a half washing up before Mum usually announced over her coffee that it was time to go and I would damp down the fire, pack up their gifts, go through the potentially lethal process of getting them both across the icy pavements and back into the car and drive them back to her flat. A swift unloading of stuff and people, a bit of chat and I would be back in the car to collect the beloved and head home by eight or nine o’clock for a bit of Christmas telly and another year would have been successfully negotiated and I would find myself completely knackered and wondering if I was ever going to have one of those Christmases everyone else I know (and as the telly seems to imply, the whole country) seems to have where they just sit down and enjoy themselves and maybe have a couple of beers…?

Hey, I know compared to some I have had it very easy, and in many ways I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way than the way it was. This year, by necessity things have been very different for me here in Lesser Blogfordshire, and, surprisingly, despite the subtext and tone of what I’ve shared with you above, I kind of missed all the routine and ritual of it. There was still a heck of a lot of running about, of course, but very different running about and somehow it just wasn’t the same. Still, I think we managed to enjoy it despite everything that was going on.

I hope so.

Anyway, however you got to spend your Christmas Day, I hope you had a good one.