Reflections on: Christmas 2024

Christmas can be the best of times. It can also be the worst of times. It is a time for gathering together of friends and family; but it can be a time when certain friends and family members are sorely missed. This year was the first in 26 Christmases that two of our daughters were not here to share it with us. Both were Down Under in Australia, celebrating in a tropical garden and on the beach with blue skies and a temperature of 28 degrees, 11 hours before we even thought about opening our stockings and sipping a glass of Buck’s Fizz over the breakfast panettone. In years to come there will be many more of these where we are not all together and it’s something I will have to get used to…

For many, it may be the first Christmas without a family member who has passed away earlier in the year. My elderly neighbour lost her husband in the dark dank days of November and I felt her pain as we similarly lost my father in mid November 10 years ago. I remember putting a cracker on the table for him and we raised our glasses to his wonderful memory. That way it almost felt that he was still with us. Last year we lost my mother-in-law. My father-in-law was lost as our eldest daughter was born. Ghosts around the table. 

Yet for others, it is quite the opposite of subtraction: it is the addition of a new little person to join the family which brings renewed joy and purpose to the proceedings. This happened to friends of ours whose daughter gave birth to a beautiful little boy just before Christmas, taking me back to our first Christmases with each of our little girls - magical times indeed. For us, that spirit of joy, wonder and innocence carried on for a fair few years and I relished every single one of them. I knew one day the magic would wear off and I would no longer have to drink sherry and mince pies at 3am on Christmas morning and make my shoes dirty stepping in the icing sugar on the fire hearth…mind you, I’d still be wrapping presents and filling stockings most of the night so a slug of sherry and a mince pie was actually rather welcome - if not the early morning awakening just a few hours later! Yet their excited little faces and the sheer joy of seeing them all dressed-up in their special Christmas dresses was more than enough to to get me through the long day ahead…

The average age of the five of us this year was 60 - so arguably not much fun for the only 22 year old! Still, she put on a good face and it was lovely to have some younger company to force us out to the pub (actually that didn’t take much persuading!) for a quick festive drink with friends and strangers before the ritual of smoked salmon and the King’s Christmas Day broadcast. After our early evening turkey with all the trimmings (no room for Christmas pud and no-one likes it anyway!) we shuffled back into the sitting room and, at 22 year old’s insistence, watched the hilarious and heartwarming last ever episode of Gavin & Stacey. For once, even my ‘notoriously-hard-to-please-when-it-comes-to-TV-programmes’ mother and brother enjoyed it - in fact they thought it was absolutely wonderful and laughed and cried till the end, as did half the nation. With a little bit of the original 1969 version of  ‘The Italian Job’ film in the afternoon and ending the day with the rom-com classic ‘Notting Hill’, we found we’d only opened stockings and just one present each by the end of Christmas Day. But it didn’t matter, Boxing Day is traditionally when presents were exchanged in the Victorian tradition so it was a pleasure delayed. We’d had a very relaxing, happy day, and that, in the end, is all that matters, isn’t it?

We’d even managed a couple of FaceTime’s with our far-flung girls who it was lovely to see celebrating together in a topsy-turvy Australian way and that, for me, was the icing on the Christmas cake. We went to our warm beds tired, but happy, and so very very grateful for all that we have when for so many people Christmas can be the loneliest and most difficult of days…