Happy Christmas Past

Wednesday 24th December 2014

Happy Christmas to my faithful reader.  I wish you every happiness now and in the New Year. DSC_0270 DSC_0270 Christmas stockings 2   I do not send out cards anymore because I prefer to give that money to The Alzheimer’s Society.  My father died of dementia and I wish that no-one else ever had to suffer this cruel disease. So, I notice too, we receive fewer each year.  I think lots of people now do what we do, and give the money to a charity.  I love getting cards though. Once Christmas is over, I cut the pictures up from the front of the cards we receive and the next year, I use these as gift-tags.  As I cut them up, I re-read them all. If you don’t ‘see’ me on Face Book, you may not know why I don’t  send you cards anymore.  Well, that is why, but I still love you, I think about you at Christmas and wish you a very merry time. The house is all decorated. The tree went up about two weeks ago, but this will be taken down on 27th December, or maybe a day or two later as this year, we have guests then.  I decorated the house in easy stages this year.  Some went up for the festive workshop and it stayed up – any excuse for wreaths of fairy lights and snow flakes on the windows. Recently, I have begun to think that maybe I’d like to spend Christmas in a way that differs from my – or our – habitual pattern.  I have wrapped up Christmas (and other, chiefly winter festivals) in a tightly swaddled collection of traditions and habits.  These are comforting in their unvarying routine.  But maybe they are also somehow inhibiting.  Perhaps it is time for a change.  Oh, not Christmas in a hotel or abroad, in a hot country.  Let’s not get carried away.  But you know, just not following ‘the plan’, not having a timetable.  Or, would that just be sad-making? Because Christmas, for all my love of it, does make me sad.  I thought for some time it was because my father died shortly before Christmas.  But actually, thinking back, I was like this even as a child.  Why is that, do you think?  Or maybe I am not typical.  Don’t you sometimes think, even if you are ‘happy’ at Christmas, that it can be tinged with sadness? As a child, I remember thinking:  what if we never have a Christmas like this again?  That would have been an utterly typical, totally uneventful, suburban family Christmas.  A selection-box and Grandma sharing my bedroom for a week Christmas.  A sherry with the Thompsons next door, a Morcambe and Wise Christmas.  A dressing gown as your ‘main present’ Christmas.  A steamy kitchen, soft sprout, flushed and flustered Christmas.  A best dress for a family photo on the ‘patio’, amazing smells from the kitchen, growling stomach Christmas.  A sneaky bite of roast capon begged from mum as she cooked Christmas.  A proper home-made cake with brittle-hard, bright-white home-made icing, tortured into immovable peaks, hosting ancient plastic festive models of Mr and Mrs Christmas plus reindeer, sunk to hock-height in the plaster of icing sort of Christmas.  A sip of mum’s cherry brandy after lunch Christmas.  A napping parents, snoring Grandma, ‘will you get the coal in, Al?’ sort of Christmas.  A red lipstick wearing, ciggies in the ‘best’ ashtray, apron tight over sexy dress mum sort of Christmas.  A trifle for tea Christmas… We neBaby half moon close upver had a row.  No-one got drunk, only a bit merry, my mother, chiefly, on the sherry before lunch.  We did not go to church, despite my pious attempts to make this happen when I was about twelve.  Really, it was just an ordinary Wellingborough Christmas, with vacuuming essential every day around the tree, a box of Black Magic for dad, Milk Tray for mum, opened a week before Christmas Day and handed round, one from each box, for my parents, my brother and me, each night as the telly programmes got more and more festive, until all that were left were the marzipans and the orange creams… Although I thought fearfully every year:  what if this never happens again? seemingly forever, we did have the same Christmas again.  But I knew it couldn’t last.  And of course, it didn’t last.   I think that to stop fearing change, you need to be in charge of your change, whatever that might be. Whatever kind of Christmas you celebrate, I hope it’s a happy day.

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