Oh, isn’t it lovely this year? No, not really…
Anyone else enjoying the perfect run up to this year’s perfect Christmas?
Nope, thought not.
If it’s not the ban on licking the envelopes of the Christmas cards my son can send to his school friends (Covid Risk obvs; the cards are quarantined for 48 hours), then it’s watching BoJo play Brexit Chicken with a German mum of 7 (guess we’ll see who wins there). Plus there’s the ongoing pandemic, the prospect of a January lockdown and it's winter, so when it’s grey and rainy, it all feels really sh*t.
For me, the most difficult thing this festive season was telling my mother that we weren’t coming for 5 permissible days at Christmas when restrictions were lifted. No, we weren’t coming at all. Despite what Boris had decreed, we were going to listen to the scientists instead and stay in our household. Just the 3 of us.
It will be the first time ever I won’t be with my parents for the holidays. And I knew the news would crush her.
My mum, you see, like me, like so many of us, loves Christmas. She lives for it, and has always displayed her love for us through the food she creates. She always harboured ambitions to be a chef, but, this girl child of the 1950s was told to go to typing school instead. She channelled her culinary love into family life.
Each year, my mother reaches for her Big Red Book, which is stuffed with torn out recipes from ancient magazines and hand-written recipes for pickled onions and stuffing passed down through the generations. Each year she records what we eat and who sat around the Christmas table, as well as any memorable events, a culinary record of Christmases past. There was the year we all had stomach flu, My husband’s cancer diagnosis. The first Christmas after her own father died; her first as a Grandmother. This year I expect there is a pretty blank page and she has written: “Covid Year. No one here to eat the food.”
My friend Claire, a former lawyer who was disabled by a massive brain haemorrhage in 2013 has written about coming to terms with a simpler Christmas - having now had 7 restrictive holidays now in a row. “It’s just my life now,” she says, remembering the year, pre haemorrhage, when she out-christmassed herself, taking the kids to 4 different father Christmases and a light spectacular at the Zoo in the same week. Now she cannot drive and walks with a walker. The focus is on easy Christmas, baking and crafts at home with the kids - and quite possibly - as I also do, because I am also a SAH survivor - reflecting on how lucky she is to be alive.
I started writing this when we’d just been told we could bubble up in households x 3; when I was still tying myself up in knots about how to tell my mum it was madness to celebrate Christmas as we normally do, despite so many of her friends and neighbours apparently ploughing on with their annual festive knees up .
Yet now the scientists, and so many others are gunning for a reversal of the Christmas 2020 rules.
There is no doubt, the ‘3 Households to Go Wild Over 5 Days’ routine will cause a 3rd Covid wave: more deaths, more sadness, more strain on our hospitals, more need of - as a friend darkly coined them - “Rishi Readies”. Will the government do a reverse festive ferret? Maybe. Certainly Wales and Scotland seem to be walking their own path.
Whether they do or not, I hope more of us realise the importance of taking personal responsibility for our social plans this Christmas.
I’ll miss my mum and dad and Christmas Day walks on the beach, catching up with old school friends and generally pretending that I am 12 again, when I am actually 42.
And while I am ever-so-slightly overwhelmed by roasting the turkey for the first time, and making sure Father Christmas does drop off his sack; while I am ever so slightly pissed off that I can’t just rock up at my mum’s, hand over the washing and pass on the cooking as normal, I do not regret our decision to Stay Home, Save the NHS and Save Lives)
It has been the strangest, most difficult of years, one which has provided chaos and clarity in equal measure and so many must feel we are running out of steam under the endless ‘hammer and the dance’. But as a vaccine rolls out, end it shall. It is time for acceptance, patience and holding the line.
So, over the next 2 and a bit weeks (and that’s all it really is, isn’t it?) have yourself a Cosy FaceTime Christmas. For all our sakes in January, it’s the year to make this festive season as merry, sherry-filled and as Covid-Secure as you possibly can.
