A Christmas reflection
Christmas Day takes a year to arrive and then it’s over in a woosh. Well, that’s how it feels to me. Perhaps if you didn’t have anyone to be with on Christmas Day or the people you spent the day with drove you crazy you might not agree. I tried really hard to be ready for Christmas this year instead of it creeping up on me when I wasn’t looking. But it did anyway. It crept up even with me keeping a close watch out for signs – like a plethora of biscuit tins in the stationary aisle at the supermarket and the humungous decorations the council hang from the light poles.
I did manage to get the cards posted – well, okay, the overseas ones will probably arrive a tad after Christmas. I got the presents thought about, bought and wrapped. And I was going to put the tree up. Actually, that’s a bit of an untruth. I had no intention of putting the tree up. I made a decision not to have a tree this year because we were going to have Christmas Day at my father’s house and my teenagers were both leaving for a holiday on Christmas night. Lame isn’t it? But it seemed a plausible excuse in the pre-Christmas rush when Christmas was madly catching up to me and I was trying to keep ahead and be ready. I must say it felt odd not having anywhere to put the presents when I’d wrapped them.
And if I’d opened the Christmas cupboard at the start of December to fish out the tree, I would have seen the Advent Calendar I’d bought last year in the sales – the one in the shape of a Christmas tree with the little drawers it. I’d planned to put Lindt chocolate balls in them as an extravagance and set aside time to write twenty-five personalised Advent messages for my teenagers. They ended up counting down the days to Christmas via a Homer Simpson calendar from the supermarket.
So I failed on the being-ready-for-Christmas front. But that didn’t stop us from having a fantastic Christmas Day. My 86-year-old father cooked the most delicious roast turkey with all the trimmings and served up his own Christmas pudding and mince pies. We had ham off the bone, summer pudding and more macadamia nuts and figs than I care to own up to snacking on.
Two of the highlights for me, apart from relaxing with my family all day, was when my father surprised us with some tunes on his harmonica and when he got out our old movie projector. The feeling of watching yourself as a primary school child tap-dancing on a picnic table, climbing a peppercorn tree and riding your first two-wheeler bike around the back garden, crying because you are overcome with happiness that you finally got one for Christmas, is hard to describe. To see your mother, your grandmother and your aunts and uncles who passed on years ago …
On Christmas night after we’d driven home and my teenagers left for their beach holiday, the silence in my house was close to unbearable. All that celebrating, giving, laughing, light-heartedness, eating, loving and togetherness over for another year. Christmas Day gone in a woosh.
A wonderful woosh.
Next year I’m putting up the tree.
I did manage to get the cards posted – well, okay, the overseas ones will probably arrive a tad after Christmas. I got the presents thought about, bought and wrapped. And I was going to put the tree up. Actually, that’s a bit of an untruth. I had no intention of putting the tree up. I made a decision not to have a tree this year because we were going to have Christmas Day at my father’s house and my teenagers were both leaving for a holiday on Christmas night. Lame isn’t it? But it seemed a plausible excuse in the pre-Christmas rush when Christmas was madly catching up to me and I was trying to keep ahead and be ready. I must say it felt odd not having anywhere to put the presents when I’d wrapped them.
And if I’d opened the Christmas cupboard at the start of December to fish out the tree, I would have seen the Advent Calendar I’d bought last year in the sales – the one in the shape of a Christmas tree with the little drawers it. I’d planned to put Lindt chocolate balls in them as an extravagance and set aside time to write twenty-five personalised Advent messages for my teenagers. They ended up counting down the days to Christmas via a Homer Simpson calendar from the supermarket.
So I failed on the being-ready-for-Christmas front. But that didn’t stop us from having a fantastic Christmas Day. My 86-year-old father cooked the most delicious roast turkey with all the trimmings and served up his own Christmas pudding and mince pies. We had ham off the bone, summer pudding and more macadamia nuts and figs than I care to own up to snacking on.
Two of the highlights for me, apart from relaxing with my family all day, was when my father surprised us with some tunes on his harmonica and when he got out our old movie projector. The feeling of watching yourself as a primary school child tap-dancing on a picnic table, climbing a peppercorn tree and riding your first two-wheeler bike around the back garden, crying because you are overcome with happiness that you finally got one for Christmas, is hard to describe. To see your mother, your grandmother and your aunts and uncles who passed on years ago …
On Christmas night after we’d driven home and my teenagers left for their beach holiday, the silence in my house was close to unbearable. All that celebrating, giving, laughing, light-heartedness, eating, loving and togetherness over for another year. Christmas Day gone in a woosh.
A wonderful woosh.
Next year I’m putting up the tree.
Comments