We have a strict rule in our house, imposed by me about two weeks ago, that no one is allowed to talk about Christmas until after my birthday, which is on November 14 (yes, I share my birthday with the King). I am writing this on November 13, anticipating the onslaught of Christmas-based demands and speculation which will ensue as soon as my birthday is over. In the meantime, I am enjoying being told about and in some cases actually shown my presents and cards in advance while also being told that they are a “secret” and that I am not supposed to know about them.
Christmas presents are already being discussed when they think I’m not listening. They both want a Barbie DVD because I still refuse to allow Netflix or any other telly in the house. An actual Barbie, specifically with legs, for my elder daughter – “I’m going to tell mummy I don’t want a mermaid Barbie this time, I want one that can walk.” (Easier said than done, I might add: my mother, in an uncharacteristic attempt to get her Christmas shopping done early, actually tried to buy her one the other day in the Peter Jones toy department and could only find obese and wheelchair-bound Barbies on sale.) Other interesting requests have included a bunk bed with three bunks, the third being not for the new baby as I initially thought, but for the cats, who are in the habit of climbing into bed with the girls and waking them up.
I am looking forward to the primary school’s attempts at conveying the meaning of Christmas to the children. Considering it is a “Church” school, so far, my daughter has displayed little evidence of having learned anything Christianity-based since she started there in September. Instead, I have been asked to send her into school dressed in red for something called “Show Racism the Red Card Day” and in yellow for “World Mental Health Day”. Suffice it to say that she was “ill” and unable to attend school on both of these days.
Asked the other day what Christmas traditions my family has, I struggled to answer, explaining that we were still rather a new family, that we had only been in our current home for a couple of years, and that we hadn’t really had time to make any yet.
Growing up as an only child, my family unit of three rarely did the same thing for Christmas two years in a row. Aside from making sure we went to Mass on either Christmas Eve or Day, we were quite happy to adopt the traditions of the family we were attached to that year, whether that was of my Polish grandparents and cousins or one of my British half-siblings, relations or friends. Polish Christmases were always the most fun because “Wigilia” – the Christmas Eve feast – would go on all afternoon and into the night, ending with the grown-ups incoherently singing what I think were Christmas carols in some unidentified language and forgetting to put the children to bed.
We did have some what I like to think of as “anti-traditions”, though. We boycotted the Queen’s speech, for example, no matter whose house we were in, which was considered rather eccentric (my dad couldn’t stand the platitudes). I would also look forward to asking my dad every year if he was excited about Christmas, to which he would always answer “not really”. (It sounds rather miserable recounting it, but somehow it wasn’t.) So apart from that, it turns out that having Christmas traditions specific to my family is rather alien to me and the idea that I was expected to have them, or indeed create them, for my own children was starting to feel rather pressurising.
But as I stuttered, the girls started reeling them off for me. They couldn’t wait, they said, to attach daddy’s racing-car trailer to the back of the car before going off to Usk Castle to choose the Christmas tree. They were also wondering if Father Christmas was going to put daddy’s work boots on again and cover the house in ash, and drink so much brandy that he forgets to finish his mince pie, half of which has ended up squashed into the carpet.
Because something I’ve learnt over the last few years is that their father, my husband, loves Christmas and grew up in a family where they did strange things like weigh themselves before and after Christmas lunch to see who had put on the most weight over the course of the meal. I now realise how unselfconsciously the really good traditions, or indeed the anti-traditions, are actually made in families, and that the pressure is off: my husband has it all in hand.
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