That year it started early — on Christmas morning itself — with the sound of glass smashing. My father fell drunkenly on the kitchen table, then there was a loud thud. Raised voices, Mum screaming, ‘You always manage to ruin it! I hate you!’
Mum later sat with her red paper crown on her head, crying silently. Granny organised crackers so that the lies about us all were maintained.
The funny thing is, I can remember the trigger that Christmas — a jar of braised red cabbage dropped on the larder floor — but not the year. Is it 1986? 1987? My childhood was spent with my teachers parents in a four-bedroom home. There, all of the horrors from Christmas past collide into one. Always the same pattern: the anxious waiting for Mum, who was desperately unhappy in her marriage, to go ‘pop’ under the pressure of giving us a ‘perfect’ Christmas.
One year she made it through as far as New Year’s Eve. However, the end result was predictable: tears, bitter regrets, horrible rows and threats of divorce. Every year, they all emerged along with the fairy lights and coloured Christmas trees. Our childish Christmas joy would fade every year just as the fairy lights.
As a mother to a small family, it was important that I avoid those horrible Christmases from my childhood. There’d be no tension, no stress or dysfunction. Pictured: Flora Watkins and her two sons Jago (left) at Christmas
While at the time of writing, Christmas is still very much on according to the Government, that doesn’t mean we need to revert to the bad old days of Christmases past. Flora Watkins and her children.
It got worse when Mum passed away while I was studying at university. I’d pore over Delia Smith cookbooks, trying to give my three younger siblings the Christmas they deserved. But after breakfast on Boxing Day — when I’d invited our aunt and all our cousins for lunch — my father would disappear for the rest of the holidays with some unlikely excuse. It was obvious he’d gone to see his latest lady friend, leaving me to entertain our relatives.
He was a great friend, but we would have had more fun without him. And that, I’ve learnt, since having three children of my own, is the secret to a truly happy Christmas. It’s spending time with the people you really love, and doing what makes you happy — not feeling you have to invite every relative under the sun to a strained and stressful celebration.
After having a child, I wanted to prevent the horrible Christmases that I experienced as a child.
There’d be no tension, no stress or dysfunction. The day would not collapse in the manner of EastEnders Christmas Day.
Covid proved to be a great help in this regard. Last year the regulations — with households largely banned from mingling — gave us just cause to avoid tricky relatives and the emotionally-charged Christmases they can bring with them.
This year, with Omicron on the rise, it’s a blessing for those who want to keep things small and spend it with the families they’ve created, rather than with what my therapist (more from her later) calls your ‘family of origin’.
Two years ago, with our new baby just home to our then house — a Victorian terrace in London’s Herne Hill — from a month-long spell in hospital, we looked forward to celebrating Christmas with my widowed mother-in-law.
The run up to the celebrations was difficult. There were family disputes about whether or not she should visit us.
She chose to have the occasion with us, although it was a stressful event.
Covid makes it easy for Christmas 2020. No fraught discussions about where anyone would be spending Christmas — or with whom.
I’m no Scrooge. I made sure my husband, Nick, a consultant, and our three children — Jago, seven, Gussie, six, and Romy, two — had the best time. We played silly games, made paper chains and gingerbread houses, threw ourselves into the advent window competition on our street, making a beautiful nativity scene that we unveiled on Christmas Eve to the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of socially-distanced neighbours.
The pandemic has forced us to evaluate what’s really important. It is now more appropriate to have smaller, less extravagant celebrations. So let’s all have a Merry Little Christmas (stock image)
My husband and I invented daft new Christmas traditions — watching Die Hard while drinking dry martinis on Christmas Eve is one we’ll definitely keep. Pouring Bailey’s on the Christmas pudding, on the other hand, is probably one best left to lockdown.
We ate delicious food. I did the cooking myself: without the involvement of the older generation we didn’t have to chomp our way through dry turkey or soggy sprouts that — as Victoria Wood used to joke — had been put on to boil since Bonfire Night. My generation is the descendants of Jamie Oliver and Nigella. To crisp up our turkeys we brine them, then fry our potatoes in goose fat. We also love sprouts with pancetta and Marsala.
Every Christmas, after the big bust-up, Mum would sob and say to me ‘Why can’t he just leave? We’d have a much happier time on our own,’ as she stuffed asparagus spears into vol-au-vents and wrapped up miniature ‘presents from the cook’ for each place setting at the table.
All the enforced jollity — not to mention the alcohol — makes Christmas the most miserable place in the world when you are in a bad relationship. I can’t help thinking that if Mum could have only scaled back her efforts and the insane amount of pressure she put herself under to do Christmas ‘properly’, we might have been able to limp through the holidays without World War III breaking out under the mistletoe.
Last year, I feel I finally laid my miserable ghosts of Christmas past to rest and exorcised the memories of the anxious waiting game it involved — waiting for my mother to crack up and have her annual breakdown. I’d done her proud. I’d done for my little family what she’d always wanted to do for us.
So in early November, when — despite being double-jabbed — my husband and I both contracted Covid, I didn’t despair about Christmas looking different again. Actually, my Christmas spirit grew as Omicron cases increased.
We had moved from London to a seven-bedroom farmhouse in the beautiful north Norfolk countryside at the end of the summer holidays, leaving us now some 200 miles from my husband’s family (and part of mine) on the south coast. After four moves in two months (surfing between holiday lets while we waited for the keys to our new house) the thought of having to uproot ourselves again and do all that driving to visit endless relatives was about as appealing as — well, a Bailey’s-soaked Christmas pudding.
And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Most of my girlfriends have a similar story about last Christmas being their best yet — precisely because they couldn’t spend it with family.
‘Last Christmas was my favourite ever,’ sighs my friend Sian, who spent it with her husband and seven-year-old twin girls.
‘We didn’t have to find a date to accommodate my miserable sister-in-law so we could all have a “lovely” Christmas together. It is exhausting, tedious and not fun for her.
‘It was such a chilled, easy day. We didn’t have to do the stupid post-Queen’s speech wait to open gifts that they insist on. We hung out, ate a delicious lunch at 3pm, drank very gently all day and played and read and walked the dog.’
This year I felt like I had finally put to death my Christmas nightmares and the intense waiting games it involved. Flora and her sons are pictured.
Christmas — in the time of Covid or otherwise — should be for hunkering down with the people we love the most. A ‘happy’ Christmas results when things are easy and enjoyable and FUN
Elle confessed to a secret hope that her sister in law would become positive for Covid and that this would force her to cancel her lunch.
Camilla, my best friend and sibling, is still waiting for the Prime Minister to make an announcement.
‘It was heaven to be alone last year,’ she recalls. ‘We did stockings and scrambled eggs and Buck’s Fizz in our pyjamas, went for a walk, had an early lunch because of the children and then a two-hour nap!
‘I genuinely regret that we have to go back to the madness of family Christmas this year.’
Jo, my friend, has been sober four years. She also enjoyed the freedom from the Christmas pressures. ‘It was just me and my husband,’ she recalls, ‘and we could do whatever we wanted.’ She drove to a Christmas Day AA meeting while her husband cooked, then enjoyed a long, relaxed walk after lunch in the New Forest.
Of course, there are some select people I’m gutted I won’t see. My brother and his girlfriend have just had their first child and I’m desperately sorry that we can’t go and see them and enjoy those precious new baby cuddles. And I’d been hoping to invite my cousin, who is more like a sister to me, and her children here for New Year. But, despite the fact that there aren’t yet any official restrictions, the rising numbers of Covid cases means it just seems too risky for us to mingle freely.
Undoubtedly, Covid has acted as a circuit breaker for many couples, freeing them from the tyranny of conforming to family traditions, because ‘that’s the way we always do it’.
My friend, Lucy, was stuck with Christmas traditions regardless of their liking. She spent Christmas with two different families and split the day to see her children. For years, my friend Lucy, a neighbour in London, had to ‘split’ Christmas, driving first to her own family in Devon — then to the North-East to her husband’s family.
It was a trip that spanned several hundred miles. They were exhausted and wanted nothing more than to lie on the couch, armed with a can of Roses. Now they are divorcing.
A family had to travel the whole length of M4 Christmas Day so that both sets of grandparents could visit the kids. They’d eat Christmas lunch with one set, drive for two-and-a-half hours and then force down a full dinner with all the trimmings with the other lot.
It all leads to fractious kids who just want to have fun with new toys, frazzled parents and severe Christmas joy deficiency. Not to mention indigestion!
Covid put an end to this ridiculousness. Christmas is about the children, not satisfying the grandparents’ ‘need’ to see them on Christmas Day. It’s not about putting on a show and playing the part you’ve been allotted in a fake festive charade in which everyone must be seen to be having the most marvellous time.
Christmas 2020 should be viewed as a gift. It gave us the opportunity to think creatively and to make decisions, to prioritize our needs over the family’s.
Lucy Davidson, my brilliant and empathetic therapist who helped me (via Zoom) through the past three lockdowns, says last Christmas provided the opportunity to ‘reset boundaries’ and use the pandemic as ‘an opportunity to do things differently, to keep a social distance from family relationships or expectations that have, until now, felt out of control’.
Christmas — in the time of Covid or otherwise — should be for hunkering down with the people we love the most. A ‘happy’ Christmas results when things are easy and enjoyable and FUN.
This should not lead to feeling pressure to meet people or travel across the country.
We need to look at Christmas 2020 as a gift. It was the opportunity to be innovative and decisive.
‘If I had my way — and I shan’t,’ said the legendary food writer Elizabeth David, ‘Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of . . . a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed.’
Were she alive today, she’d be able to do just that.
While at the time of writing, Christmas is still very much on according to the Government, that doesn’t mean we need to revert to the bad old days of Christmases past.
Don’t like turkey and want to cook pancakes in your pyjamas, as my friend Hilary did last year? Do it! Can’t stand Carols From King’s and want to play the AC/DC Christmas tribute album? (FYI it’s called Hell’s Bells Of Christmas. You’re welcome.) Turn it up to 11.
The pandemic has forced us to evaluate what’s really important. It is now more appropriate to have smaller, less extravagant celebrations. So let’s all have a Merry Little Christmas.