December

Despite the snow a few days earlier and the presence of decorations, I arrived home from university in mid-December to find things not so festive after all. I spent my first week at home in and out of hospital visiting my brother, who is fine now, but was very ill, and eventually, very bored. I'm an incredibly privileged person who's lived a pretty charmed life, and this is the first time I've had any experience of severe illness in my immediate family. It wasn't right to have him staring at a Christmas tree in a ward rather than the one in our living room.
We used to decorate the house all together. It had to be a Sunday afternoon because my sister and I had dance classes on all the other days, and pantomime rehearsals on Sunday mornings. We would always put a Christmas film on at the same time, before dissolving into arguments about who had been lumped with the unpleasant tasks of untangling all the lights. All of us kids would argue over who got to put the star on the tree until we put it up together, all of us holding a corner. Then it became me being Facetimed into the decorating process, and they would leave the star off the tree until I got home.

Christmas Eve used to be getting up early for an intensely long walk though woods and fields designed to tire us out for the evening. We would meet the rest of the family at a pub, eat together and then walk back home. One time we woke up to snow on Christmas Eve, and on our walk my sister was chasing my dad pelting him with snowballs and he turned around and just pushed her over. After the meal we left the pub to find it was snowing again and everyone was slipping over every two minutes for the entire walk home. Nowadays, it's not Christmas Eve for me unless I'm working, and this will be my fourth consecutive year opening the restaurant at 9am with more f***ing festive cheer than Buddy the Elf. 

The first time I told my mum I'd be working on Christmas Eve she was sad that our tradition of the walk and the meal would be changing. But I don't think these changes are a bad thing. We tend to think of tradition as something that takes years to build up and that must be adhered to, but tradition can become doing something just for the sake of it, just for the fact that it's what's always been done. All of the changes to my traditions have always been positive, I don't decorate the house with my family because I've moved out to university, and I'm not there on Christmas Eve because I have a job I enjoy doing that pays me well too. And often, the time you don't do what you used to becomes the time you look back on most fondly, because it shows you what matters even when things don't go as planned. That time the walk home took 2 hours longer than it should have because everyone was laughing and slipping over on the ice. That first time I wasn't there for decorating the tree, and I ended up hanging up in the middle of the call because everyone was arguing just like normal. And even, that time my sister and I slept in the living room with the Christmas lights on, waiting for a call from the hospital about our brother.
I'm never going to be cool and cynical about Christmas. We can complain about the heart being taken out of it, the insane advertising and the trolley gridlock in the supermarkets, but why would we? Even from beneath a mountain of Starbucks Christmas cups it's clear that anything that encourages people to be a bit kinder in a world that's basically on fire is something to not be too flippant about. Yesterday, a man asked if I had two £1 coins to swap for a £2 coin in a car park, and when we exchanged he said thank you and Merry Christmas, and really seemed to mean it. It's cold and dark and busy. The terrible traffic and the cramped shops are exemplary of capitalism and commercialism and general crap-iness, but they're also evidence that all we're trying to do in December, is be together.
Happy Holidays x