For Sammy and me, it’s been a Christmas in transition. Behind us, our wealth of traditions and memories, each telling us how Christmas ought to be, ahead of us, the home we haven’t reached yet.
There were some things we started though. On Christmas Eve, we went to Midnight Communion - this time at a new church. The candles twinkled and the rector preached, and we sang rousing hymns until it was time for “May I be the first to wish you all a very Merry Christmas” and we shared the ‘peace’. It was nice to be there with Sammy. Then we all sang all the long verses of O Come All Ye Faithful, and stepped out into the Christmassy night air.
It was our first married Christmas too, which made it all the more poignant. Stockings, just like we used to do in our family, then round to her family for dinner and gifts and games. It’s been excellent for me to get to know everyone a bit better, though, once again, I was missing my own family too.
Christmas was always so grand and so majestic, right from the beginning. I miss those family times. But families grow and change shape - and then houses are not big enough and distances are not small enough, and so the scintillation of Christmas magic starts again somewhere new, mixing up grief and joy and hope and bittersweet memories. I wish I had known that that was the way of things when I was young. But that, I know, is not the way of things.
The transition for us this year is that we’re not exactly somewhere new, but not somewhere old either. So it’s natural to miss the way we were, but also it’s inevitable that we long for the way things will be.
Boxing Day has long been my family get-together day. I wish I could describe it well this year. One sister, absent with grief; another there and croaky with flu, my parents clutching tea to keep warm, and a big TV screen showing a computer game - around which my fifteen-year old nephew threw gangly arms and bobbed his curly ADHD hair. The niblings have grown up.
My niece, now 20, was sipping a snowball (which I thought was custard) and my third sister’s boyfriend was there, to add unhelpful comments to proceedings. Sammy was quiet. I just missed my Grandma.
Christmas was born in transition, wasn’t it? We paint our nativity scenes with warmth around the stable, retro-projecting our own notions of family, home, and safety onto that holy night. But it was cold too. It was dangerous. It was temporary.
Anyway. That shouldn’t give you the impression we’ve not had a good time. It’s been wonderful in its own unique way. Having a wife who shares love for the season is a joy and a delight, and the permanence of her on the first Christmas morning of many to come, felt like a gift I could never have imagined. It will probably sit up in my mind as a Christmas like no other, given the context, but one infused with wonder and delight, alongside that very grown up feeling of loss and nostalgia.
And it’s not over! We’re still after all, only on le jour de three french hens, and the hallowed season of Betwixtmas has only just begun. Today we’re going for a walk and doing some baking - small things, but things that are good for the soul, the heart and the memory.
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