It seemed odd to admit defeat to a sleepless night at 8am, but, I reasoned in the half-light, that’s Betwixtmas for you.
(By the way, society’s calling it Twixmas nowadays, which, for me, is a little too chocolatey, but I thought I ought to mention it. You know, just in case you thought I was getting it ‘wrong’.)
Anyway. A sleepless night. I wondered whether I had stuffed in too much leftover pie the day before? It’s possible I suppose. Or perhaps that teeny glass of wine had taken its usual effect, and once I was dehydrated in the small hours of the night, there was no going back to sleep for me. I had, I realised, forgotten about the wine.
Either way, I was lying in bed scratching and turning, all to no avail, reading the news, scrolling the endless halls of social media, and thinking carefully about what I wanted to say about this Christmas.
We had a decent Christmas Day. I was so joyful to see Sammy’s reaction to her gifts both from me and from Father Christmas. I’d almost forgotten that I’d be opening stuff too on Christmas Morning! I won’t bore you with the unwrapped details, but I loved every moment of that.
Dinner with Sammy’s family was a triumph, then the pudding was fanfared in, bright blue with brandy-flame, just as the King himself told us to be nice to people and look after them, which if you think about it, is rather a good thing to say.
I grew up in a house where presents were always opened after dinner, and in an almost post-Victorian manner, we’d go round one-by-one opening a single gift at a time, youngest first, of course. I hadn’t thought about that in a while. It used to take forever. That’s probably why, as the family grew and we started doing secret Santa, we found ourselves ripping off the paper all together, all at once. Three, two, one, go!
But this year, in Sammy’s family, we went round the circle, one-by-one, opening all the presents in our stack. If that’s not your tradition and the scenario instantly makes you feel a bit of stage fright, I want to say that I really do understand. From early years, my sisters and I were trained on how to react to gifts from relatives with an audience - some from far away and some in assorted armchairs around the room. I get it. My dad kept a notebook and made sure we had a record of whom to say thank you to. I got it - we did it. But admittedly it had been a while since I’d actually done any present-opening in the round, like that.
Well. It was fine. Around we went on Christmas Afternoon. But I sat there, astonished that I was suddenly missing my family. I thought about that for a while.
Boxing Day came. That was the day for it. We squashed into my sister’s front room - my parents, my nephews, my sister and her husband, my other sister (not the one who finds Christmas so painful), and her boyfriend. He is not a celebrator of any occasion, but he sat quietly and quite graciously, while Fortnite (the video game) was played on the telly and conversation ricocheted like interference patterns around the room. Sammy and I sat on wooden kitchen chairs. The rest sank into well-used sofas. I pondered a feeling I was having that I couldn’t understand, as though the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were somehow not going to fit their spaces. Some things are too deep to explore all at once, I imagine.
The sky was growing slightly less grey, perhaps more white, out there on the other side of the window. I sighed, watching the duvet move up and down with my breathing. It looked like mountains, ruckled into place, cast into slopes of dark shade and weak light - like some alien planet, or the moon, where once a Lego space rover might have rumbled over the duvet hill on its way to a moon base, and a small plastic astronaut smiled helplessly from beneath its orange visor. Those were the days, I thought.
Those were the days.
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