Beware the Perfect Family Christmas
Keeping things idyllic will only ruin your children's expectations of yuletide
While it’s true it comes but once a year, Christmas memories burn brighter than others, seared into our banks of nostalgia, glistening, or festering in lametta-edged sepia. Because the thing is, not all Christmases are Hallmark moments and though the pressure to be ensconced in a snow globe of joy from December 1st is real, it just doesn’t always go that way. I’d go so far to say that some of my recollections are categorically miserable, but even so, I can’t help but feel some fondness for them, at the very least as comedy material. I’ve come to realise that I have an ensuing emotional connection to the bittersweet side of Christmas. Call it the Fairy-tale of New York flavour of festive—actually sad when you step outside the melody, but also strangely appealing.
That is probably because I developed Yuletide gallows humour at a young age. My parents split before I was potty trained, so my childhood Christmas memories are cleaved into two distinct streams. With my mum things were festive but frugal. She still takes credit for ‘inventing’ the twig tree (dried branches spray painted silver) because a Nordman was quite clearly out of the budget. There’s no need for violins, we had a lovely time, but there was none of that abundance I’d been schooled to expect by 90s Xmas films. We’d usually go to my nan’s in Northfleet for the actual meal and there would a procession of my grandparents’ 13 siblings. I love to think of nanny Audrey’s peach-tinted cloud of hair topped with a paper hat, singing the wrong words to carols with her swarm of sisters popping in and out. When it came to the meal, she always used 1 cal spray on the roasties and my grandad always mixed HP into the Bisto. Nigella it was not, but then we were hardly gourmets at the time. I remember the tinsel she’d put on the Barbie loo roll cover, the lilac and silver palette for decs, the rows and rows of cards strung from the corners of the ceiling. The tinny Christmas tune on the electric doorbell.
In stark contrast, Christmas with my dad in Munich was full of bounty (more expensive presents), yet not *quite* so much heart. There would be a good stash of Lebkuchen and Weihnachtsplätzchen, but it was never exactly jolly. We might get a tree on Christmas Eve (which to be fair, is the German tradition), but his bachelor pad generally remained distinctly non-festive. At eight, I remember going to ToysRUs and dad telling us that Santa had given him money to buy us presents, which somewhat burst the bubble for my little brother who still believed. When we got home, he handed us each other’s gifts to wrap. In foil. While the Krauts go all in for Christmas food – think red cabbage, Knödel and Stollen, the menu was more limited chez dad - hot dogs and crisps were the order of the Holy day. After lunch we enjoyed a whiskey-fuelled sermon on how religion was the opiate of the masses and Santa was a Coca Cola funded construction. Magical.
The food started to improve when I took control, rustling up my first spread at 13. This marked the beginning of what I’d describe as my Perfect-Christmas-angst era. I decided that if dad wasn’t able to get the festive party started, I would make it happen instead and I was going to make it EXTRA. Finding a turkey in goose-eating Munich was no mean feat, but we finally tracked one down at the central meat market. The only problem was it still had its head and guts intact. The morning of, I woke at 5.30am and with the help of Julia Childs, managed to hack off the poor bird’s neck and deal with the innards. Considering I’d been living on the 90s diet of chicken dippers and micro-chips to this date, it was quite the awakening. The meal turned out fine, aside from the parsnips (again a delicacy in Munich) which dad, in his only feedback about the whole shebang which had taken me circa nine hours, complained I had burnt.
Things went further downhill a few years later when he included the blonde Russian he was romancing at the time on the Christmas invite. Unfortunately, she was only two years older than me. She was also in Deutschland Sucht den Superstar, but that is a story for another day. We were used to the procession of Renates (there were literally four in a row, they presumably didn’t have any other female names in Germany through the 60s), but this was a teenager and while I believe their bond stayed on a friendship basis, it was obviously a weird one. Even weirder looking back. Adding insult to injury, dad had sent me out to get said young blonde a Chrizzie gift (I went for Chanel beauty), yet had neglected to get me anything that year as we entered the cheque-inside-blank-card period. Of course, I cooked again, then passed out around 4.30pm having drunk about two bottles of Prosecco and nailing a pack of Marlboro Lights out of my bedroom window. I was in Sixth form at the time, so all highly age inappropriate.
There have been other car crashes: the Christmas right after my ex-husband left was rancid. I kept crying, my mum kept crying. It was just the three of us that year, mum, my stepdad and me, and even the blurry Facebook pictures look raw. Then there was the year that I’d gone to an incredibly swanky Christmas party thrown by one of my uber-wealthy Uni friends. It was on the 23rd and trying to be sophisticated, I ate some oysters. You know the rest of the story. I spent four days lurching from my bed to the toilet bowl and missed the whole goddam thing.
But here are some great examples of how I can also choose to see another side. That sad, sad Christmas with a broken heart was also an incredible moment in my relationship with my stepdad. He’s a man in the traditional 1950s mould but has plenty of experience in the disappointment of broken vows as my mum is his third wife. Over that Christmas, he was incredibly kind of me and helped me shift some of my perspective on what felt like an all-encompassing catastrophe. Divorce is a rite of passage in my family, but then so is happy marriage later in life, so I choose to dwell there. On the dodgy mollusc year, yes, I was in physical misery, but I also received the best presents of any year of my life including a karaoke machine and a full BOX of Chanel beauty (my mum remembers details). Even the stories with my dad have high points. I mean, I’ve got plenty of experience with a turkey and he did his best. Well, maybe not his best, but he did what he could.
Now I have kids, there is no doubt that I’m keen to break the generational cycle. My dad grew up hand-to-mouth in a very austere background. My grandad Bill, who was a copper, was gruff and distant and my Gran, Dolly lived a hard life. No wonder he didn’t really get the festive memo. It’s very easy for me to take on the pressure of making Christmas idyllic and everything it wasn’t for me, and my brother and I both fret massively. But I also don’t want Christmas to be so sugar-coated that my boys expect perfection. With two parents together, living in a house full of decorations subsidised by paid partnerships, I worry that their festive privilege won’t arm them to deal with the reality that this time of year is just sometimes shit and most families are borderline insane. I remember one friend telling me back in the day that her mum prepared Christmas dinner with a list of the calorie content in each dish and made tutting sounds if she reached for the bread sauce. Another recalls some of his Christmases which featured family punch-ups as par for the dessert course. Like so many others, I’ve also dealt with grief during advent, which is just so brutal—feeling spliced into pieces on the inside while wearing a Christmas jumper on the outside. Life doesn’t stop for Christmas and your family with their traumas and idiosyncrasies don’t suddenly heal on 24th December. I think it is important knowledge to arm yourself with that from an impressionable age.
Somewhere along the line, we’re going to have to drop the ball a bit to give the kids some leeway for their own less than immaculate experience. My boyfriend spent three Christmases in a shelter, so they rarely escape some version of the ‘you don’t even know you’re born’ speech (as they are one and four it’s currently going over their heads, but that is not from want of trying). It’s probably also right that they witness a family meltdown or two and receive a pack of Biros wrapped in foil under the tree. There are always two sides to the fairy-tale, and you can never guarantee which side you’ll be on when those bells ring out for Christmas Day.
As always, a gorgeous bit of personal storytelling
The procession of Renates 👌🏼