Christmas Passed

2023 ended with our least harmonious family Christmas ever. We were all tired and irritable. Conflict erupted repeatedly then finally at a level that so shook the dynamic that the rest of the celebrations were aborted. Christmas 2023, in all likelihood, marks the end of my attempts to curate a Kodak Christmas experience. I’m sixty seven, my husband is seventy two, and we have two adult children and no grandkids…  There is something a little forced about painstakingly decorating a tree (actually a conifer branch from the garden), preparing a perfectly stuffed and roasted turkey and recreating our mother’s ‘traditional’ ice cream Marsala cheesecake each December.

It is well known that the pressure to create an atmosphere of ‘comfort and joy’ for the festive season is at odds with how many people are actually feeling. There is also the tension between those who want to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ and atheists like us who cite Yule or, more appropriately for the Southern Hemisphere, the solstice, as the ‘reason for the season’. I went through a phase of eschewing all ceremony and ritual… that is the reason I didn’t go to my first uni graduation and delayed marriage for so long. I do now see, and have for a long time seen, value in coming together to celebrate, but maybe the cause has to be more personally relevant than the mixture of commercialism and sentiment that marks Christmas.

Until we lost my mother-in-law, and my husband’s family dispersed, our Christmas Day was always marked by trying to please both our families. To do this we would have lunch with my husband’s and dinner with mine and end up exhausted.  Once, before the kids were born, we tried asking both lots of relatives to our place for lunch with catering assistance from a friend who was a chef. He did a glazed ham and a pastry cornucopia with hors d'oeuvres spilling from it presented on an upturned mirror. It was more like a hotel function (the context for his training) than a family Christmas and the two groups didn’t mix readily either. I was so fretful that I got more exhausted than our usual shuttle Christmas had left me.

The Christmas dilemma took on new proportions in 1999 when my mother, declining with terminal cancer, was set to come out of hospital to spend the holiday with the family. Instead we got a call in the early hours of Christmas Eve to say she had died. The kids were little so we went – numbly - through the Christmas Day motions. It felt as if we were all treading water until the funeral could be arranged. Some kind friends invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with them in Newcastle, a welcome escape from the rawness and publicness of processing Mum’s death. My husband took the kids down to see the fireworks heralding the new millennium.  I retreated to bed.

The first Christmas after Mum died none of us could face organising a get together. We accepted an invitation from the same chef friend who’d helped us with that attempt at combining families. Needless to say, his catering was stylish but the whole affair felt hollow, adult-centric and overly steeped in alcohol. I missed my sisters and the children were bored and missed their cousins. After that the younger of my two sisters and her newish husband graciously took on the role of hosting for a few years. We became semi successful in balancing our sadness at the anniversary of Mum’s death with enjoying one another’s company and providing fun for the children.  Then that sister moved away for work eventually settling in Tasmania and generally spent Christmas with friends.

It was around then that we started hosting regularly. We always had a real tree whose decorations included remnants of my  mother-in-law’s collection dating back to the 1960s and our own accumulation of many years featuring felt kangaroos and koalas with little bells, a painted toilet roll and tissue ‘candle’ our daughter made at kindergarten, glass baubles, little wooden figurines and various arty trinkets we’d collected over the years. Some of this collection has succumbed to natural attrition but more recently it has been depleted by successive puppies. My other sister, her husband and kids and my grown up niece and her boyfriend usually joined us. When that sister and her husband separated, her two boys went to live with him and his new partner leaving my sister as a full-time single parent and carer for a daughter with severe disabilities. The first Christmas after their split, either through misunderstanding or bloody mindedness, her ex didn’t deliver the boys to our family gathering. A series of increasingly angry and desperate phone exchanges took place, then, furious and distraught, she took her daughter and went home.

We have tried a few times to dispense with all the Christmas palaver. In 2012 we booked a holiday at a farm stay place in Bemboka on the state’s south coast. Our eldest elected not to come so that cast a bit of a pall from the start. We did however have the company of our beloved family dog, whose cautious encounter with a billy goat provided one of the trip’s high points. Others were catching up with old friends in Tanja and visiting Potoroo Palace, a native animal reserve later threatened by and temporarily evacuated during the south coast bushfires. Christmas lunch was to be at a seafood restaurant in Merimbula a short drive from our accommodation. Despite confirming our reservation twice in the preceding months, we arrived to find the place closed. With the local club booked out, we ended up eating at a Malaysian restaurant, one of the few businesses open. The proprietors created a festive mood by draping a potted Dracaena with tinsel and impaling our desserts with little Aussie flags.  Afterwards we walked under sullen skies around the lake along a path of terracotta pavers many incised with decorative designs, some commemorating local identities and businesses. Merimbula followers (if I have any), who is Bernie ‘Poostain’?  His name is forever etched in my memory.

For our next attempt the following year we chose an Italian restaurant in Lugarno that did honour its Christmas lunch reservations. My sister and her daughter joined us and things were a little hairy on our arrival when my niece let out a series of excited shrieks. However, the family-oriented Italian restaurateurs were good natured and reassuring and she soon settled down.  I remember it being a reasonably successful if not overtly festive occasion. That may have been wishful thinking on my part as my sister has since told me she remained tense throughout and I see, looking at photos from the day, that our son was face down on the table at one point, not from inebriation but to avoid his father’s camera.

The first Christmas after our tree change to Wagga Wagga, when to my delight both my sisters came, sans spouse and offspring but with dogs, to our new home, should have gone swimmingly. In fact the swimming pool was a godsend both as respite from the heat and because it proved a useful way to wear out the largest dog. However the mix of four dogs and three cats, most of which were not used to sharing their domiciles, caused chaos. We had to erect a kiddy gate to stop the biggest dog stealing from the kitchen and dining table and all the visiting dogs chased our cats. It was an ambitious experiment that worked best only when we decamped to the Botanical Gardens to give the mutts some exercise and the cats a break. Everyone’s mental health was challenged and the visit was cut short, albeit not as acrimoniously as happened this Christmas just passed.

It is tempting to think we were just all emotionally wrung out. During 2023 my best friend died, my husband’s middle brother died, followed just 5 months later by his wife, our artist friend of over 50 years died, and our 12 month old kelpie pup was fatally hit by a car.  Our first Christmas both as retirees, the time pressure imposed on us to prepare and host was lessened. However our kids were under their own strains, one arrived from Sydney fighting off a virus and spent a lot of time sleeping and the other was preoccupied with work and rental issues. One of my sisters now lives locally but only had two hours between work shifts to spend with us on Christmas Day. This constellation of factors perhaps didn’t provide the best backdrop for tree decorating, turkey preparation and commemorative cheesecake production or for civilized human interaction, but it would be disingenuous to tell myself we hadn’t been here before.

Time to change course.