A good Christmas doesn’t just happen; it requires the kind of planning usually reserved for major military exercises. Like so many things in life for me, Christmas begins with a spreadsheet on which I meticulously account for each family member and the gift I plan to give them. The beauty of this is that I can refer back to spreadsheets from previous years to make sure I don’t inadvertently give the same gift twice. Depending on the day, this overly officious approach to the most festive day of the year is either endearing or incredibly grating. Or both.
Christmas is too big to be contained to a single meal or even a single house. Like my stomach after a third helping of Christmas pudding, Christmas day spreads out. When we were kids, Christmas morning was always at home. There’s a subtle kind of agony in the lead up to the big day where, thanks to daylight savings, it feels as if the sun will never get around to setting. Eventually darkness descends and you wonder whether you’ll ever be able get to sleep or, indeed, whether this is the year that you finally catch Santa in the act. But I always slept through.
Being the eldest of five children meant that I could leave the dirty work to others. Younger siblings were invariably up on Christmas day before I was, and they would gleefully volunteer to undertake reconnaissance by crawling up the hallway to the living room with the Christmas tree. The tree was nothing much – a metal frame that may or may not have once been an antenna, clothed in synthetic pine needles. We’d had a real tree once or twice, but finding a suitable tree in bushland was a lot of effort, to say nothing of the fact that it’s harder still in the dead of night, which my father judged to be the best time to get a tree whilst still evading detection. In those circumstances, a fake tree seemed like a pretty good idea.
There are families who, in their passion to liberate their gift, maul the Christmas paper like wild animals. Not us. Under the watchful eye of my father, we were expected to remove Christmas paper from presents with the skill of a surgeon. I hadn’t realised that most families don’t hand their children a scalpel on Christmas morning. As we went, my father eagerly collected the paper, carefully folded it again in the hope of using it again the following year. Christmas after Christmas, you’d receive a gift wrapped in the same paper as the year before. This was in the nineteen eighties, before the term ‘recycling’ had been invented, and my father now claims that he was ahead of his time.
Once the present-opening ceremony was complete, we’d hit the road so that we had almost no chance at all to play with the presents we’d only just received. Or, worse still, we took the gifts with us, thus creating a risk that we’d leave some vital part behind when we eventually left. It seems crazy, but taking the whole show on the road to visit our grandparents was our tradition. That and stale coloured popcorn, chocolate coins and miniature boiled sweets that would be lucky to survive to boxing day.
Things have changed since then. The older we got, the more complex Christmas became. If you throw a divorce into the mix, suddenly you’ve get two completely separate Christmases to contend with. Then everyone gets married or partnered and the complexity factor multiplies. Soon, Christmas involves seven or eight separate events and takes about a week to execute. That’s more Mariah Carey and ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ than any one person should have to endure. Ever.
Now the week between Christmas and New Year is a blur. In that time, I will wear more paper hats than I will for the entire rest of the year and the top button of my jeans is going to be working overtime under all the additional pressure. As 2024 falls into 2025, the scent of gunpowder from all the Christmas crackers will linger in my nostrils.
Life takes unexpected turns. I now find myself with the company of someone for whom Christmas is the year’s major event. The tree is real, as are all the insects that live in the tree, as are the pine needles and the resulting hay fever. But the end result is a fitting monument to the day. It’s a long way from a re-purposed antenna. The Christmas playlist gets its first airing a month beforehand and remains on rotation. I’ll be honest – it’s the only time I ever hear Gene Autry. And when it’s done, I’m happy to wait a full year before hearing from Gene again.
We no longer re-use the wrapping paper. It is ripped to shreds in a feeding frenzy. As I watch the kids open their gifts, I wonder if what I’m experiencing is anything like what our parents went through when we were little. It’s a glorious thing. When it’s all done, I save and close my spreadsheet until next time. By any measure, 2024 has been a long, strange and difficult year. 2025 could easily be stranger still. But, at this moment, in the shadow of the most spectacular Christmas tree in the Southern hemisphere, I am thankful just to be here. Merry Christmas to you all.