Christmas Eve 2022

And here we are back to Christmas. Christmas on the calendar is a definite mark, an unmissable pass  and whatever you are going through at Christmas, in my experience, is amplified, so happy is super happy, sad is super sad, and so on. This evening i'm feeling pensive, a little lost & maybe a little sad. Christmas comes & what is it for ? 

I thought i would blog as a way to run my feelings out, but difficult feelings aren't allowed at Christmas they must me pushed down, sat upon, stifled, because Christmas is HAPPY and merry and if you aren't HAPPY and merry you are Scrooge or the Grinch or Captain Comedown, and so my feelings this evening feel wrong for this evening. 

So what is going on ? I think i may be lonely. I am someone who needs time alone more than most i think. I am someone who needs solitude and for whom solitude is generally a source of comfort, so to admit to loneliness is quite hard. My loneliness stems from a longing to connect i think. It is a long time since i have felt this but as i tap tap on my keyboard that is what is coming up. 

That is enough to write for now. I acknowledge my awkwardness on this Christmas eve but i think i don't need to wallow in it. 

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Christmas Morning 2022

5am. In years past my home would have just been awaking to the sounds of children, then teenagers, excited about their stockings. I used to lay their stockings out on the rug in the living/telly room.  They were not socks but great big acrylic christmas fake socks, vulgar i suppose, but there is something about the things that come out each year, they harbour memories. I wonder how they feel now after years of not being filled, like un-cuddled Teddy bears or unread books or rooms in houses waiting for entrance. I must throw off this melancholy mood. Or at least assimilate it to try to understand it. 

In years further past I was the child. Mum would put our stockings on our beds. They were proper long socks always with a tangerine in the toe end. Tangerines were christmas treats in the 1970's. Going to bed on Christmas eve i would fall asleep listening to the rustle of her wrapping & filling the socks with carefully stashed little gifts, embroidered animals from the Chinese shop on Elm Hill and paper parasols amongst other things. Once when i was very young i woke in the night and saw Father Christmas, yes really, i remember it clearly, a glowing figure coming into the dark of my bedroom, i shut my eyes so he wouldn't know i'd seen him but i did. 

After breakfast our gifts from family and friends would have been laid out on chairs in the sitting room. My dad's were usually wrapped in a paper bag, that was his trade mark wrapping. And the woman from from up the road who showed me a softer way of being used to give me Devon Violets scent, i think this is where my love of violet perfumes stems from. One year i had asked my dad for a bottle of mead because our teacher at school had been reading The Hobbit to us and mead had been talked about and he bought it for me. In other years i'd asked him for records, Swan Lake, Abba's Greatest Hits, David Bowie's Scary Monsters. 

In the youth, long ago, Christmas day's opened with a glass of champagne and a spliff but today i wake alone except for my cat who as she does every morning came for a cuddle before we went downstairs. I have baked a cake for Christmas day at Amis' house. It is too big for three to eat but i enjoyed baking it, living alone i don't have much reason to bake cakes anymore unless i particularly fancy cake and i'd not trouble to ice a cake for myself. But it is odd after decades of being the provider of the feast to be a guest, a luxury and treat in the first year, but it feels like water running thin in some ways now, a trickling stream joining the body of a stronger river, briefly, before slipping back onto it's own pathway. I am no longer the river or even a great part of the river. 

Oops slipped back into winter-y thoughts. I guess it is natural. It is Winter. And tho this feast, Christmas, is a festival of light, it comes within the bleak of Winter and after the recent cold snap when my fuels bills (research politics and cost of living crisis 2022 if you are reading this years from now) were un-payably expensive i feel a little bleak. I guess the politics of the moment are part of what makes me feel a bit to the side of celebrations this year. National, international, social and personal-social politics are beastly (to a greater or lesser degree) at the moment, the future looks like it may be hard to navigate. The future cannot be held back, life cannot be held in arrest for long, a pause can be held briefly but life goes on, or doesn't, the dead may know pause and but maybe even they are shuffled along as other bodies bury them deeper and the grief of those left behind becomes a ragged cloak and not the heavy mantle it once was.  

So today is Christmas Day. It is 6am now and i just went downstairs and the advent candle in the kitchen fills the room and beyond with light. Today will be a good day i will be with people i love, Archie and Amis and if my stream meets only briefly with others it is perhaps the way i have chosen, at this time, for it to be. To be alone and of small consequence is not a terrible thing, there is a freedom in that journey. Happy Christmas.

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Boxing Day morning 7am

And so Christmas Day was lovely. Gentle. Made gentle by my son Amis who carried the day as host with warmth & generosity. We watched TV, a charming animation that he had recorded so i could see it "The Boy, The Fox, The Mole and The Horse" and Alexa, the weird character who occupies space in so many people's houses, gave us christmas tunes and told us how to cook with the truffle that Richard had sent us as our joint Christmas present. We gave & received gifts mostly books & consumables. We had cake and champagne at lunchtime and ate dinner as the light was fading. Archie & Amis made me watch the King's speech. They are quite ardent royalists. I am not. I came home, not late, exhausted but quietly happy. My walk home at about 6pm had been fine, lots of cars and people about. A couple of years ago when we had Christmas under Covid restrictions i'd walked home at 9pm and quite frankly it was scary.  

And now it is Boxing Day. I'm snuggled up in my bed with the cat asleep by my side. It's a relief to have got through Christmas day. I think it feels like the year's last hurdle. I was conscious this year of my mum in her care home and feeling guilty about that tho i think she will have had a good time as she seems quite happy in the home and the staff and manager are kind. I know i am not the only person facing that scenario. And other friends were facing Christmas with parents recently died, i was thinking about them too, i have yet to go through that i can only imagine how it feels.

But now, having got over the last jump and on the run to the finish, the new year, there is time to regroup my senses in readiness for 2023. God knows how next year will unfold. I will make resolutions, i always make resolutions and some of them i keep, sometimes for a little while and sometimes they become part of me, but more of that maybe on a New Years Day post. Today i will be mostly eating cake and reading and maybe out in my garden.