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I was in a local pub recently when I overheard a lament about Christmas opening hours. Contrary to what you may hear in The Archers or see in EastEnders, many British pubs now close on Christmas Day. The man at the bar was clearly troubled. Where was he to go on 25 December? The landlord – who was obviously looking forward to putting his feet up on Christmas Day – said there were quite a few websites that would tell you which nearby pubs were staying open, but I could see his regular was troubled. Not only was this the pub where he had always drunk on Christmas Day, but he had suddenly lost his surrogate family and at the most vulnerable time of year.
Depending on your circumstances, Christmas Day can be a nightmare. It is up there with Valentine’s Day if you are unhappily single, and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day if your children aren’t speaking to you. You can’t pretend it is just another day and simply get on with your life. Everyone and everything is telling you it’s Christmas Day. Even the Queen gets in on the act. There are few worse days to be on your own. It happened to me 14 years ago.
Newly divorced and with a lovely new flat in a new city, I stood at my picture window and watched a family – grandparents, mother, daughter and dog – going for a bracing post-lunch walk. Seeing them striding out, with an ecstatic dog and a young daughter in new gloves and coat rushing ahead, I remember thinking, “I’m like you. I’m sure if you met me, we’d get on.” But I knew I couldn’t nip down, introduce myself and say, “I’m all alone on Christmas Day. Can I walk with you?” They would have called the little girl over and put her safely between the mother and grandmother until the strange, sad man went on his way.
I wasn’t entirely alone in the world that day. On Christmas Eve, I had taken my children to their grandparents and we had opened presents over breakfast on Christmas morning and then I had driven them to their mother’s and come back to my flat.
At first, I felt like Matt Damon as The Talented Mr Ripley having his solitary Christmas in Rome. I unwrapped my presents, ate and drank some special things I had saved up for the big day. I may even have watched The Talented Mr Ripley. I certainly fell asleep at one point in best post-prandial style.
But when I woke up and walked to the window and saw that family, it hit me that here I was, in my late 40s, and life had only ever prepared me for “Christmas Day with family”, not to spend it on my own. I had been enjoying the single life up until that moment.
For many people who are on their own at Christmas, there are surrogate families. Going to church or helping out at a refuge can supply a sense of community, but as we lose pubs that offer open house on Christmas Day, we are losing the kind of family that many single men crave, the kind of benign family where you can drop in and chat, or keep to yourself but still feel welcomed by fellow human beings.
So how do we cope, we men who are looking at being on our own on Christmas Day? I address this question deliberately to men because I am one and can’t really speak to the female experience – although I have always felt that women have more effective support groups than men. But that is only because we have none.
It is a question of attitude. My overwhelmingly strong feeling was that I needed a family on Christmas Day. But Christmas doesn’t have to be about families. That was my mistake.
When I think back to The Talented Mr Ripley, Christmas Day is presented as the moment of perfect stillness in Tom Ripley’s turbulent life. In his Rome apartment, he plays the piano and sits by the fire opening a present that he has bought himself and that he clearly loves. Yet it is not the present, the music, or even the glass of wine he sips, that makes this moment special, it’s the stillness. The world stands still on Christmas Day. This stillness, at a point when the planet feels as if it has ceased to turn – and we will remain in the depths of a silent winter for ever – is a great moment to recharge our spiritual batteries.
Looking back, I see it was a mistake to gaze longingly at that family out on its bracing walk. I should have been enjoying the calm of a Christmas afternoon entirely on my own, rather than wishing it away. I was outside family life for the first time and, instead of appreciating the wonderful silence, I wanted to get back into family life as soon as I could.
The funny thing is, exactly 12 months later I drove my children from their grandparents to their mother and, instead of driving back to my flat, I drove on to Devon with the M5 entirely to myself (a very odd experience that quickly convinces you that zombies have taken over). When I got to Bideford, there was the family I was going to marry in to three months later. There were grandparents, there was my fiancee, there was her nine-year-old daughter and there was the dog.
I don’t quite know how I managed it. They can’t have been the family I saw walking that Christmas afternoon, but it was strange how what I got for that Christmas was exactly what I had craved the year before.
But my point is not that if you wish for something hard enough, you will get it. The world is full of people who have wished hard and been desperately disappointed. No, my point is that if you are alone without a family this Christmas Day don’t wish it away but see if, like Tom Ripley, you can enjoy it. I think you can.
