This year, I have slipped further into Christmas mania than ever. I have always been the person who wraps their gifts in October and spends the entirety of Christmas Day in homemade reindeer ears, but 2019 has been markedly more intense: I started looking at decorations in early November, organised a four-course potluck dinner with friends as soon as December had started, and spent hours comparing essentially identical fir trees online.
I have done all of this because I love Christmas, I really do, but also because I knew that I had to reclaim it. On Boxing Day last year, my dad died after what it would be an understatement to call a long illness – a brain tumour of impressive complexity, which developed over 20 years. Death can knock you off your feet at any time of year, but there was something particularly surreal about taking my brother out of the room where our father had just died, and turning on the TV to cut through the silence and the noise only to find Macaulay Culkin setting booby traps in Home Alone.
The rest of the “festive season” was a blur, except for the fact that it was the festive season in appearance only. I was mainlining chocolate orange segments while looking up funeral venues, all of which dutifully replied with a “sorry for your loss” message before quoting ridiculous prices to put some sandwiches on a table (sorry, indeed). We couldn’t have the funeral until well into the new year because everything had shut down over Christmas, and spots at the crematorium were going quicker than Glastonbury tickets.
As the seasons came and went, anticipatory grief turned into actual grief, which then turned into confusion and other emotions both new and familiar in their painfulness. I would occasionally think about how Christmas was indelibly tainted, and then I’d feel a sense of guilt for making it about myself, reminded of the unforgettable moment in Keeping Up With the Kardashians when Kim loses an expensive earring and her sister Kourtney snarls: “Kim, there are people who are dying!”
But, slowly, my feelings began to shift. It helped that one of my close friends had also lost a parent at about the same time and knew how disorienting the whole thing was; the Christmas lights were still up in the street when we had our first post-death debrief. By late summer, I had started to think of it as almost a miracle that my dad – humble, brave, exacting – had died at pretty much the only time when we might have all been in the same place at the same time. Also, it was at the time of year when friends and family were at their most available, and when we did have a mountain of chocolate oranges, a great accompaniment to the deepest of existential crises. I began to feel grateful for the peacefulness of Christmas, and how – even for an agnostic – it was underpinned by hope. I was terrified by the thought of it, and of getting lost in this unbridled sea of joy that wouldn’t be fully applicable to us, but I was also appreciative.
And so to now. With my tree up, my firewood-scented candle burning and Mariah playing, I feel both an immense sense of loss and a great appreciation for the rituals, the cold and the familiar comforts. It will be difficult – it would be strange if it wasn’t. But, perhaps, in many ways, it is a parting gift.
