It may seem to sit in direct contradiction to my misanthropic shtick, but I bloody love Christmas. I loved it when I was a kid, mainly because my parents went in for Christmas hard. There is a big Sri Lankan community in Crawley and we would do a circuit of people’s houses over the festive period, with my dad getting hammered and making a real show of himself before going home to the traditional Christmas sound of my mum giving him a bollocking.
One year he slipped on the ice and hurt his face. My mum took him to hospital and he decided he was going to try to lift everyone’s spirits in the waiting room (showing a wilful ignorance of the reason everyone was there) by singing Christmas songs at full volume. My mum said her low point was when he went behind reception and started trying to check in patients.
Having children obviously makes Christmas even better. They get very excited, although I am starting to become convinced that our eldest son has twigged re Santa. There is, of course, no incentive to him letting us know that, as Santa is giving him presents; but I am starting to wonder if the dynamic has now changed and the kids have hushed conversations about not letting us find out that they know he’s not real: “It would break their little hearts, they love doing the mince pie and the crappy little footprints across the living room. I can’t believe they think we don’t know it’s flour.” Etc.
The one thing that we haven’t figured out is a system for who is going where on Christmas Day. My wife has a sister and I have a younger brother, and every year my wife and I sit down to deliberate about what we are going to do, as if Christmas has never occurred before and this is a brand new conundrum. Suddenly, the time that we spend at people’s houses has become a premium commodity, and we have to measure it out carefully, so that the different parties involved in “Ranganathan Christmas” do not feel slighted in any way.
We have Brexit-like trade discussions: “If we spend the morning of Christmas Day at theirs, we may be able to use that as leverage to get ourselves some time with just us in the evening. But that means we don’t see my mum, so I think we’re going to have to face the very real possibility of losing Boxing Day.”
This year, we decided that we have been too forceful in the past, and agreed we would wait to see what everyone else wanted to do. The last couple of weeks have been the most high-pressured of our lives; meeting up with family members and trying to ascertain what their plans are, like Christmas detectives. Eventually we caved under the pressure. I was away on tour and my wife phoned me to say, “I couldn’t take it any more, so I’ve asked everyone to ours.”
This actually is the most clever move of all: Christmas Day is the ultimate play – you sacrifice one day and buy yourself enough superiority points to have the rest of the break to yourself. My wife says she finds it stressful. I tell her that she has never spent Christmas in a hospital waiting room with my dad.
