Christmas - It’s Complicated
If you have complicated feelings about Christmas, take heart in knowing you are not alone.
You don’t have to be a full-on Grinch to feel triggered by shopping mall carols and incessant reminders to have a Very Merry Christmas. Even without years of therapy, most of us have worked out that the 25th of December holds many different memories and not all of them are as joyous as we would like them to be.
I both adore Christmas and feel apprehensive about it. Adore it because I love celebrating, and eating, and hugging people, and swapping gifts. Apprehensive because I often (like many of us) get to this point of the year exhausted, and Christmas involves extra To Do Lists that feel a like a straw on the back of a camel. With or without a Wise Man riding said camel towards Bethlehem. Which reminds me, I haven’t done any Christmas cards this year and at this point I’m unlikely to. Apologies if you were expecting one.
Even without cards, there is much to do – shopping, cooking, family logistics and (especially this year in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis) budgeting pressures. There will be a lot of people feeling the strain of gift-buying this year, and hats off to those who have made a call to set limits on expectations.
In reality, mostly we love unwrapping a thing, and will barely recall what was inside it. Try making a list of what was under the tree last year and you’ll know this is true. You can remember the bicycle you got when you were seven years old, but not much before or after that. So take the pressure off to find the perfect gift and maybe invest in fancy wrapping.
In our whānau we have had terrific and terrible Christmases. There was the one when my niece ran into a sliding glass door and broke both it and herself, and my Dad got whisked off to hospital. This was the same day.
There were childhood Christmases filled with family tension – someone taking umbrage, someone storming off – and more recent ones that had moments of drama and the odd clenched jaw.
Though also there have been fabulous days. My mother, daughter, granddaughter and I slipping off in the morning to watch a performance of “The End of the Golden Weather” down at our local beach.
A spectacular white Christmas in Canada when suddenly all the food made sense. Yes, ham! Yes, steamed pudding!
A beach Christmas in Hawkes Bay with family and friends that is right up there with the best. And a garden Christmas in Wellington for wider family, too, that I reminisce about often.
And another year when my daughter was away with her father, and Jeremy and I ran away to the Coromandel, and it felt wicked and liberating, and adult and being little kids all at the same time. We bought a cheap plug-in tree and threw it in the boot, and plugged it in at the rented bach when we got there.
So Christmas can be a day to be managed, endured and survived; and also a time of magic, wonder and joy. Being a grown-up means knowing a thing can be both.
A useful thought for me whenever it gets anxiety-inducing is that it is Just One Day. One shared meal, maybe two depending on how you do it, and you can make sure there is trifle to eat and crackers to pull if that’s your thing.
And then Boxing Day is all yours.