Merry Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Holidays! Season’s Greetings! And all other variations on that theme! Today is Christmas Day and I can’t quite believe I’ve got a blog post scheduled for it. I thought I’d finish this Polar Bear Winter Festival by showing you what Christmas is like at my house so you can imagine exactly what I’m doing as this post goes live. Not that anyone’ll notice but this one’s not going up until 6pm instead of 4pm in the hope I’ll have time to get actual photos of actual today up.
Every year, my mum gets more over the top about Christmas. For at least the last three weeks, you literally can’t take a step downstairs without knocking over another piece of Christmas tat. I like decorations and I especially like lights but when I have a house, I will not be filling it with wobbly headed Santas from the garden centre and that four-foot Santa that fills the hall will be destroyed – to be fair, my grandmother bought it. Not for her, oh no. She’s not going to suffer a four-foot Santa in her own house. She bought it for us! How nice! He is the epitome of everything I hate about Christmas! Fortunately, Dad is taking a stand this year and it’s not come out of the loft and Mum has seen the light and removed everything from eleven of the stairs.
The tree follows the theme of “if we throw the decorations at it and they stick, they’re staying there”. To be fair, this tree looks a bit less crazy and over-packed when the tree isn’t so needle-thin. The old tree is probably still up in the loft, I don’t remember there being anything wrong with it and it was a much fuller shape.
There are some bits and pieces that have been on there since my parents first got married, more than forty years ago – the aging bells and silk baubles, the Santa glass, the Thing in a Box and the robin.
There’s a few bits I made as a child. Well, there’s one, I think. There’s plenty my mum got given (as a teacher) by her kids – several angels and a huge lanky green skiing thing. Some bits came from my travels and my mum loves to buy an oversized bauble in Innsbruck when she goes to the Christmas market there. The carousel was inherited from my grandad, although the motor that used to make it spin doesn’t work with modern lights – you used to unscrew a bulb and put the motor in instead, but LEDs don’t work like that.
What else is there? Oh, some stuff I’ve made in more recent years – my fused glass bits (and this year’s) and things I’ve done at Rangers or Guides. We put tinsel on when I was tiny but by the time I was about five, we’d switched to strings of beads. Something as chaotic as this doesn’t need any tinsel, does it?
We have a hedge outside and that gets decorated with red berry lights. We used to put icicle lights along the roof but it’s been a long time since my dad has fancied climbing that far up a ladder. We have lights in all the downstairs windows – that’s partly because we have too many lights to really know what to do with but partly because we like lights. We used to laugh at my uncle for the number of lights he had. Now I have more than that just in my office.
Yes, let’s go to my office! On the Kallax I have my mini tree, my tiny felted Icelandic Christmas tree and my miniature Nativity set. The tree is a few fairly generic things from Homebase, plus obviously a polar bear and it’s topped with a phoenix because I saw it in the Longleat Christmas shop a few years ago and just thought it would be nice. That said, the red paper star is from Winchester Cathedral and there are a couple of strings of bells that were either wrapped around a cracker or a box of chocolates or something like that. This year I’ve also got three felted penguins up there too because I made them at Sparkle & Ice earlier in the year and they suit the theme.
Then there’s the lights. I have a string of white lights around the ceiling and coloured lights on the bookcase and window. Those three stay up permanently because they took so much effort and swearing to get up two or three years ago that I wasn’t going to take them down and go through all that again. I have three lanterns containing strings of coloured lights. They used to hang from the curtain rail but it’s a flimsy plastic one and I was terrified of being showered in shattered glass as it collapsed so now they’re scattered around the office. There’s a string of white lights and gold foil holly leaves around the top shelf on my right and a string of ordinary coloured lights around the top shelf on my left. The snowflake lights that go down the side of my Kallax are just polar bear-themed novelty office lighting. Not that it’s relevant to Christmas but I have a stegosaurus miniature lamp on the Kallax too, a ring light on the windowsill for winter Brownie meetings and under the desk is a rainbow LED strip.
And finally, I have a mini plastic Christmas tree that’s on the Kallax next to my desk this year. I’ve been working on it for years – it’s always looked very 2D and very fake and very plastic but last year I had the idea of dabbing silver paint on the needles and painting the pot and this year I added some black paint around the trunk and the bottoms of the branches to give it a little depth and it looks a little less plasticky now. I also made some little tiny beaded decorations and although I’m still not exactly happy with it, it does look better.
As for the day itself:
The Christmas tree lights go on first thing, of course. Usually we don’t bother with the lights until it’s getting dark but today every light in the place is on. The day used to start with me and my sister sitting on our parents’ bed to open the stockings. It still does start with stockings but now we’re grown-ups and my sister doesn’t live here anymore and tends to bring her boyfriend round, it happens downstairs. And the stockings have become special bags rather than a pair of old tights cut in half, although that’s at least partly because my mum hasn’t worn tights since I was a small child.
There are a few things that need to be in the stockings: a toothbrush, a net of chocolate coins and a tube of Jelly Tots. They almost invariably also contain a chocolate orange, a packet of Matchmakers and a bottle of shower gel. We sometimes have frozen croissants while we’re opening the stockings but my mum and sister regard a proper Christmas breakfast as opening the box of special Christmas chocolate biscuits and having a glass of Bucks Fizz.
Once that’s all over, it’s time to get started on the lunch, so most of us decamp to the kitchen to do the veg and the gravy while my grandmother demands the sherry that we’ve had all my life and only open once a year and then wants to phone my uncle and still hasn’t learned that no, his phone number isn’t stored in our landline’s internal phonebook.
We start the day in Christmas jumpers but they get too hot very quickly with so much going on in the kitchen. My dad has a reindeer jumper with lights on that comes out year after year. My mum has been adding to her elf costume for years – the jumper, the hat, the socks, the slippers – but it gets too hot during the cooking part so the elf jumper comes off to reveal the reindeer t-shirt. It has lenticular eyes to make it look like it’s run head-first into a tree. My grandmother wears the same red skirt and white blouse every year. A couple of years ago, my sister and I spent the day in matching full-length furry teddy onesies. I’ve definitely worn my green velvet dress at least once. But my Christmas jumper is a nice brown Christmas pudding fleece hoodie. Now that I’ve rediscovered the holes in my earlobes, I have some reindeer earrings. They have a big blue stone in them, which isn’t very Christmassy but I think they suit the blue better than the red.
When the veg is done and everything’s sort of in hand, we get to presents. My mum goes over the top with presents as well. It starts in August with “what do you want for Christmas?” and by the time it gets to November, when you’re almost in the right frame of mind to consider the question, it’s already too late. Everything is bought and half of it is already wrapped. This means that sometimes the labels have fallen off before December even comes around. Some of them are under the tree, most are in bin bags in the hall and they’re mostly produced by pulling something out until everyone’s got something and no one knows what or who it’s from. My dad keeps my mum’s presents upstairs and spends the day running up and down to fetch them one at a time. Usually, he’s only wrapped them the night before but this year he was organised and did them last week, although he needs to come downstairs to watch a YouTube video after every ten minutes of wrapping and leaves them on the bed with the door open. I spent that day covering them with shirts or towels every time I found them sitting out in the open.
Lunch is the big meal in this house. Turkey, of course. Gammon. Roast potatoes, special gravy (from a packet, obviously!), parsnips, carrots and sprouts. A chocolate on each plate. Oh yes, the Special Plates come out. They’re not even festive! They’re blue and green but they only get used at Christmas or when my godmother comes over. Usually they get solemnly placed on the big gold plastic charger plates which are on the shiny metallic red placemats but this year the plastic plates are too big and my mum’s gone off the shiny place mats so we’ve got the snowman ones out this year. We have a bottle of wine – it used to be whatever the kids had given Mum at the end of term (she was a teacher) and now it’s whatever someone’s had sitting on the side for the last year. My dad occasionally has a can of beer but we’re just not wine drinkers in this house. I once engraved a wine glass with bees and I fill it up with red Fanta because I don’t like wine and so the bee glass is my Christmas glass.
The meat gets laid out on the big serving plate and the veg goes in the two serving tubs. Someone always takes the veg fork to eat with. Obviously there’s nowhere near enough room for everything on the table. Back when all the grandparents were alive, we had a massive sheet of chipboard we’d put on top of the table to extend it and then cover it with several tablecloths and someone, usually me, had to sit on the corner with the computer chair.
After the main lunch comes pudding: Christmas pudding and mince pies with cream and/or custard. Somehow we’ve managed to stock up on seven tins of custard this year. One goes in the pearly Santa jug and one goes in the snowman jug. Which reminds me, the gravy goes in the great big Santa-shaped gravy boat. Dad and I make the mince pies. We used to make the pastry but in the last few years – you know, roughly since he retired – it just takes “too much time” to make the pastry so it’s frozen ready-roll pastry, which rather defies the point of making them. Making the mince pies is the one Christmas thing I really enjoy in December before the day itself – everything else is a bit too much “enforced fun”.
Having stuffed their faces, the grown-ups go to sleep after lunch and I usually go upstairs. It’s all a bit too much noise and chaos and too many people and I like some quiet. By the time I re-emerge, the TV is on. In fact, I vanish upstairs so soon after lunch that I never knew everyone else watches the Queen’s Speech. I only saw it this year because my sister brought her kitten – he’s too little to be left at home alone for such a long day – and I stayed downstairs playing with him and witnessed it for the first time in my life. Then it’s whatever Christmas film is on TV for the rest of the afternoon.
By five or six, everyone’s forgotten their gluttony of only a few hours ago and it’s time for Christmas tea. Cold turkey and gammon, cheese and crackers, mango chutney and Pringles, mostly. It’s a buffet. You grab a small green and blue plate, load it up and then go and sit back down in front of the TV.
The last part of the day is the bit where the grown-ups sit and eat Quality Street while I go upstairs in the bath. It’s not very festive but it’s a busy day.
So that’s what Christmas Day looks like in my house. I hope you’ve had a good day, whatever you’ve done, a break from your everyday life and eaten some good things. Happy Christmas!