It’s that special time of year, where normally I would be planning a getaway. Every family has its own special Christmas tradition, and ours is: “Mum goes mad and makes us go away to scary places.” I wrongly assumed when I had children that they would inherit what I would call my “spirit of adventure”, and others might call recklessness. Stupidly, I also never quite got the measure of how conservative children can be.
They want to do things the same way everyone else does, and there is no time that this need is more pressing than at Christmas, when for some unknown reason we all have to pretend to live in nuclear families and recreate the idea of a Victorian Christmas. Why?
Perhaps you can tell this is not my idea of fun. Indeed, the very idea of it makes me feel claustrophobic – and no amount of therapy can shift that – so what I like to do is go away at Christmas, for the actual day itself if possible, and certainly for that weird limbo bit between it and new year. What is that all about? Those empty days. Very early on, and when living on a tight budget, I also realised some very cheap deals are to be found then.
As a result, my children have been hauled all over the world at “this special time”. Now they are grown up, they can see the funny side, but it’s not always been that way.
There was the most “Un-Christmassy Christmas” ever episode when I took them to actual Bethlehem on Christmas Day. Rather cleverly, I thought, I had booked us into a Franciscan monastery on the actual Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, which was full of pilgrims wearing crowns of thorns. The monastery wasn’t the height of luxury, let’s put it that way, and the children found the monks “creepy”.
On the day itself, we had to take two different taxis – an Israeli one and then a Palestinian one – and there was still a bit in between when people threw stones at us as we were getting into the car.
“Well, this is exciting!” I said, trying to jolly the children along. “Mum, people are throwing stones at us! It’s horrible.” In those days before the appalling wall was built, there were still many checkpoints as we were going into the West Bank and Manger Square was somewhat bleak, with pictures of Yasser Arafat everywhere and a straggly Christmas tree. “Is that Jesus?” my youngest asked, pointing at Yasser.
“Well, not exactly.”
