The pressure mounts as we inch towards the Big Day. It’s worse this year than it was last, and then it was pretty bad. But Christmas Day is always pretty bad if you ask me, the enforced jollity of it all. The endless repetition of everything you are meant to do. Every. Single. Year.  Now, I am not here to stop anyone else’s enjoyment. You are either a Christmas person or you are not and, in my experience, nothing can turn you from one into the other though, Lord knows, people endlessly try.

“Don’t you like parties Suzanne?”. “Think of the children! ” “It’s all about the family”. No one bothers telling me much about Jesus because it seems to me few people are actually celebrating his birth. 

Some people enjoy the sameness of Christmas Day. Some people love the light entertainment shows on a loop from quizzes to Strictly. Some people want to wear paper hats and wonder, every year,  how even though they have bought luxury Christmas crackers there is nothing decent in any of them. Some people want to believe all the hard work is done by a strange man called Santa Claus rather than by overloaded women. Many women enjoy the self-sacrifice of this pretence .  

Amazingly, I am not one of them.  Eat, drink and be merry, for sure. Any time, my friends!  Giving presents out of love or because you have just seen the perfect thing for a best mate is great. Getting together round a table and making a bit of an effort? Fabulous. Just not when it is compulsory.    

Perhaps it all goes back to what your childhood Christmases were like. My mother used to make Baileys in buckets under the bed and we would flog it to the neighbours. She never revealed the secret recipe but I know it involved condensed milk. On the day itself, though, she would sit smoking, her disappointment at Christmas Day glinting more than any tinsel. When I had children myself, I wanted to repair all of this and desperately tried to make it perfect for them. It never was. So over the years I have made several attempts to escape it all.

To those folk who say: “I can’t imagine it’s a proper Christmas if you are on a beach,” I would say, that is precisely the draw, because “a proper Christmas” is damn near unachievable. Christmas Day has always felt claustrophobic, and my visceral reaction to it has been ramped up by Covid. The stories of the bereaved, of people dying alone, of grandparents not seeing their grandkids – all of these are real enough. No vaccine can immunise us against the sheer amount of loss that many have experienced in the past two years: loss of life and livelihoods.  

This is why the evidence of free flowing cheese and wine in No 10 jars so . We are all in denial about the scale of what has gone from our lives – perhaps we have to be to carry on – but no amount of fake cheer can cover it. For all 

the talk of togetherness, it is also a time of year when many feel the sharp stab of absence. Surely it’s better to acknowledge this, than sprinkle glitter over it?  

The variant may not kill many of us but it is undoubtedly making those who look after us, from ambulance drivers to GPs to firefighters, ill enough to be off work. I really wonder what those in denial of what is going on do when they have a heart attack. Do they have a brusque exchange of views or dial 999? Do they expect to be cut out of the wreckage of a car crash or do they write to an MP? All these folk who claim to know more than  epidemiologists and virologists, I find it all incredible. Literally.   

Of course in the midst of so much confusion and angst, the need to hug dear ones close is understandable. But do we need to do it in exactly the same way every year? The pressure to be there for each other on Christmas Day just imposes another set of rules that sucks out the spontaneity and warmth of life. This constant and heightened need to make it somehow more “special” makes failure more likely. We live in an age when folk talk constantly about “making memories” and yet the thing about memories is that the best of them arise unannounced. Being in the moment is not thinking constantly about how it will all look in the future. 

Something memorable cannot be curated. The fantasy of the perfect Christmas is just that and the pandemic could have been the thing which enabled us to let it go rather than cling on to it. Tolstoy said: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And this is what I feel about Christmases – happy ones are all the same, it’s the unexpected and the disasters that you really remember. 

Having said my Grinchy piece though, I do hope that on the day you do whatever it is that floats your boat. Whatever happens, we will all sail right through it to wherever we are going next.

See you in 2022.