TIS the season to be jolly. Aye, right. Ye can fa-la-la-la aff. (Spoiler alert. This columnist disnae like Christmas ...)
Perhaps it was the ill-fated casting of the five-year-old Hardeep as Joseph in the Meadowburn Primary School nativity that was the genesis of my anti-Christmas sentiment. (The girl who played Mary/Our Lady, received some flak for entering a mixed-race relationship. Bishopbriggs in the 1970s was a significantly less multicultural place.)
Could we devolve any further from the essence of Christmas?The free market has never marketed more freely. From the moment Hallowe’en was over, we've seen the longest-ever build up to the festivities since records started.
The seasonal celebration of the birth of Christ twists and tortures the already tense template of family. We all know the score.
Take Angela and Maureen. Since the Christmas of 2007, these two sisters Angela and Maureen have ceased to fraternise (or should that be sororise).
No casual suburban coffees are coiffed; no sibling Saturdays are spent shopping; no nothing. They are sisters, estranged. Yet the tide of Yule, the most stressful time for kin and kith, insists that the aforementioned Angela and Maureen somehow share the same seasonal space (even though Maureen’s husband Albert never apologised for saying Angela’s ex-husband was a, and I quote, “wastrel ne’er-do-well”).
Albert and Angela will sit seething at each other, gieing it pure daggers over an overcooked, overpriced turkey, wishing the day to be, well … over.
While this Angela, Albert and Maureen inhabit only my imagination, none of us can say we don’t know an actual Angela, Albert and Maureen. At the best of times, Christmas can be the worst of times. It’s as if family finds every fragile fissure in our soul and crowbars the wound wider still. I’m not a fan of these festivities. But this year, there promises to be something a bit different for me.
This will be the first Christmas since 2008 that I will spend the anointed day with my anointed people: my kids. (Though technically, they are kids no more). The last eight years has robbed me of that one day of the year when being a dad felt like it might mean something that wasn’t wholly ephemeral or didn't involve a lift tae someone's party.
There are legion fathers who will spend these holidays separated from their children; some by accidental abandon, others by deliberate design. I never understood fathers who wilfully refused to see their kids, post-split. Never. Until I became one of them …
There’s nothing more painful than having to hug and kiss your children goodbye, late in the expectant afternoon, surrounded by holly, ivy and as yet unopened presents. It’s torture being with them on the eve of Christmas, knowing that you won’t be there to see their beautiful wee faces in the frantic flurry of gift unwrapping.
What is it about men that makes us unable to deal with this year-round pain? Snatched sun-less Sundays in tired cafes, halfway between the house you used to live in and a flat you can’t quite fit it.
You miss the unremarkable meals you cooked for them on wet Wednesday while they did their maths homework and you desperately tried to remember the difference
between cos, sine and tan. You miss cutting their toenails, when they were fresh out of the bath; and you miss the silent sessions in front of forgettable television programmes, as their tired heads swayed steadily into sleep, cooried intae your chest. Simply, you miss your life.
For many men, it’s easier to close the door than to operate the revolving door of fortnightly frailty. It’s easier to stop feeling in order to keep on living. (While there are some men who simply cannae be a****d to fulfil their parental responsibilities, I suspect there are more who are unemotionally ill-equipped to cope.)
But this Christmas, they will be there: my adult children, with me and their mum and extended family, gathered around a table heaving with food, drink and memories. I really don’t know how to feel. I have become used to spending that day in a different way, seldom with my extended family. I have naturalised myself into a Christmas Day surrounded by strangers, a Christmas evening spent with my old friend Mr Ardbeg. This Christmas, I need to be a dad. Again.
There are legion mums, dads and grandparents out there who will be a million miles away from those they love. They will cry silent tears, eat solo meals and wish the day away. I, at least, can confront Christmas with the two people I love most in the world. And as I carve a slice of leg for my son, a bit of thigh for my girl, I imagine that Albert and Angela exchange an unforced smile, knowing that they, like me, are with their family. Merry Christmas.
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