Merry Christmas

Something to read today if you love your family and also find them irritating, or are having a weird day, or just need a minute ...

Mabel the cat writing my Christmas cards for me a few years back

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Christmas is a strange time. We experience it mostly in anticipation or in retrospect. The actual living of it can be an oddly detached experience and can often generate the same floating sense of disconnection or unreality, even when the circumstances are different. I went to write a Christmas post but when I looked back on the one below from 2021, written on my last Christmas day in Ireland, it said everything I wanted to say this time too. So I’m sharing it again since there are thousands of people here now who won’t have seen it originally, and because the pleasures and challenges of Christmas tend to repeat with the holiday.

For some people, this is a straightforwardly enjoyable day. For others, it means going home to a dinner table that includes your flat-earther uncle who is secretly (not at all - everyone can smell the cooking sherry and Bud Light on him) off the wagon. It’s your mother who asks you, in front of the rest of the family, if you need to wee before heading out on a family walk. You’re forty.

If anyone else did this, you’d laugh heartily at the silliness of it all. It would be a funny story to tell next Christmas. But because it’s today, and because it’s her, and because it’s you, the question transforms you into an infantilised, huffy twelve year-old. A livid, molten fury and shame roil in your gut. Your instinct is suddenly to call your mother a “pointless bitch” (to quote comedian Tim Dillon), run up to your room which is now incidentally filled with pre-owned flat earth and QAnon literature because your uncle has been sleeping there ‘till things pick up’, and slam the door. You don’t. Hopefully. But you might.

Or you may be by yourself today. Or perhaps there’s an empty seat at the dinner table which was occupied last year, and you’re suffering. Maybe you are thinking about how lucky you are to have your children, but also feel kind of like flinging them out the back door because they’ve been pressing buttons since three o’ clock this morning on the blaring, battery-operated toy your goddamn idiot sister bought them. Christmas heightens all the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ we carry through the rest of the year. What we ought to have. Where we should be today and in our lives generally. Who should be with us. How we ought to feel.

It’s been a hard year. For you. For your insufferable uncle. For your kind, dumb sister with bad taste in gifts and your ‘pointless’ mother , who you know deserves more tolerance than you feel able to give her when you return home and everyone slots automatically into the role of ‘me, but ten/twenty/however many years ago’. You deserve more tolerance too. It’s a weird time. That’s alright. So I hope you’re safe today, and have something nice to eat, and that it’s the best possible Christmas available to you under your particular set of circumstances. Take care of yourself. Don’t open the links your uncle sends you on WhatsApp, and I’ll see you back here soon.

Merry Christmas and thank you for your support this year!