I (No Longer) Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

I have always been something of a Christmasphile. I say have – I should say had. Christmas was always a big deal in our house as I grew up. And I loved it. My personal library is filled with festive memories. The flickering tree lights which crept through the crack in my bedroom door in our first family home. Waking up on “Christmas morning”, rushing in to my parents’ bedroom to find out they were just going to bed, not getting up and it was still Christmas Eve. Our first Christmas after relocating back to the West Midlands in 1979. Dad breaking a floorboard in the living room while trying to create The Railway Children in a game of charades. Urging Mum to stay up on Christmas Eve while Dad was a Midnight Mass, so I could tell both together that I was engaged to be married. Christmas in our first married home, hosting Mum and Dad after they’d hosted me for so long.

Happy, happy memories.

This Christmas will be quite different for a number of reasons and the levels of Christmas spirit in my festive tankard are a little lower this year. Lower but I’ll still celebrate and there will be plenty of smiles and laughs. And, as I do every Christmas, I’ll think of those for whom December 24th, 25th and 26th will be like every other day of the year. Those on the streets, those with chronic illness and, closest to my experience, those whose lives are lived in the shadow of dementia.

Mum loved Christmas but in her later years, the festive season meant less and less until it seemed to signify nothing at all. After her diagnosis, I encouraged her to write cards and send greetings – Mum would normally include a letter in many of the cards she sent. I remember popping in just before Christmas in 2009, the year of her diagnosis to find the house festooned in cards. Hundreds of them. Wow. I knew Mum was a faithful correspondent but this was off the scale. I glanced at the cards – two next to each other had suspiciously similar writing…and the same names. Unbeknown to me, Mum had kept every card from the previous Christmas – Dad’s last – and had put them all up again. She was thrilled. She had so many friends (true, but…) and I wasn’t going to do anything to burst that small bubble of joy.

So, despite missing Dad – his Les Dawson rendition of carols on the piano and the recycled festive jokes – Christmas 2009 was a special one for Mum and, by extension, for all of us. Subsequent Christmases, in Mum’s care home, were different but special in their way.

For many, Christmas 2023 won’t be particularly special and will be the same as Christmas 2022 and many before it. And the same as every other day of the year gone by. It might be December 25th but caring is caring and doesn’t change. Very little changes.