Welcome to Yule time: a season delightfully combining the elasticated pants of Hammertime with my mother’s 100-proof trifle. Stronger than a Molotov and guaranteed to make things turn to custard, Ukrainians should be using it against the Russians.
Now is when that inflatable mattress stored for the past 11 months is discovered to have a slow leak and, in the grip of some kind of gluttonous hypnosis, you mindlessly eat those horrible miniature fruit pies that litter side tables and taste like urinal cakes wrapped in wallpaper. On the tele, Hugh Grant is forever a dancing prime minister and Mariah Carey’s bosoms heave as she yodels about not wanting a lot for Christmas. Never trust a woman who says this.
All I want, Mariah, is a million dollars and to tweedle my knees into the back of the Casanova’s and sleep the dreamless sleep of a hamster who has stepped off her wheel. But no! Rouse yourself, you must. Display good will to all mankind even though they drive very, very badly. Make sure there are enough bin bags, beat the cream, gently exfoliate the new potatoes and go back to the supermarket for the five hundredth time. Scream internally while smiling in a holly jolly manner lest the checkout operator with the blinking festive earrings think you are a b ... .
It’s come around so fast. Tonight, Santa Claus, the overweight younger brother of Sinterklass (the Dutch patron saint of blackface), will streak across the sky pulled by eight reindeer, if he can find that many in this era of driver shortages.
If I have any advice to offer, it’s put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. To stay sane these holidays, I recommend practising self-care; self-care being a euphemism for selfishness.
This Christmas, you need to stay elfy.
’Tis the season of obligation. Even in a year when the economy isn’t in the toilet, the lead-up to the holidays is stressful; combine that with managing the confronting opinions of relatives, familial trauma, exhaustion and a compulsion to "be everything to everyone" and the resulting overload is guaranteed to deep fry best intentions and leave you as ready to blow as a sugar-cranked 5-year-old with an armless Barbie.
With this in mind, may I present a helpful festive listicle to clutch while you lose the run of yourself:
IT’S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS
Half of you will have already done your Christmas shopping and smugly laid artfully wrapped presents beneath the tree for children to surreptitiously shake. The rest of you, your pronouns predominantly he/him, will have left everything to the last minute. Tonight, panicked men will cluster at the beauty counters of the orange women and grab "a thing" — usually a gift box (the petrol station flowers of presents) — this will be followed by a heavily-refreshed dash around the shops, clattering through the front door at midnight wild-eyed and shouting for Sellotape, balancing 10 boxes of Ferrero Rochers and a 12-inch ceramic rooster.
Those of you who have run out of time completely will resort to wrapping random ephemera, giving the gift of spontaneity. Luckily, using magazine pages as wrapping paper isn’t desperate, it’s sustainable. There’s no such thing as the perfect gift, so it would be churlish for the giftee to look askance at that unwashed potato masher or say, "Have you read this book already? And spilt red wine on it?".
GET IN EARLY WITH EMBEDDED EXCUSES
Establish your kind-hearted nature and sow the seeds of release. The minute you arrive announce, "SO great to be here! Just so you know, I did promise that while I was in town I’d help Trev with his leaky tap." When things get too much you can whip out, "Dang and blast it, Trev’s tap has given up the ghost", and go sit in your car and eat a Whopper.
TRADITION IS PEER PRESSURE FROM DEAD PEOPLE
You might find traditions soothing, a lifeboat in turbulent times. Some families play backyard cricket, some folks like a walk on the beach after lunch and taking misty photographs of themselves dressed in white clothing. Every year my family likes to bring up the time I decided Christmas was over at 4pm, took the ornaments down and hauled the tree out to the kerb. Actually, when you write it down like that it does sound completely bonkers.
The Casanova of Wanaka has his own tradition: every Christmas when he finishes work for the year, he purchases a bottle of tequila, because nothing says Feliz Navidad like shots of Patron. We can’t remember much about last Christmas Eve as a result, but the neighbours tell me it involved bows and arrows and a picture of Trump.
SAY NO TO THE COLONIAL FOOD COMA
Perhaps the only place in the world where you will encounter tinned sliced beetroot, the Kiwi Christmas lunch is a quixotic affair comprising roast meat with all the trimmings followed by a heavy pudding on a summer’s day in a land where the pohutakawa is the unofficial Christmas tree. It’s almost as if we think we can trigger the opening of some kind of time travel portal using our gastrointestinal tract. Perhaps that’s true. Wherever it leads, I don’t want to go there.
This Christmas, due to the cost of living, choices are going to be limited when it comes to food and drink. Cheese stopped being affordable back in May, and the price of meat, poultry and fresh vege is out the gate. With many families bracing for sky-high costs next year, it’s time to reintroduce the old "bring a plate" idea and rethink splurging. Splurge on your local foodbank instead, so another family has full puku, too.
The Muir Scotts have decided to have a posh barbecue this year. The poshness will come from the grilling of things other than sausages.
REPEAT YOUR MANTRA
Tomorrow, the kitchen bin will be overflowing with wrapping paper, the dining table littered with cracker jokes, paper hats, non-biodegradable glitter table decor and miniature novelty combs. The Queen won’t be here this year, but just as you ease up the footrest of the La-Z-Boy to watch the King’s speech, sure as apples the cat will make that terrifying "hurking" sound, sick up a tinsel fairy, and someone will shriek, having just stepped on pieces of Lego Death Star. It is at this moment that Uncle Bill will painstakingly explain why women are too emotional to run countries.
Breathe. Centre yourself. Repeat after me: Calm blue oceans, calm blue oceans. Release control. Embrace helplessness. That stain isn’t ever coming out and it’s too late for Uncle Bill to have a personality transplant.
Still to come: the annual phenomenon known as the Boxing Day Sales will see you buy baffling things during a fugue of fomo later only recalled in a series of acid flashback-like strobes of troll doll hair and straining sweatpants. Oh, the humanity.
All of which make it so important that you:
REMEMBER THE TRUE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
This Christmas, for the first time in four years, my daughter is coming over from Perth with her partner to spend her holidays here. By the time you read this they will have arrived, wrapped in jerseys against the chill of a Dunedin summer. As Paul Simon sang, "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away". Don’t Google the story behind this song, or you will be as disappointed as I was to discover it’s based on a chicken and egg dish on the menu of a Chinese restaurant.
The only egg of this particular chicken, I’m excited and nervous about our reunion. My daughter and I parted on unsatisfactory terms after a text sent in anger dismantled an already fragile relationship. For three long years we were estranged, the wall of silence between us only broken by brief communications made with the politeness of strangers.
The fault mine, the guilt and heartbreak has been also. Moving house earlier this year I went through a box containing her primary school paintings, broad swooshes of colour on newsprint paper, 5-year-old handwriting like fence palings marching up a hill: "dear mum you are the best mum". But I haven’t been. Never patient enough, too stressed out from work, too self-involved. I’ve been a failure as a mother and while this has eaten at me for years, I’ve never turned to face it for fear I would be completely undone by the reality.
The pain radiates from the place she came from, a womb ache. The child now an adult and no way to undo the past, the relief when she re-established contact last year, having decided to heal the breach and make the first move, had me doubled over in the kitchen howling, "Oh thank god, thank god".
I’m scared of course, after four years. It’s a long time to go without seeing someone and both our lives have changed utterly. How do we get back to the place before the bad happened? Can we? I’m scared of myself, and the emotional rollercoaster that I can be when I’m anxious: up up up before the hysterical plunge — afraid that I’ll stuff things up again, say something that will cause another Cold War.
Better not to speak, rather let’s move into each other’s space carefully, as cautious animals do, breath mingling with the other’s breath, two puzzle pieces put away in the wrong box, united, refitted into the tabs and locks that were made when she used to fall asleep in the crook of my arm.
Forgiveness and reconnecting with loved ones is what Christmas is all about, so I put aside my fear and hold on to gratitude instead; that with all that’s bad in the world at the moment, despite war, inflation, covid, everything, we have managed to gather as one, to take stock of what’s really important. She is. I am. We are.
Whatever might have happened, we will always be mother and daughter. Your parents are always your parents. You might exasperate them, they might be utterly sick of your s... but they always love you. It’s primal, a love that goes gut deep. Nothing can take that away.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year if you believe it is. Embrace the opportunity — whatever your family might look like, whoever your people are — for god’s sake tell them how much you love them. Because we don’t always get a second chance.
