This is how Christmas normally looks for me: I haul myself out of bed at about 5am on the 22 or 23 December and catch an early morning flight from London, where I live, to the west of Ireland. My mum picks me up from the airport, and on the way home we stop at a café – the same one every time – for a coffee and a mince pie and the kind of excitable catch-up that you can’t really have over the phone.
By Christmas Eve, my brother and sister are home too, and every surface in the sitting room is studded with bowls of Quality Street chocolates in their jewel-bright wrappers. We go to the pub, and by the time we’re back, the Father Ted Christmas special is on.
On Christmas Day, our grandparents call round for dinner, an elaborate affair that involves three kinds of stuffing, two choices for dessert and the obligatory cracker-hat wearing. Afterwards, my mum and I have a completely unnecessary Baileys coffee, and then we all attempt to play a board game before falling asleep on the sofa. And, of course, once the cabin fever sets in and the toffee pennies are the only Quality Street left, I start itching to get back to London again.
No one celebrating Christmas last year could have comprehended what the coming months would hold. None of us knew that this year’s celebrations would be very different. In 2020, for the first time, like so many others, I’m spending Christmas away from home. I’ll be in the flat in London I share with my boyfriend.
Though it was always going to be complicated – with 14 days of self-isolation required on arrival in Ireland, and an anxious cat we don’t want to bring on a plane – we had a plan. We were going to drive home via the ferry in mid-December, self-isolate in a friend’s empty house for two weeks and then get picked up by our respective families. Then, in November, someone stole our car – and, though they didn’t know it, our Christmas.
“We decided it’s just not worth putting the people we love at risk – my parents work in care homes, and the consequences of me giving Covid to either of them could be disastrous.”
Other ways of getting home would just be too complicated and risky. We decided it’s just not worth putting the people we love at risk – my parents work in care homes, and the consequences of me giving Covid to either of them could be disastrous.
Of course, I know that many, many people are in the same situation. I also know that far worse things have happened this year than a 28-year-old woman in a live-in relationship not getting to see her family at Christmas. And yet, it stings a little to think about all of those rituals – the bowls being filled with sweets, the giddy Christmas Eve pub trip – happening while I’m hundreds of miles away.
I moped for a couple of days, wondering how I could recreate Christmas as I knew it – before realising I couldn’t. There’s no way any of it could be the same. So I’ve decided to develop my own festive traditions for the first time.
It’s started already, with Christmas cards. I’ve never sent them before, but this year, with not much else to do, I decided to try making my own. The process was so lovely and therapeutic that I’ve already decided to make it a yearly ritual – getting all the bits in from Hobbycraft, lighting a festive candle, blasting Mariah Carey and spending a peaceful evening at the kitchen table, doodling and folding and sticking.
Baking has been my main way of dealing with the constant sense of impending doom that’s underpinned this year, so I’ve scoured the internet for mince pie recipes and tried to take all the most delicious-looking elements of each – spiced rum, ground almonds, orange zest – to develop my own. As I wrote it down on a piece of paper torn out of my notebook, in a massive delusion of grandeur, I imagined it being handed down to my grandchildren.
On the big day itself, we’re planning to go for a long walk in our favourite park to work up an appetite before dinner. We’re both vegetarian, and so for the first time we can cook a big plant-based Christmas dinner, rather than picking at a stuffed mushroom from Tesco while everyone else tears into the turkey. We’ve bought all the things we need to make cocktails, so that post-dinner Baileys coffee is going to become a Baileys espresso martini this year.
“If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that we can’t ever count on things staying the same.”
Since I moved to London six years ago, friends and family have always asked whether or not I’d be coming home for Christmas, and I’ve never understood why it was even a question. Until now, the thought of spending Christmas away from home seemed crazy – it always felt like something only a real, established adult would do. Someone who owns a house, has children, knows what their tax code means.
But starting my own festive traditions – knowing I can ‘do’ Christmas – has given me a sense of confidence. I’ve realised that I am a real, established adult, who can adapt when things go wrong, who doesn’t melt into a puddle like brandy butter on a Christmas pudding when a deadly virus scuppers her plans.
I’ll probably feel a little sad when I wake up on Christmas morning, but there’ll be comfort in these new rituals that we’ve developed, and that we’ll hopefully carry into the future. Traditions, I’ve realised, are what makes Christmas so special – there’s so much joy to be found in the things that stay the same every year, no matter what else is going on in our lives.
But if we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that we can’t ever count on things staying the same. We’ve just got to throw ourselves into whatever our normality is right now. And if that means a cocktail before noon, so be it.
Rebecca Hastings is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter at @rebz_hastings
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