A very 'homely' Christmas

I think the build-up to Christmas is my favourite part of the all the festivities. It gets longer each year, and for one reason or another, it just makes people happy. German Christmas markets pop up everywhere, hot mulled wine is served in little red boots, there's the warm smell of roasted chestnuts, and Christmas is still a week or two away so the panic of 'Oh shitbollocks, I've forgotten to buy a present for Auntie Julie and I have no idea what she likes, will a soap set do?' hasn't quite set in.

Coming home for Christmas is, and always will be, one of the warmest feelings in the world. I can't quite describe what I mean, other than when I walked into the lounge in my parents' house on Christmas Eve after a 3 and a half hour drive from Bournemouth in the pouring rain, there was a part of my insides that felt like a little switch had been flicked on, and a mini hot water bottle was squidged in between my lungs and my intestines put their feet up in front of a log fire.

Since I was last home, my parents have been 'doing up the place'. On my last visit in early November, the walls of the lounge were strewn with various different wallpaper samples from B&Q, and my mum asked me to stare at each one individually with my hands cupped around it to try and imagine the whole wall in that paper. Naturally, they chose the wallpaper I advised against, but there I was, standing in the lounge, with the new wall staring back at me. And I have to admit, not listening to me was (for once) the right decision. It looked brilliant.

And even though the wallpaper was different, there was a new carpet, and several of the pictures on the wall had been switched around, it was still home. And I was delighted to see that the tree was just as I'd remembered. Now, my parents' Christmas tree is what a lot of people would call 'tacky', in that anything and everything is thrown onto the branches. The tree itself is artificial, as old as me (25 years), and looks as if some of the rows of branches just didn't want to be part of the Christmas Tree anymore, and left in search of a better life, perhaps as those fancy dead twigs people have in vases in their hallways next to the potpourri.

In actual fact, our previous cat Cleo made her best efforts every year to climb into the tree and sit on the branches, and her beady yellow eyes would glimmer through the tinsel. This was fine when she was a kitten, but as she grew older, and somewhat bigger, the branches soon began to bend under her weight, until she had to sprawl all four legs across as many branches and Christmas lights as she could just to stop herself falling through. Since then, I'm afraid the tree has never quite looked the same again. I suggested to my parents that perhaps it was time for a new tree, you know, one that didn't look like a broom was half way through getting changed into a Christmas Tree outfit after a shower. But my mum is very sentimental and hates wasting things, and assured me 'it's got another few years in it yet!'

And even though the tree does look slightly tacky, it looks homely. It wouldn't be the same without the decorations we made as children out of plasticine (including a rather fetching one of Pingu made by yours truly), a set of musical bells that play 'O Come All Ye Faithful' one bell at a time (except one bell doesn't work, and my mum can't work out for the life of her which one it is, and so hums in the gaps), knitted angels, crocheted snowflakes and old material baubles with threads loose handed down from my nan. I don't get all these trees that are colour co-ordinated, and precisely engineered to have the same tinsel-to-bauble ratio. My friend at work was bragging one day about his Christmas Tree and how orderly it looked. He even showed me a picture to demonstrate how everything was in perfect symmetrical lines, everything was the same colour, and no one was allowed to decorate the tree but him, and when he started telling me about how much he dislikes tinsel, well. I very much had to leave the conversation.

Christmas Day at our house always begins with the annual 'photo in front of the Christmas Tree'. It's normally taken in the morning, once everyone has had breakfast (usually something fancy, like a bagel), had a shower, and wearing something festive. My dad sets his SLR camera up one end of the lounge on a tripod, puts on the auto timer, and runs like a Chinese man across hot coals to quickly kneel down next to us and smile before the picture is taken. It is lovely looking back year after year at the different Christmas pictures and seeing how we've all changed. But two things to bear in mind are 1) Once a photo is taken on my dad's camera, it disappears into the deep chasm of the memory card, and no human but my dad will ever see it for years to come, and 2) he takes about 15 photos, with and without flash, so that by the time the lighting is correct our smiles have drooped, someone is blinking, and the beeper is going on the oven for the turkey to be taken out.

The two photos I took on my own camera, as I wanted to see them before 2019

The opening of presents is just as important as the taking of the Christmas picture. We move a chair next to the pile of presents and it is either my mum or dad's duty to dish them out. They're normally done one at a time, so everyone has long enough to marvel at their gift, say the relevant thank-yous, and play the game of 'who can get their wrapping paper into the rubbish bag in the middle of the room' before the next wave of presents are given out. Mum and Dad always seem to bicker over who gets to be the hander-outer of presents, as if doing so is some kind of recognition of 'parent of the year' award. Just for the record, my mum handed them out this year.

It was a particularly special Christmas this year, because it was the first time that a lot of us were actually spending Christmas Day together. In previous years, my sister Louise spent the day with her husband's family, and my brother went to his fiancée's family's house, and I usually worked in a restaurant. But this Christmas was the first one in about 5 years where I was to be at my parents' house, for the whole day, and both my brother and sister would be there too. With me living almost 200 miles away, and my brother and sister having equally busy lives, we rarely get to see each other all at the same time. On Christmas morning I could see my mum's eyes sparkle as she knew that today, for the first day in a very long time, all her children who flew the nest many years ago would all be back together again, and I wish I could have encapsulated the happiness in that moment in a picture.

Once the presents were opened and the picture was taken, I soon realised my mum apparently had invited a person who, it would seem, was very important. She referred to this person when cooking, when talking about the seating arrangements, how much they'd like to eat and drink, how long they'd like to stay for, what they'd like to watch on TV, and so on. As far as an individual goes, they seem rather selfish and a bit too snobby to be honest. For all intents and purposes, she named them 'people'.

"We want to make sure everything is ready for when people arrive"
"Well, people might not want to eat much."
"What do people want to drink? Go find out, Jennifer!"
"Have people had enough to eat? There is more in the kitchen, let me go get it"
"People can have whatever they like for dessert"

I half expected either a Royal King to stroll in and sit at the head of the table, or a hoard of 50 people to come clambering through the door. The best part was that as all 4 of us, the only ones who would be present for dinner, were in the kitchen helping my mum dish up everything into the 'good china' ( the crockery which lives in a glass cabinet and only gets used at Christmas) she still insisted on saying 'people', as if we were either invisible or going to give birth that instant to more people.

"Mum, we are the people" I quickly reminded her.
"What? Oh yes, yes, but you know what I mean..."

I left her to it and said no more as we walked into the neatly laid dining table in the conservatory, as she wondered 'one bag of brussel sprouts might not be enough, you know! What if people like brussels?' (One bag was more than enough; apparently people were too full after all.)

This was also my first Christmas in many years not as a vegetarian. It has only been about 3 months since I've started eating meat again, and so there are still many 'new things' to have; foods I haven't had in so long I've forgotten how quite exactly how they tasted. And Christmas dinner was one of them.

I'd learnt to love Quorn over the years, and in the past my Quorn Roast, which resembles the body of a small sausage dog who's died of dehydration, was good enough to keep me satisfied during Christmas dinner.

A Quorn Roast.

This year, however, turkey was back on the menu. To celebrate, my mum decided to treat us all and cook not only turkey, but gammon and duck, too. All separately of course; not one of those vile concoctions you can buy from  frozen supermarkets where you buy all the birds stuffed together in one like some giant winged Russian doll. It was only after we'd all finished our second helpings that my dad, oblivious as always, asked how my vegetarian meal was, and I reminded him that I'd asked him to pass me the turkey and he'd watched me put some onto my plate, to which his reply was: 'Oh. Welcome back, then.'

After dessert, and once everyone had loosened their belts at least 2 notches, mum and dad came sniggering back to the dining table holding a stack of papers and some pencils. Before Christmas, they'd dropped off my nan at my aunt and uncle's house in Basingstoke so she could spend Christmas with them, and while they were there, my aunt and uncle had concocted a Christmas quiz. This was the very same quiz that mum and dad were now handing out. I knew the odd fact here and there about Christmas, the names of all the reindeer, the origins of Kris Kringle, what colour Father Christmas' coat used to be etc, and so was feeling semi confident, until my mum said 'Oh, Jennifer. You probably won't know very many. Sorry.'

I wasn't sure what she meant, until I looked down and saw we had to write down all the names of the Christmas number 1's along with the artists for the years stated. We were given the first letter of each word, but seeing as the majority on the sheet were before I was born in 1988, I felt like I was, to put it politely, a bit buggered.

From personal experience, Christmas songs are the very few songs where you have no idea who sings it. Other than the very famous ones like Maria Carey and Slade, very few people (including me) actually know the names of any of the songs or the artists; they're just played on repeat on the radio and in shops and you're more familiar with the tune than you are of the name. To name them is more like going 'oh, it's the one where a waitress is moaning', or 'something about Mary's child? Mary's boy child?' and 'Driving Home for Christmas by that guy who sounds like Morgan Freeman with a sore throat'.

There was some cheating involved, whereby my brother started peering over his fiancée's sheet and asking to swap answers in exchange for better cracker prizes, and then my mum was giving very obvious clues such as 'It rhymes with Miff Wichard' to anyone who was stuck. As I could have predicted, my sister won by a mile, but I got a lot more answers than I thought, especially ones such as 'Bob the Builder - Can we Fix It?' (Christmas Number 1 in 2000).

All in all, it was possibly the best Christmas I'd ever had. Because, for the first time ever, I didn't actually care about presents or food, I was just happy to be back with my family. And after all, that's what Christmas is really about, isnt it?

In fact, thinking back, I did encapsulate my mum's happiness in a photo on Christmas Day. I made her take her very first selfie.

I also decided to recreate this photo that my mum had stuck on the back of the door in the downstairs loo, along with many other highly embarrassing Christmas photos from the 1990s. My mum even had to go into the loft to find my doll Michelle and repair her face with plasters just so we could retake this photo, as for some reason, when I was 5 I liked to play the game of 'throw Michelle as high as I can in the air' over a concrete floor, and her face continued to smash and fall off, and then I'd do it all again. And don't worry, I know what you're thinking; no I haven't tried this with my hamster Pippin.

Me: 1993 vs 2013. Wearing a peplum top before it was even in fashion.

I hope everyone has as lovely a Christmas as I did. Here's to many more in the future.