If you have been wondering where I am, here I am, knackered.
I have previously expounded my theory to anyone who will listen, that Christmas is a festival of work for women. If you are a lone man sitting down to a packet of gravy grains and a tin of sprouts, I’m sorry, but usually it is.
I have spent the last many days trying to catch up with myself. What a sensible person would have done who had planned a fully interactive, play-with Christmas card prior to splitting their forehead open, would have been to curtail the plans to something more manageable. At the outset I asked the OH if he wanted cards for his relatives and drinking buddies. As usual he said no until a couple of weeks after I had finished about 700 passes through the die cutting machine to create the bits for a put it together yourself folding dolls house. He waited until I had printed 50+ funny pictorial letters, which are never round robins, and, on years when I am not freshly scarred, all handwritten and different. He waited until I had got through three tubes of glue sticking all the rooms together. He waited until I had made 50+ stand up Father Christmases, posh Victorian ladies and Rudolphs and stable doors for him to hide behind . He waited until I had cut up 50+ bags of sticky and 50+ bags of white Tack. He waited until I had made 50+ card boxes, addressed them, picked, packed and posted them and begun the massive tidy up and then he asked if I had any cards for his relatives and drinking buddies.
Surprisingly, no.
In the middle of all this effort, I had to go to the supermarket because I was running out of things to eat. Returning to my car, in the rain, I had to halt my trolley for a lady on her third go at getting her small car into the space beside my car. She abandoned her car at an interesting angle and got out. Looking at the car she remarked ‘ Well that’s easily the worst parking I’ve ever done!’ I said, ‘Oh don’t be hard on yourself, I’m so tired I can hardly think.’ ‘Yes,’ she re-joined ‘and men don’t help, they just sit there..’ ‘Watching television,’ I added ‘and’ we finished together, ‘saying: Christmas, isn’t it lovely?’ How we laughed (slightly insanely)!
A distant neighbour threw me into a panic by asking to borrow my carpet cleaner for her mother. Last time she did it took me an hour and three quarters to clean the cleaner afterwards. Picking other people’s hair wound round your Bex Bissell rollers dun’t half put a dent in your magnanimity. So, trying hard not to be too British, I plucked up courage and asked, when she arrived, if she wouldn’t mind cleaning it after use. A couple of hours later she was back with it, her mother having decided to buy one of her own. I was so relieved I did not have to do stranger hair removal four days or less, depending when it came back, before Christmas, off me bristly rollers, I allowed myself to sit down and have a cup of tea. After I had finished cleaning the fridge and freezer, of course, there’s no need to go mad with relief.
You have to pace yourself as you get older. Twenty years ago I regularly painted the hall stairs and landing in the week before Christmas, stayed up until it was done and still got up at the crack of dawn next day.
Besides being a festival of work for women (and sprout can opening men) it is worth remembering why we have Christmas now. The date has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, which was in the spring, and everything to do with earlier, pagan celebrations in the northern hemisphere that saluted the turn of the year and the winter solstice.
Five thousand years ago Neolithic people worked out how to build the cairn at Maeshowe with a passage that would let the winter solstice sun shine through and illuminate the opposite wall. They knew that in the dark of the far north, on mainland Orkney, they had reached the turning point at the shortest day of the year.
I get a bit chilly going to the heated supermarket in my heated car at this time of year. Ignoring the fact that I would not, as a neolithic woman, have lived to my current age, quite how I would have got through the winter with only firelight, with only dried food and berries, without my comfortable bed and most of all without really thick knickers and a nice long vest, I do not know.
No wonder they used some of the food stores to feast and a big yule log to keep warm. No wonder they celebrated when they knew for certain that they had reached the turning point.
It is certain knowledge you seldom possess. There have been many times in my life when I would have been so glad to know I had reached a point at which things were going to start to get better. Horrible times such as the fag end of caring for someone who is on the way out. Times of desperately mourning the loss of a relative or friend. Times such as possible recovery from cancer, times when you think your arm with the new metal in it actually is going to work again. In my experience you never get the memo telling you it’s over and that you can relax, you just set your teeth and plough on.
The neolithic builders who put certainty into their dark, cold world were very wise. In the dark of the year they could look to the light.
I only have four rooms to bottom out and the Christmas food to fetch tomorrow. When I have done that I might put the decorations up and then I have to do some present wrapping.
I shall keep reminding myself that it can’t possibly be as bad as dragging a yule log across the tundra, making a twig hut for your penguins, or sticking your last tooth gingerly into the edge of a dried haddock.
Yes I could start preparations in September but that’s Miniatura; and I could have done without a holiday in October, I managed for seventeen years without one. I did once do all the cards at the end of the summer and I did on a couple of occasions do all the present shopping early in the summer sales.
If you do it all too early, it’s just wrong.
The most Christmassy I have ever felt was either, when I was younger, waiting for a bus in the snow with my arms full of presents and, more recently, driving back from shopping for food somewhere special, knowing I had lovely things for everyone.
I’m not sure why we have Father Christmas, Mother Christmas would be more accurate.
I could, of course just not bother. I could sit in increasing squalor and dropped peanuts watching rubbish on TV. If I did that there would be no celebration, and we might even have enough money and food to last through January.
But you don’t have to live up in Orkney, to be joyful that, once more, the light will conquer the dark and that there will be a future and that there will be good things in it.
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