“Getting stressed at Christmas is for sissies”

THERE’S nothing like a bit of death’s door to file the point on a Christmas memory and keep its edges sharp.

On December 13, 1992, after the delivery of my third child, a whopping haemorrhage kept me pinned to a hospital bed for a week and to my own bed for a further week, on strict doctor’s orders. In the history of Holles Street I doubt there was ever a patient more compliant in obeying these orders than me (a week of bed-rest during the run-up to Christmas. What’s not to love?)

Christmas 1992 saw me cocooned in an oxytocin bubble upstairs at home, marvelling at my early Christmas gift of a quiet-as-a-mouse baby girl in a state of unprecedented calm, wondering whether the doctors had main-lined some sort of serenity drug in with the blood transfusion. Downstairs I could hear my sons shifting Christmas into high gear. I felt deep, warm affection towards my low haemoglobin for allowing me to experience the run up to Christmas at one remove.

“This week’ll be hideous,” I said to my husband. “It’s a two-man job and I haven’t even started the…” My husband cut me short with something like “Christmas. Nothing to it, getting stressed at Christmas is for sissies, it’s only a souped-up roast dinner and a few presents. Why do people get so worked up? And the shopping’s not that bad, it’s only shopping. It’s fine.”

A stout philosophy, with only one snag: it operates on the same principle that governs a coconut in a coconut shy; throw something at it hard and eventually you’ll conk it sideways.

Early December, the ‘Christmas, nothing to it’ philosophy stands firm — after all the most it’s had thrown at this stage is a bit of fairy-light sparkle and festive browsing — but come the 24th, the philosophy has had one knock too many.

By this time I’ve spent weeks flogging the shopping aisles to death, the usual contents of my brain have been sluiced out entirely and the vacuum filled to bursting point with chestnut purée, bacon and cloves, sickening images of Nigella in a saucy red cardie, lady’s fingers for the trifle and breadcrumbs, panic surrounding the dates of crucial arrivals from Amazon upon which your children’s happiness hinges, duck fat and crackers, observations regarding Christmas magic and how it is UTTERLY absent in Penney’s queues, scissors and sellotape, sporadic worries about my nerves which feel as fragile as glass baubles, tin-foil and bitter thoughts about the idea of ‘keeping it simple,’ cranberries, sudden terror flares concerning items I can’t find, like lemons, a Dylan Moran DVD, nutmeg and a polka-dot bra from Marks. Traditionally, by Christmas Eve, the philosophy’s been conked.

In 1992, the pre-Christmas maelstrom passed me by. Christmas Eve night I sat in bed, wrapping a small emporium of gifts and felt the magic. At 11pm I came downstairs on legs that felt as weak as a colt’s and placed the presents under the tree. My sons had decorated the tree themselves; the bottom branches gilded with bunched up fairy lights and spangles, the top branches bereft. Stockings hung on the mantelpiece. All was calm. All was bright.

My daughter and my sons were asleep. Christmas Eve on mute, I thought, as my husband handed me a glass of hot port and sat down next to me.

“It’s lovely in here,” I said, “so...”

“I don’t know how that new bloody oven works,” he interrupted. “It’s electric and it’s in degrees farenheit… and I’m worried about timing the turkey tomorrow.” Biting his thumbnail he said “Is 16 pounds big enough? How many of us are there all together and what time are they coming again?”

He wasn’t quite giving off my high mosquito whine of irritation but he was getting close. He darted into the kitchen. “And that ham,” he called. “I think I’m going to have to cook it in two halves — we don’t have a pan big enough — and I’ve still got to wrap your present and I can’t find the scissors anywhere…”

As I made my way upstairs, I looked in on the kitchen, an apocalypse of baking trays, flour and turkey giblets. My husband was slumped against the sink, chewing his cuticle.

“I should really do the stuffings tonight,” he said bleakly.

I kept moving. I didn’t have the heart to ask him how his ‘Christmas, nothing to it’ philosophy was holding up, not when the un-made stuffings had just conked it.