Motherload

Christmas seems to me the most preposterous process of emotional line-drawing and dread.  'Advent' turns out not to mean anticipating the coming of the Lord — or even Father Christmas. Or rather the true meaning of 'anticipation' is searching nightly through the contents of your soul, memory and wallet for a full month, while trying to hold down a job, and cope with everyone else's unfiltered greed (if they are children) or unmitigated disappointment (if they are adults).  All through December I feel I am wading through the treacle of my own and everyone else's expectations and anxieties. I am measuring myself up, working out what didn't get done, what I hoped would happen and didn't, combing back over the year in a cloud of sadness for time lost, and by extension, sifting through all the previous years, now gone for ever. We are all working and living a kind of double time, trying to fit in everyone else's activities (aka hopes and dreams), h...

Now, I can hardly complain about Christmas. My former chef husband always cooks an incredible turkey and I baste in his glory. I have been able to leave my mother's warm embrace and step into the brawny waiting arms of a Christmas chef. I have never actually prepared the beast. Even when we lived in Australia — and still ate turkey in 40 degree heat, natch — it was broiled on the Weber by my father-in-law. The day itself is a piece of cake for me, compared with the stress it must cause many people, and those mainly female. I can remember my mother trotting for years between kitchen and sitting room, under the irritable watery eye of my father, trying to cook and Be There while the presents were opened. Her black patent leather shoes, with the gold buckle and a little heel, were firmly on; a gin and tonic was permanently in hand; she sported a smart red A-line skirt under an apron and a film of worry. Strange how silence is golden when it comes to the magical preparation of the ...