Have yourself a very selfish Christmas

Michelle Thomason - 4 Dec 14

This year I will be having a very selfish Christmas. Instead of the military precision operation of bundling two small children and all their festive accoutrements into a car for a 12 hour round trip and a tick box whistle stop tour of the family, we are … breathe … spending Christmas at home with no house guests. That’s right. No one, just me, my husband and our two kids. Oh, and Santa, of course, he can still come. As long as he doesn’t make a sooty mess.

Now I’ve got my own home and my little family unit, and my own chimney, I want to create our own festive template. While my kids are young, I want them to experience the fluttery anticipation of Christmas eve, to wake up in their own bed and rifle through their stockings, to stumble downstairs and marvel at the assortment of shapes lying jumbled around the tree before tearing off the garishly patterned paper. Just like I did when I was little.

My parents jealously guarded the sanctity of Christmas for me. Every Christmas was a magical event. From decorating the tree to the last green triangle in the Quality Street tub; every part of the whole counted. The magic never really stopped, it just got diluted. I got older and my Christmas collided with other people’s Christmases; time got more precious and spread more thinly as I started to try and keep everyone happy. I spent years beetling up and down the motorway between houses at Christmas. One year, I finished work late on Christmas eve, drove 200 miles to my parents’ house, opened some presents, shoveled down some Christmas dinner, only to then drive back to work again on Boxing Day.

My first experience of a selfish Christmas was our honeymoon. Having married the week before Christmas, we, by luck or design, sideways swerved the difficult question of which in-laws to visit. Instead, we spent Christmas day in a Moroccan Riadh, spending the day by the pool and the night drinking cocktails by an open fire. On Boxing Day, we toured the snow-capped Atlas Mountains in a 4×4. It felt wonderful, liberating, but just a little bit weird that our respective families were at home getting on with the business of Christmas without us.

Once you have children, though, families are meshed together in a new way. After the birth of my son five years ago, Christmas took on a different cloak. The focal point shifted from us to the kids. We spent the first few years, after having kids, intricately planning our Christmas travel arrangements, ending up with a boot full of stuff ready for a nuclear attack. Our families wanted to see us, we wanted to see them, we had a lovely time, but we ended up back in our own house just after New Year, exhausted and sluggish from too many late nights, too much overindulgence and too many driving hours notched up. The kids were crotchety and overwrought from being out of their routine. We wanted to please everybody and we wanted to spend time with family, but we ended up with mix and match pieces of everybody else’s Christmas., in everybody else’s homes.

One genius friend has got it just right. She brings Christmas forward by a day so that she and her kids get to do what they want in exactly the way they want to, creating their own little rituals before they go and spend the actual day itself with the rest of their family at their houses. But she appears to be in the minority. Most of my friends don’t live where they grew up, have married or had kids with partners who also don’t live where they grew up. Families are scattered across the country often hundreds of miles in the opposite direction from each other. They are busy people, they work long hours, and they often talk about their Christmas plans with a sense of heaviness that this is one extra burden to factor into their hectic lives.

I have one particular friend who this week told me she has a long term yuletide strategy which seems to span at least the next few years, and which involves an elaborate series of trade offs. She has carefully plotted alternate christmases at her and her partner’s respective parents’ houses to avoid conflict and to try and keep everybody happy. What stood out for me from this conversation was the total lack of her, her partner’s and her kids’ needs in all of this. When I pointed this out, she looked at me totally aghast, like it had never once occurred to her that his might be an option, and that I was suggesting something so daring and heretical that Santa and all his elves would arrive any second to quarter me using Rudolf and his reindeer buddies. Descending to a whisper, as if she didn’t want to expose my illicit thoughts to anyone else, she asked me how I was managing to spend my selfish Christmas without seeing the family. As I told her, she looked at me wide eyed and like I was mad, but I could see that little seed being planted in her mind.

It’s true, Christmas is about family, but so is the rest of the year. I suppose if my husband and I didn’t prioritise our families the rest of the year then I might be feeling uncomfortable about not seeing them over the Christmas period, but we do. Family is important to us, to our kids, and we never let that slip. We’re also very lucky to have the kind of sensible families who understand this too. We’ve got my in laws staying with us this weekend, we’ll be driving 250 miles next weekend for a family birthday, other family members will be coming to see us the following week and then we’ll be returning up north some time in January once the Christmas madness has abated. We’ve got the family thing covered.

I’m not saying we will never spend Christmas with family again, of course we will, but for this year, we will be making our own rules. I don’t know quite what those will be yet but it will be fun carving out our own little family rituals.

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Michelle Thomason

Michelle Thomason is a mother of two and lives in London

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