There is no greater sorrow / than to recall a happy time / when miserable.
Dante
Whenever I think of Christmas, I often think of Return of the Jedi.
Long before on-demand streaming and the tyranny of Disney Plus, Return of the Jedi was one of those quintessential films that only ever seemed to be broadcast at Christmas. Whenever I think of Return of the Jedi, I think specifically of that scene early in the movie when a hooded Luke Skywalker arrives at Jabba’s palace to retrieve the carbonated body of his friend Han Solo. I think of him entering the palace, with his black cloak and shrouded face. I think of the heavy metal door sliding slowly down behind him, killing the light. I think of Luke disabling Jabba’s Gamorrean guards with a single movement of the hands, without even touching them: the way of the Jedi. And I think of the message which flashes briefly at the bottom of the screen.
‘Christmas Care Line’.
‘Christmas Care Line’. It took me a long time to work out what it was: a helpline for those on their own at Christmas. A number people could call and speak their sorrow. Share their pain. ‘Christmas Care Line.’ A lifeline for the isolated, lonely or depressed. The suicidal. The afraid.
Watching Luke making his way into the dark tunnels of Jabba’s palace, I couldn’t really understand why anyone would feel any of those things at Christmas. Why would you feel depressed at Christmas? Surely it was the most wonderful time of the year.
*
Growing up, Christmas was as much about TV films as it was family. If family were a constant, irksome presence, TV films were exciting, new and fleeting. Blink and you’d miss them. As a young adolescent just coming into cultural consciousness, Christmas for me meant a densely packed TV schedule of new cinematic discoveries. To begin with this meant festive staples like Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then later more adult fare like Trading Places, 48 Hours or The Outlaw Josey Wales. Films I could surreptitiously record and watch once the year’s festivities were done and dusted.
For children of the 80s and 90s, home recording was a tangible phenomenon. Once you recorded the film, with all the ITV ad breaks or scheduled news bulletins that you needed to fast forward through, somehow you took ownership of it, put your handwriting on the label on the cassette’s spine, and thereafter the tape and film and the stories it contained became yours, as familiar as the memory of that year’s festive celebrations.
I still have a collection of recorded films, gathering dust in a box in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I should throw them away, as I’m no longer able to watch them, but for whatever reason I’ve kept them - hoping that at some point I’ll be able to watch them again, and journey once more through Christmases past.
*
It’s difficult to say when I first started to feel depressed at Christmas.
Perhaps it was sometime in late adolescence: being introverted and insecure; very much over the whole Santa mythos, but not old enough to know, nor understand, the twinkling festival of commerce and excessive booze consumption that carries us into adulthood.
Or maybe it was later, being young and single and London-based, when returning home for Christmas to spend time with extended family and my parents’ friends served as an annual reminder of my social and sexual failings.
Yes, life in London is as exciting as I’d hoped, thanks; the job is going well, kind of you to ask; no, I haven’t got a girlfriend yet, but still live in hope, thank you, thank you very much.
*
Unpacking Christmas memories in my forty-first year: like reaching into a bottomless stocking.
Four years old, the first tangible Christmas memory. My parents give me Castle Greyskull from the TV show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The programme that terrifies me and gives me what I believe to be my first proper nightmare. But the plastic has a beguiling smell. Like Battlecat’s coat. He-Man’s straining muscles and grimacing face.
Aged seven or eight. The first sleepless Christmas Eve. Creeping downstairs and sent back to bed at 2am, 4am and 6am.
Christmas Eve, aged ten. Sat by the fire to watch The Wolves of Willoughby Chase while the alarum call of Carols from Kings rings out from the kitchen, where my mother is preparing the turkey. Later that night my mother gives me medicine to help me sleep, and I throw up over her hands.
Aged fifteen, recording Delia’s Christmas on BBC 2. For the next three years, until I leave for university, watching it in November becomes a kind of pre-Christmas tradition for my brother and me.
Accompanying my mother to choose the Christmas tree from the local garden centre, and helping her to decorate it when we got home.
Working in the French Alps the winter after university, my Christmas away from home. Phoning home on Christmas Day and hearing my mother weeping through the receiver.
And this year, a year unlike any other, while my wife was putting our children to bed, two days before Christmas, sitting beside the fire and sobbing.
*
Christmas this year has been hard because of Covid. And I know I’m fortunate. I have two lovely children, a loving wife, and I come from a safe, stable and largely loving home environment. My mother always made a big fuss over Christmas – birthdays were more muted affairs – and my brother and me were, in truth, royally spoiled. Not opulently, but more a parsimoniously acquired abundance: hard won through hard work. At Christmas there were so many presents for us kids my mother didn’t bother to wrap them, just placed them - delicately - in a chair. Dukes of Hazzard, He-Man, Star Wars, Transformers, Thundercats, Ninja Turtles: the imaginative realm of my childhood owed almost everything to my mother’s munificence at Christmas.
Later, some time after the toys had been liberated from their packaging, my extended family would gather at my parents’. Four generations sequestered in one room, the room always saved for best, now filled with exuberant conversation and, above all, generous amounts of food and drink. Turkey sandwiches piled high, a pristine cake and a huge sherry trifle, fistfuls of crisps and Quality Streets. For a young boy it was, absolutely, the most wonderful time of the year.
This picture endured, despite the loss of elderly relatives and fraying relationships, for many years. Those who departed were replaced with friends and neighbours, as my parents moved from one home to another, eventually to the house where my father still lives – and where I spent a good chunk of my early Twenties mooching around, smoking dope and mulling my options. Christmases then were more fraught – I always felt that I had to make good my enduring presence – but not depressing in the way they are now.
At least, not for me.
*
It is highly likely that my mother suffered from depression – particularly after my brother and I left home for university, but almost certainly before. Undiagnosed, undiscussed depression, but the signs – mood swings, introversion, awkwardness in large groups – are all there. On paper my mother had much to be happy about, but she found it hard to smile. Even around us, our family, she found it hard to smile.
Looking back, Christmas for my mother was both a trigger and catharsis for her bipolar nature, prompting a frantic burst of activity in the lead in, followed by physical and psychic collapse in January’s dark days. She always found January hard. We all did. As she suffered, so did we.
The last Christmas we had when my mother was well – the year before she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour caused by lymphoma – was a catastrophic debacle of shouting and swearing and snapping at everyone. A familiar picture for many on Christmas Day perhaps, and others have it far worse, but that day the point of crisis was reached when my mother dropped scalding turkey fat onto her foot – and refused, of course, to leave the kitchen and let someone else take over, much less help out. She had invested so much in her perfect Christmas over the years, and this year was particularly important as it was the first with her new grandson.
What were the chances that it would also be the year everything fell apart?
*
That was the last ‘good’ Christmas we all had together. Things have fragmented considerably since then. I moved from London to Scotland for a fresh start with my family – away from my parents but closer to my wife’s. My mother’s brain tumour came back, she survived a second round of treatment but with significant brain damage. She no longer lives with my father but with my grandmother, where the two of them receive round the clock care. With my children I visit them as frequently as possible, but they have no relationship with my mother. Not a meaningful one, anyway. She’s Strange Granny who sits in her chair and stares. And now they have another Strange Granny: my wife’s mother was diagnosed with dementia not long after we arrived in Scotland. Her decline – more terminal than that of my mother - has been shockingly swift.
*
Last Christmas, my brother said that our family doesn’t feel like our family anymore.
*
In my memories, my mother is ever-present at Christmas, despite her absence. My father more peripheral. A stoker of fires and pourer of drinks, who regularly worked on Christmas Eve – and in later years could be relied upon to find a last-minute odd job for me to help with – and yet I miss him, too, for all his peripherality.
Come Advent, my father and his Round Table pals used to drive around the estates of my hometown with a trailer converted into a ‘sleigh’ – using a bit of painted chipboard and some fairy lights attached to a generator, which also powered a ghetto blaster to play Christmas tunes – with ‘Father Christmas’ – some frozen Tabler – perched on a bench at the rear, waving to sleepy pre-schoolers, while everyone else went door to door collecting money. (My father always dodged this as – being a builder – he was one of the rare owners of a car with a tow bar. Plus, he didn’t particularly like other people’s kids.) As I grew older I would often go with them, helping with the charity collection, pilfering boiled sweets from the trailer, feeling festive and altruistic. Outside of Christmas Day with my family, these are my probably my happiest Christmas memories: being part of an adult world, yet still a child.
Or perhaps, I miss the possibility of enjoying another Christmas with both parents being fit and well, with fewer of the fraught interactions that characterise visits now; Christmases that my children will never know.
*
Christmas for my children is very different to how my Christmases were as a child. My wife always says that they won’t know any different. I’m not so sure. After becoming a father I had hoped that I’d be able to take the baton from my mother and lighten her load, become the host at Christmas. Restore those rooms of laughter and life. That hasn’t happened, and now when we spend Christmas at my grandmother’s house, with my disinterested and slightly disorientated children in tow, it is with a sense of guilt that I have abandoned, yes, my family but particularly my mother, taken myself to an unreachable part of the country where I can have my own life without having to deal with the reality of hers.
And now my wife’s mother has dementia. And there is another life to observe unravelling slowly, painfully.
*
I miss my mother. My mother as she was.
*
Nostalgia, wrote Milan Kundera, is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
So, is my desire to return to Christmases of old a sign of latent desire to return to my youth? Is my mourning for my mother something more psychoanalytical? Or is my desire a return to what I perceive to be the perfect Christmas guided by marketing consultancies, underpinned by long-established Christmas tropes? Roast turkey, Midnight Mass, Old St Nick, The Poseidon Adventure etc.
Temporality is critical to the Christmas narrative: the sense that we are constantly moving towards it - thanks to Advent calendars, marketing campaigns, the school calendar etc - while having no control over it. Its annual recurrence also gives us the feeling that we are moving further away from something (youth, joy, perfection) and closer to something else (infirmity, misery, catastrophe).
Meanwhile, in the halls and rooms of our mind, we are back in the past.
As a child I used to get so excited about the annual visit from Father Christmas that I would become physically ill in the lead up, and, like most children, unable to sleep on Christmas Eve. Then, one year, I accidentally found my mother’s stash of presents sometime in mid-December. I say accidentally, but it was pretty purposeful. There had been, as I remember, a fair amount of playground chat about Santa not existing that year. Once home, I went hunting.
Once the Santa-myth had been dispelled, for me and my brother finding our presents became an annual treasure hunt – a prelude to Christmas Day’s dopamine rush, the first taste of something illicit. Mum caught me once and thrashed me for it, threatened to take everything back. The next year she hid them somewhere else, but I still found them, drawn by the thrill of the hunt, the pull of addiction.
*
The pull of addiction. For a number of years prior I had been self-medicating with certain substances, and that always peaked over the festive period. Everyone else was buzzed on boozed anyway, so what did it matter if I took a little something. Something I’d earned after another difficult year in a job I despised. By then, I needed it to get through Christmas with my family. The drinking, the bickering, the boredom, the depression. That year was no different. So while my mother struggled with her increasing derangement, I offered little assistance, revelled in her ridiculousness and mocked her when her temper frayed. I regret it. But that’s just how our relationship was back then. Perhaps I wasn’t the son she’d hoped for. Every Christmas I hoped things would be different by the time the next one swung around. And then they were.
By my thirties, the certainties and anticipation of family-focused Christmases had given way to something darker: office parties, lap-dancing, heavy drinking, cocaine. Now when I hear the words ‘White Christmas’, it’s not Bing Crosby that springs to mind (although the video of Bing and mid-recovery Bowie crooning ‘Little Drummer Boy’ in 1977 always raises a wry smile).
The further into adulthood we travel – with its conflicts, compromises and nostalgic yearnings – the greater the distance to these early childhood encounters with joy, goodwill and generosity. Little wonder that most of the pop songs about Christmas are so fucking miserable – framed by absence, betrayal, sorrow, regret or loss. Every Christmas is / could be / might as well be our Last Christmas. For Christmas depressives, it heightens the yearning, deepens the gloom.
*
Looking back, I was always nostalgic about Christmas. Even watching those beloved videotapes, that curated nascent film collection, was always tinged with sorrow when the Christmas adverts came on during the summer. And the further I travelled from the time of that recording, the greater my nostalgia. The deeper the sorrow. Looking back, perhaps that was when it started.
*
It is impossible to restore the past. To come to terms with it, we are told, we must to confront it, accept it, reconcile ourselves to it – or at the very least, push it from the forefront of our minds and move on. Too often, my feeling towards the past is one of coddling, or tip-toeing around it. Perhaps this is why being depressed around Christmas is such a common experience. The very act of trying not to think about something involves having to think about it. To compartmentalise. And that becomes part of the depressive’s conundrum: how to not think about something when it’s constantly intruding on your consciousness for almost a quarter of the year. A sadness that turns each passing Christmas a deeper shade of blue. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the difficulty. My only hope is that I can give my children something of the Christmases I knew once: a present to outlast the ungovernable past.
*
A photograph of me, aged four or five, with my mother on the floral sofa of our old house on Elworth Street. Tucked in the corner behind us, a fake Christmas tree. I am playing with something in what are presumably my smartest clothes. My younger brother’s new Fisher Price kitchen set is at my feet, which would suggest it is either Christmas Day or Boxing Day. My father is taking the picture. The chair beside us is empty. My mother’s gaze is elsewhere. Disinterested. Distracted. Watching TV perhaps. In the next photograph my brother has joined us. I have no memory of the photograph being taken. I barely remember being in that room. It is a foreign place now. It belongs to people and a way of life which is no longer with us.
*
One more memory. Making mince pies with my mother at our house in London. One of the Christmases when she was in remission, I forget which. Changed but not irrevocably. Still Mum. And still that promise of a Christmas to come.