Ghost of Christmas past

This title has been floating around my mind for a few weeks. Like a lot of people I love Charles Dickens’ story, ‘A Christmas Carol’ and his delightful character, Mr Scrooge, a long time favourite of mine. I recently discovered a movie, ‘The man who invented Christmas,’ a fictional movie about how Charles wrote the story. It’s on my ‘favourite five movies of all time’ list. 

I will admit to a tendency to secretly view people as ‘Scrooge-like’ if they don’t enjoy Christmas. I love Christmas. It’s a time to show how much we love our family and friends and to hold dear all those we love. 

Yes, I know — we ‘should’ do this all year but, let’s be honest, it would be exhausting and we’d get over it pretty quickly. Not to mention I’d start singing ‘The……. sun will come out, tomorrow…’ and we’d all be groaning. There’s only so much ‘Pollyanna positivity’ anyone can take.

Yes, I know it’s a hard time for some and I respect that…

Yes, I know the world’s a mess and we’re all going to die one day…

Don’t get me wrong, I can be as scrooge-like as the next person about all the commercial lunacy and the ridiculous shopping. I don’t love all the hype and the spending and the traffic and the crazy-makers. ‘Jingle bells backwards!’ No, you can keep all the silliness. 

It’s everything else I love. The smell of pine trees, magical twinkling fairy lights, silly dog costumes, dopey Christmas t-shirts, sweet home made presents and sentimental Christmas movies.

I usually have Mariah Carey’s Christmas album far too loud on loop as I decorate the tree. Not this year.

This year as I decorated our tree, a living tree in a pot which doesn’t fit too many decos, (I’m not sure it likes the lights much either) I was inevitably reminiscing, over each bauble and funky ornament, remembering the ghosts of Christmas past.

Yes, of course it made me cry. It always does. The tears reminded me that this would be my first Christmas without my mum.

I thought about Christmas when I was a child. Practicing carols at the piano, decorating the tree with paper chains made by my brother and sister and me. Dad working hard to get the Christmas lights to go, with the dog trying to help. The muttered swearing when his frustration level increased as he tried to find the one ‘bloody’ light that had blown and the huge cheer we all gave when he fixed it. The brightly wrapped presents under the tree. Secretly shaking them to see if they rattled and trying to guess what treasure lay within. Pressing our noses to the icy windows waiting for the first snowflake to fall. Going carolling around the neighbourhood wrapped up in warm coats, scarves and warm woollen mittens to brave the snow. Good King Wenceslas – with all the verses, Silent night, O come all ye faithful and any others we could do by heart.  Slipping and sliding on any ice we found, throwing snowballs and generally terrorising the neighbours. The ghosts of Christmas past.

 Her Christmas cake was jam packed with every kind of dried fruit and who knows how much brandy. I would sit at the kitchen table, where she worked, watching her create the magic. When the Christmas cake was mixed together mum would give us each a few stirs. Just for good luck. Everyone had to have three stirs, after all, we didn’t want bad luck for year.

The Christmas pudding was next. Silver sixpences were hidden in the mixture. Mum always threw in a few twelve-sided thrupenny bit’s so everyone had a chance to find a coin. What choking hazard? Were the coins sterilised? Aren’t thrupenny nickel and brass? Can you eat that? Then the pièce de resistance, the trifle. Mum would cut up the Swiss roll and place it in the bowl, slugs of brandy to give it a punch and raspberries galore to cover the cake. Then came the home made custard, not that powdered muck, then thick dollops of whipped cream, beaten by hand. Then I was allowed to open the tin of mandarins, the traditional mandos for decorating the top and absolutely no jelly anywhere. The ghosts of Christmas past. Our daughter carries on the trifle tradition now.

Yesterday was the anniversary of our family landing in Australia from the UK, November 18, 1963. It was a stinking hot summer. The university provided us with a temporary house, in Brighton, Victoria, while we looked for somewhere to live.¹ 

It was a beautiful old weather board home. A bungalow by UK standards. We had always lived in two story homes in the UK. That was the norm. This house was not my dad’s idea of a good family home. It wasn’t brick and it wasn’t two storey. Yes it was very close to the beach and yes it had a huge garden with well established fruit trees, but it was a bungalow. We eventually learned bungalows were the norm in Australia, even weatherboard. The university offered for us to buy the house very cheaply and dad immediately turned it down. He didn’t want some one storey ‘wooden’ house with a huge rambling garden so far from Monash University. He kicked himself for that decision for the rest of his life. Brighton is a very well to do area in Melbourne. It would be worth millions in today’s market.

That year, my brother and sister and I thought we’d died and gone to heaven. We ate so many plums, peaches, and apricots I ended up with hives. The beach was at the end of our road and it was so hot, that year, the tarmac footpaths were melting under our feet as we walked to the beach. We’d never seen anything like it. 

It was nearly Christmas and I was worried Santa wouldn’t know how to find us living on the upside down part of the world. My sister told me I was old enough to know why it didn’t matter anyway. Needless to say, it didn’t feel much like Christmas that year. I was given a toy koala made with real kangaroo fur and little black plastic claws. He wasn’t soft and cuddly like a teddy, more stuffed and stiff and a bit prickly with his little plastic claws. I felt sorry for the kangaroo who had died to make him so of course he became my best friend. I took him to bed with me every night for years. I still have him, held together with bandaids and love, tucked away in a box. I can’t throw him away, he knows all my secrets. 

Our first year, in the house my husband and I live in now, we bought a small pine tree in a pot, which we planted in the garden after Christmas. It’s now a massive tree at the bottom of the garden. Its quite lovely and always reminds me of our first year as newly weds, in our own home, in 1980.

In my experience, when someone dies, my mum and then my dear auntie, your mind is flooded with memories of them. The fun times, the laughter shared, the sadness, the joy, the regrets, all the experiences, all the little quirky things they said, all of it mixed up in your heart together like a big glamwch.² The memories swamped me and I ran out of steam.

The Welsh have a word for how I feel. My mum said it every Christmas after my dad died. I don’t have the ‘huille.’ ³

In English it’s like not enough ‘Oomph’ or maybe the Hebrew word, ‘hutzpah.’ It’s an energetic thing. I’m ok, it comes and goes. Grief is like that. I still love Christmas and I will find my ‘huille’ again. This year will be a quieter celebration and there’s not as many Christmas cards to send but my heart is filled with the memories of all the other Christmases. The ghosts of Christmas past, which are filled with love and laugher and so many prawns and so much pavlova, thank you Aussie Christmas. There has been much joy and much love shared over the years and my cup runneth over. 

I’d like to thank you for reading and for your comments this year. I am constantly amazed and encouraged by the connectedness I feel. What a strange world we live in. 

May you and yours be blessed this Christmas time as we gather to show one another the  depth and the meaning of love in all it’s wondrous glory. 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

1. I have mentioned this in previous posts that you may not have read. If you have, my apologies for the repetition.  ↩︎
2. Pronounced glam-ooch. Welsh for a messy bunch of stuff ↩︎
3. Pronounced: hoo-eel – sort of. It’s a bit like hiraeth which loosely means homesickness tinged with grief and sadness.  ↩︎