Annabel Langbein
Christmas isn’t a contest, it’s about being together ... and having a few treats
When I was growing up, Christmas was a really big deal in our family. My parents were very social and had a wide group of friends, both in New Zealand and abroad. My mother would spend weeks baking and making treats for friends and neighbours, making the tree pretty, and filling the house with Christmas decorations.
Every year the folded strips of crepe paper would come out of the Christmas box and be hung in long lines from the picture rails around the walls. By the time we got to Christmas there would be hundreds of cards floating down the walls on colourful crepe ribbons. All cards received were carefully marked off in the Christmas notebook. If a card didn’t come in from someone they were expecting, there would be a debate — people didn’t tend to get divorced much in those days, so if they didn’t write it usually meant they had died. The name was gently crossed out of the book, with the date.
Christmas Day was one long feast, starting with a full cooked breakfast, moving on to neighbourly elevenses with Christmas mince pies and then a long, late, excessive Christmas lunch — the whole stuffed turkey, gravy and every vegetable known to mankind hoop-la. Pudding came in layers: berries and pavs and meringues; Christmas puddings and chocolates, cherries and nuts. At the end we would stumble, catatonic, from the table to sleep until the next round of eating later in the evening.
From stoic Irish farming stock, my husband’s family could not have been more different. Christmas was the day you got a half-day off.
I turned up at the home of my in-lawsto-be for the first time full of excitement, laden with treats and gifts. There was no sign of anything Christmassy — no tree, no decorations, no sign of any presents.
“Lasagne’s nearly ready,” my sister-inlaw-to-be called from the kitchen. I sat for a long time in the bathroom, sobbing with homesickness.
Many years later, in the very sad year of my own lovely mother’s dying, she insisted we have Christmas dinner at home with her. “I’d love to cook Christmas dinner,” I said. “No,” she mumbled (she could hardly talk at this stage). “No.” I had to lean forward to understand. “No, I’ve got a lasagne in the freezer.” And so it was. Lasagne for Christmas dinner. My husband could not have been happier — I had been banging on about that Christmas lasagne with his family for a couple of decades.
What I realised, that last Christmas with my darling mother, is that it doesn’t actually matter what you eat and it’s really easy to make yourself miserable by setting the bar too high.
Christmas is really just about being together and making little treats to make people feel special. This week I share some ideas for little gifts that show you care.