Digested week: Dismantling my tree left me haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past
As we age, some things fade, while others take on greater significance. It’s a line that sounds lifted from a Call the Midwife voiceover, but as the new year begins, it also strikes me as true. For the first time this year, I’m aware of a shift in emphasis, from Christmas Day itself – a pain of logistics and expectation management – to the period directly afterwards. Specifically, an occasion that before now I’ve never felt to be any such thing: the taking down of the tree.
I bought our tree three years ago from Bed Bath & Beyond. It was $39.99 and came loaded with the kind of lights that, twinkling magically and extremely brightly, caused me to blurt out “bad wiring” and “house fire” every time I walked past. On Sunday night, while my children pottered around engaged with their new presents, I started slowly to remove the ornaments. I untangled the tinsel. I removed the listing star. As I did so, I caught myself in one of those unnerving moments in which you can feel time as an almost material property. For a second, I saw the scene as through a telescope backwards. How much longer would the magic of Christmas hold? How soon would this stage of childhood evaporate? How definitive the dismantling of a large object in my living room felt, the physical manifestation of another year passing.
Some of this nostalgia was down to the decorations. We lean heavily on the homemade: the wonky angel from nursery school, already an echo of a distant past, along with the loo roll penguin and the glitter art. Six days after Christmas,
my children turned seven – as a friend in Paris pointed out, the beginning of the age of reason. Six seemed to be running on the last vapours of toddlerhood. Seven is a different proposition entirely.
With the care of one handling the crown jewels, I laid the decorations in Tupperware and covered them in tissue. “Why do you look like that?” said a child, crossly. God forbid anyone should have a moment of internal privacy in this house.
“It’s my thinking face,” I snapped. On we go.
Tuesday
Climbing into a cab in the pouring rain, in the middle of Broadway with a bus behind us, is a stressful business without my kids operating at quarter speed. “Hurry up, you guys are so slow,” I say, as they ease their way into the car and I continue to stand in the traffic.
“That’s so mean!” says my daughter, when we’re finally in. “You tipped my bucket.”
Are you aware of this? The bucket philosophy of childhood emotional welfare? It’s a thing. In schools in the US, or at least in our corner of New York, emotions are buckets. Or wait. The child is the bucket and you, the adult, are responsible for filling or tipping it. That could be wrong.
“Explain the bucket thing to me again?” I say. She gives me a look of disdain, like I could study this for the rest of my life and still never grasp it. When children do well at at school, they are issued “bucket tickets”, like the gold stars of yore but with a prize at the end and an extra level of frisson because buckets can also be emptied.
“You called me slow and that’s mean and it tipped my bucket,” she says. But I’m not wearing this one. “It would only be mean if you were incapable of going faster,” I say. “Are you saying you are literally incapable of going any faster when I ask you to?”
Yes. That’s exactly what saying.
Wednesday
she’s
What a gift on a gloomy Wednesday
is Novak Djokovic, not merely barred from the Australian Open, but barred after taking an 18-hour flight from Dubai, then held overnight at Melbourne airport. Never mind that his treatment was a result of a dithering U-turn by the Australian government. It looked, for all the world, like a piece of top-class trolling and correspondents on Australian TV could hardly contain their delight. A day earlier, the Serbian world No 1 and vaccine-sceptic had smugly tweeted “today I’m heading Down Under with an exemption permission” – that is, special dispensation to enter Australia and play in the Open, despite being unvaccinated, and causing sufficient fury among Australians for Scott Morrison to jump. At the 11th hour, the country’s border force cancelled Djokovic’s visa and after keeping him in the airport, moved him to another venue. Or as his mother, speaking at a press conference in Belgrade and ably demonstrating where her son gets his charm, summarised the week’s events, Australia was “keeping him a prisoner” in “some small immigration hotel”.
Thursday
The new mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has been showing off since his inauguration five days ago, culminating in the moment mid-week when he slides down a firefighter’s pole in Queens. (One tries to imagine Bill de Blasio doing this and concludes it would be worse than that scene from the first Bridget Jones.) Hard on the heels of the pole slide, Adams displays a strapped finger at a press conference, which when questioned about he says is an injury sustained after shaking a police officer’s hand too vigorously.
Adams, an eccentric figure who was busted before Christmas for abandoning his car in the middle of the street, to emerge from his house hours later and coolly drive up the pavement in avoidance of the traffic chaos he himself had caused, suddenly seems a delightful prospect for the next four years, with a pinch of that old Ed Koch showmanship. He certainly knows how to spin a line. Stand by, in coming weeks, for Adams to throw his back out bowing his head at the 9/11 memorial, get laryngitis from over-reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and wear an RSI wrist guard after too-enthusiastically saluting the flag.
Friday
The weather in New York is bananas. It was 15C last weekend for new year; mid-week it dipped to -5. Today there’s snow. I drive through it to a garage to return a rental car. Renting a car in the city can cost more than staying in a hotel, with an invoice full of add-ons that make less sense than a cable bill. Through incompetence, impatience and an inability to decode the fine print, I manage to gift the rental firm half a tank of petrol. This happens every time. It’s really tipping my bucket.