The Harper swim: author Jane Harper's family tradition
Christmas is all about rituals, but creating new traditions is just as important. Award-winning author Jane Harper muses on how she will make the festive season special for her daughter.
Ileaned over my infant daughter, looked deep into her eyes and asked her what she would like most for Christmas. At 15-months old she can’t talk, but her little face lit up with feverish desire. I leaned closer, tuning into the baby babble and deciphering the determined flick of her gaze. I want to eat the tinsel, mummy.
As I heartlessly crushed my only child’s one Christmas wish, it seemed as good a time as any to consider what I did in fact want to give her at Christmas. Not in terms of presents – after the tinsel, top of her wishlist is her own personal bath plug, an item she covets ever more each day. Instead, I was thinking about “making memories”, as they say on social media.
If New Year is an opportunity to look forward, Christmas has always seemed a time to reflect. I am lucky enough to have a happy store of Christmas memories and traditions from my childhood, many of which I’ve attempted to recreate over the years with varying degrees of success. It’s those memories that make me love the season as much now as I did then.
But as my daughter continues to hopefully eye up the tinsel, I’m suddenly aware that her own Christmas memories will be the ones that I help make. Obviously, I hope to rise to the challenge, but the bar these days seems high. For every one of my good intentions, there are a dozen Facebook photos of friends’ daughters wearing intricate homemade snowflake tiaras and competitively icing the window awnings on their own gingerbread houses.
I decide to seek out tips from my parents who, in my mind at least, know how to do Christmas right. A 40-minute Skype session later, and I’m trying to find a polite way to cut them off, as the conversational tone turns more than a little judgemental.
“If you do just one thing, make sure presents for every kid in the house are exactly even, and not just in terms of cost. I’m talking surprise and funfactor, too,” my dad says, his voice tinged with a distinct note of bitter regret. “Because they notice, mark my words – don’t think for a second that they won’t. Get it wrong and the whole day is a complete hell. Do you remember the skateboard incident of 1989?”
My mum and I both nod. We do. “This is all great advice, really,”
I say when I can get a word in edgeways. “But I was thinking more of family traditions I could carry on.”
“Oh, we’ve got loads of those,” Mum says, counting them on her fingers. “It’s okay to eat chocolate at every meal, everyone has to wear a paper crown, except the person manning the barbecue ...”
I’m pretty sure she’s listing her own personal preferences rather than hard-and-fast traditions.
“Decorate the Christmas tree as a family,” my dad interjects. “And never get rid of any decorations, no matter how tatty they get. That junk becomes family heirlooms.” He was looking a little misty-eyed.
“And obviously,” my mum says, “there’s always the Christmas swim.”
Of course. The Harper family Christmas swim. I spent most childhood Christmases in Australia and most teenage ones in England – all involved the splash of salt water on my skin. The air temperature could be 40 degrees with the sand burning your feet, or zero with snow thick on the ground but for some reason, it wasn’t considered Christmas without a plunge in an ocean.
So ingrained is this tradition, that I actually attempted it last year in a baby-brained fog, when my daughter was just 12 weeks old and Christmas passed in a daze of nappies and broken nights. I remember us as enjoying it. The photos show me trying to dip her toes in the sea while she sensibly curls up her legs and screams until she looks like a boiled goblin. My husband had tried to warn me. But that’s the thing about traditions – Christmas isn’t Christmas without them.
Now, as I become the parent for the first time in this seasonal scenario, I realise that perhaps it’s worth taking a tip from the New Year’s crowd and look forward as well as back.
What traditions do I want to keep or scrap or create?
Santa? In. Real pine Christmas tree? In. Traditional fruit Christmas cake? Out, no-one eats it anyway. Handmade decorations? In, if I can face it. The Christmas swim? In, I think. Eating tinsel? Out, unfortunately. Sorry.
But if family traditions are really about coming together as a family, maybe I should ask my daughter, when she’s older, how exactly she would like to celebrate. Build some traditions together. Because as I become the parent, I realise my own Christmas wish, this year and for all the years ahead, will always be the same. Let her be happy.