Christmas is not a perfect art so relax and accept the madness
CHRISTMAS, ah, that time of year when relationships are pushed to their absolute limit and enough is never, ever enough. The time of year when the bar is set so high that nobody, at least nobody foolhardy enough to aim for perfection - can expect to get there, wherever there is. Smyths most likely, but then you’ve failed to take the children to Lapland or failed to do what your perfect parent colleague has done, or, or. I could go on.
Christmas was once about having enough saved up for a nice meal and a few bottles of porter in the fridge, a bottle of Nash red lemonade on the go and a bottle of Blue Nun for Mam, with a few boxes of Roses or Quality Street in the shopping trolley too. It was calling around to the aunts and uncles and cousins, and over to your friends to see what Santy brought.
Today people are checking security cameras when someone calls around unexpectedly. How times have changed, and this extends to how families celebrate Christmas also. For separated families the stress can become multiplied very easily.
Communication, often restricted through courts, mediation, the usual, is the main problem. Luckily for me and the children’s mother, we communicate well for the most part. If mediation taught us anything it’s that arguments are normal, whether they are in couples united or separated.
At this time of year, when we are sur- rounded by ads showing perfect two plus two families, in warm familial surrounds, it can make the season to be jolly a real bummer.
Added to ancillary things like the way some married acquaintances think your separation status is an illness that’s contagious, along with all the insecure prattle that a separation can invite in a conservative country like our own, things can get on top of you and I say this from experience.
Combined with often terrible customer service in large multiples and condescending, thoughtless comments like: ‘Is it only the three of ye today,’ it all can add up to a stressful experience.
It can be easy to judge and to cast aspersions on people.
But what has anybody ever gained from judging someone else, I ask you?
Lately I’ve been noticing how people, time poor and also pocket poor also, are only communicating by the occasional like on Facebook or through a quickly worded, abbreviated text or WhatsApp message. It’s easy, yes, but what’s easy usually carries little meaning. The reality is this is a difficult time of year for lots of people. The Good Mother added to our shopping stress recently by suggesting Santy bring The Little Fella a teddy bear swing instead of a swing. Have you ever heard of such an item. If so PLEASE email Santa!
Life is a leveller. In the estate where I live a neighbour who is a great young guy, always willing to kick ball and play games with my two, is fighting cancer. When I heard he’d be spending Christmas in a hospital ward, I felt the trifling worries I had fall away.
The Little Fella enquired about him a few days later. When I told him where his friend would be on Christmas Day, he immediately said: ‘Daddy can we go and sing songs for him in hospital on Christmas Day.’