My family’s NO-GIFTS CHRISTMAS
INSTEAD OF BUYING MORE UNWANTED STUFF, KERRE IS SPREADING THE JOY ELSEWHERE
This Christmas, I’m being a grinch. Well, that’s not strictly true. I haven’t gone full grinch. We’re still having a Christmas dinner.
And I’ll probably dust the fireplace and put out the Nativity figurines, complete with the three-legged sheep, over the weekend. But there’ll be no tree this year.
My attempt to decorate the tree last year was an abject disaster. That was always a job for Kate from the time she was little and if she’s not here, it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t have her eye for balanced colour and design. It was looking pretty pathetic anyway but then when I attempted to drape the baubles and beads around it, it looked like it was being forcibly restrained in the corner of the room. A pine prisoner. So no. No tree this year.
Also for the very first time, no gifts for the family. Normally, I’m a complete nutter about presents. I love them and I love attempting to find the perfect gifts for my family members. I always used to fill a pillowcase at the end of Kate’s bed long after she was a child, this was a tradition she insisted be continued – and every year the tree was almost swamped with colourfully wrapped gifts. But not this year.
I cannot think of a single thing I want or need. I have all the rings, bracelets and earrings I want. I don’t need another handbag and there isn’t room in my wardrobe for another dress. I have a pile of books a mile high I want to read over summer and really, I’d rather the present money went towards our next trip to London to see baby Bart.
My husband is delighted. He found the present-buying frenzy a little much. I came out one year in the middle of the night to find him sitting on a chair in front of the tree, the lights twinkling and the floorboards straining under the weight of the boxes, shaking his head and muttering, “There’s so much – so much.” He was right.
It’s so hard after you’ve been together for so many years to come up with something meaningful. Mum just wants her holiday in the Hokianga, so she gets a week with us up north and then her airfare home. As for my little London family, they’ve just spent six weeks here and have been lavished with gifts. They don’t want anything and they too would prefer the present money went into a travel fund so that we can see them in the new year.
But although I won’t be buying presents for the family, I was able to indulge myself with somebody else’s. Every year, I sign up to the Salvation Army’s Adopt a Family, where you’re given the first name and the age of the children in the family, and the first name of the parent or parents or caregivers. It gives me so much joy. You never ever get to see your family – you just deliver the presents to the hard-working angels on earth who are the Sallys and they drop them off.
This year, I had two little girls and a solo dad, and I had a ball shopping for them. Scooters, LOL dolls, Smiggles supplies, dress-up costumes, books and all sorts of stuff I hope a fourand five-year-old will love.
It is so much fun and I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to spoil somebody else’s kids given I didn’t have enough myself. I was a struggling single mum myself back in the day and I know it could just as easily have been me who needed a bit of help at Christmas.
‘And every year the tree was almost swamped with colourfully wrapped gifts. But not this year’