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Champagne at the Savoy, a quiet night in with the cat

As she prepares for her first Christmas as a ‘waif and stray’, Fiona Mountford reflects on the power of ancient family traditions, and the consolatio­ns of being free to create new ones

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‘As tempers fray and blood pressure rises in the December hullabaloo, I have felt strangely calm’

For me, there was a particular moment each Christmas Day that signified we had made it. It meant that our little family of three, Mum, Dad and I, had navigated the seas, sometimes choppy, sometime tranquil, of the past year and come at last into a safe harbour. We would gather around the Christmas tree, hung with cherished old favourite decoration­s, in the chilly sun lounge of our family home, which a gas heater so elderly it might well have served in WW2 did its best to warm. We would raise a glass of champagne in toast and start to open our presents, while the rich aroma of our coming roast duck lunch wafted beguilingl­y around. We were all right. We were still here.

My father died in 2015 and Mum and I continued the tradition, dampened by sadness but still resilient, adapting it in recent years to take into account her increasing­ly frailty. Then, on December 15, 2022, after a year of escalating ill health and hospital admissions, Mum died. Ten days before Christmas and nine days before her Christmas Eve birthday. It seems strange to think that the gas heater has outlived both my parents.

I passed the festive period last year in a blur of grief, relief and administra­tion. I went to register Mum’s death in a council office just off a busy high street, emerging to the sound of carol singers. While bustling shoppers filled their bags with last-minute treats and goodies, mine was empty save for 15 copies of my mother’s death certificat­e. Organising a funeral single-handedly in the deep days of December is no small undertakin­g.

At the age of 47, I found myself with no immediate relatives. An only child (my parents had me late, after 16 years of marriage) with no aunties, uncles or cousins, I was also currently single with – by choice – no children of my own. I spent Christmas Day with my dad’s dear cousin Stephen and his family, and went home to the cat, and the gas heater. There was no getting around it: I had become one of those creatures I had only read about in lachrymose magazine articles, one of the Christmas “waifs and strays”.

As this year progressed, after I had delivered the funeral eulogy for the second of my parents and slogged through the trudge of probate once again, my thoughts started to drift towards Christmas 2023. With time to plan and prepare properly, what was I going to do? What new festive tactics would I require, starting with Mum’s birthday on December 24, a day that for so long was celebrated by the Mountford family with a champagne afternoon tea at the Savoy?

Family and tradition are such highly emotive concepts at this time of year, so the prospect of aloneness can feel bleak and un-anchoring. Adverts are full of happy, multi-generation­al families in jolly jumpers and everything is underscore­d by an unshakeabl­e assumption of togetherne­ss. I considered my options, including a kind invitation from a newish friend who said that he was hosting his family, “plus assorted waifs and strays”, for Christmas lunch and that I would be very welcome to join them. I felt included, but simultaneo­usly alone. This seemed to be official confirmati­on that I had been admitted into a club of which no one wants to be a member.

And yet. As tempers fray and blood pressure rises all around in the December hullabaloo of parties and preparatio­ns, I have felt strangely calm. Calmer, in fact, than I can ever recall feeling at this always overloaded time. I have no one to please but myself, nothing that I need do or buy unless I want to. Every choice is mine alone to make.

The gas heater, it transpires, is delightful­ly relaxed when it comes to Christmas table decoration­s and the use of Blu Tack on glass; and the cat is content with her feline advent calendar and a warm spot on my bed. I am suffused with a highly unexpected sensation of liberation, of stripping away the weight of years of accumulate­d custom and tradition and choosing to retain only what I want to. Do I honestly like afternoon tea as a meal? No. Would I prefer to toast Mum with a glass of champagne in the American Bar at the Savoy on Christmas Eve instead? Yes. So I shall – and scatter a handful of her ashes on the same day.

“Rituals are habits with soul”, says grief counsellor Julia Samuel. “It won’t be possible for you to form new rituals and new traditions so quickly. Do the thing that will allow you to feel sad but bitterswee­t and allow those feelings, the love and the loss, to flow through you. It’s the things we do to block the pain that hurt us”.

I will decorate the family home with a carefully curated selection of favourite decoration­s, many of them sourced from Scandinavi­a by my father over his many years of work trips there. The Swedish candelabra lights that only function with the help of a special adaptor and a judicious bang on the plug will take their place once again, as will the pugilistic carved wooden reindeer who perch on the mantelpiec­e with hoofs aloft, looking perenniall­y prepared for a boxing match.

What I am definitive­ly not doing, however, is creating a shrine to the past, wallowing in former glories while turning fearfully away from the present. I am making a concerted effort to live in the here and now, in my new, often unsettling, occasional­ly thrilling reality.

It is an immense relief not to feel responsibl­e for anyone else’s emotions at a time of the year when emotional temperatur­es run at their highest, and I will not miss the inevitable moments of tension that all families experience on the big day itself. Whether or not we listen to Radio Four while preparing for champagne and presents, whether or not we try to cram in Christmas Day church as well as Midnight Mass, are no longer tussles I will find myself having – and I won’t miss them.

Where then, will I be, come December 25? My three closest friends, without whom I would have retreated into a very long period of hibernatio­n around the time of Easter 2022, have all kindly invited me to theirs. Thus I have had the delicious choice between some days in the snowy Scottish Highlands, an overnight stay on the other side of London or an easy 20-minute drive. All three are glorious prospects and I’ve considered each one carefully. The Scottish Highlands would render the Christmas Eve trip to the Savoy impossible, so that one unfortunat­ely had to go. The overnight stay would leave the cat, if not the gas heater, feeling cold and unloved.

In the end, I have plumped for none of these three. Once again, I will be delighted to be with Stephen and his family, a little more aware now of the traditions of that household (presents after Christmas lunch not before, but remember to place the gifts under the tree when you arrive).

“Connection to others is the most important thing when someone you love dies,” says Samuel. “The worst thing you could do is to isolate. Join communitie­s, join a choir, help others by volunteeri­ng. And don’t forget to get outside and move your body in nature, as this reduces cortisol and raises dopamine levels.”

I’ll do the fresh air and the walking before I join my relatives, distant in terms of the family tree but close in spirit. I’ll see Stephen’s hands and remember with a complex frisson how similar, sturdy and supportive, they are to my Dad’s, and recall the happy times that our two families shared together. There will be the enticing smell of food that I haven’t had to cook for myself, in a place that isn’t freighted with the memories of all that I have lost. There will be shared reference points, but no sensation of emotional suffocatio­n.

For one day all will be calm, the reindeer on the mantelpiec­e will not fight and the cat will be glad to see me when I get back to our family home, the home which is now, in every possible way, mine and mine alone.

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 ?? ?? i Fiona has declined to join other ‘waifs’ this year, preferring to spend Christmas with a cousin – once she’s toasted her late mother’s birthday on December 24, of course
i Fiona has declined to join other ‘waifs’ this year, preferring to spend Christmas with a cousin – once she’s toasted her late mother’s birthday on December 24, of course

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