My mother hated Christmas. Although she tried to hide it, it was difficult as she had one of those faces many women of Yorkshire are afflicted with, one that’s directly connected to the part of the brain that decides what is a pile of bollocks and what isn’t. She hated the shopping, the cooking, the decorations, the gift buying followed by the wrapping. She hated the small talk that started “are you ready for it then?”, she loathed visiting family or worse still, having them visit us, and she couldn’t stand Julie Andrews – with special reference to The Sound of Music. She also had a major issue with Cliff Richards, who during the 70s and 80s popped out of the woodwork more often than Santa to deliver unto us a Christmas single.
To get her through it, she, like many people in the 1970s, self-soothed with vast quantities of booze and cigarettes. Back then you had to hit Oliver Reed levels of alcoholism before an eyebrow twitched, so in comparison, my parents were relatively normal (*cough).
Gold Label Barley Wine had been my mother’s tipple when I was growing up. For the young people amongst us – as it’s unlikely to tempt the under 30s or the modern palate - it tasted of something resembling melted earwax and the stuff you put down to kill cockroaches. Yet despite having a 10.5% proof alcohol content, my mother, could knock them back like shots of lemonade. Every Saturday my parents would arrive home from the pub, shatter my peace and have, what they lovingly and euphemistically called, “supper”, also known as, a six-pack or two of Barley Wine. So it was that at Christmas, every day simply became a Saturday.
The evenings had a common pattern. The Barley wines would come out, and the Shirley Bassey albums would go on. For the uninitiated, Shirley was a huge star at the time who was never off TV. She was known for her big voice, fabulous dresses and theatrical delivery which involved lots of snaky arm movements and pained facial expressions. My dad and I would roll our eyes, and my brother would snigger as a tipsy mother battled with the stylus, pausing occasionally to shout over her shoulder, “laugh all you bloody like, she’s going on.”
The drink was usually accompanied by a spot of chain smoking. 1970s-style smoking habits meant that my mother rarely breathed clean air. I often thought if ever she did she might pass out from the shock. By bedtime she would have worked her way through a full packet of twenty, but by cigarette six you could still peer through the blue haze and make out if there were some humans in the room. Cigarette six and Barley Wine three were important milestones - we knew, we counted them - because this is when she would start singing. And what she lacked in talent she made up for in execution.
She would happily warble away, eyes closed, lost in the orchestral arrangements and Shirley’s vocals and copying her famous arm movements and facial contortions, which suited Shirley but just made my mother look like she was having a stroke. Every so often she would open one eye and say, “listen to those lyrics” as if she was eating them, covered in chocolate. I would shove my face into my Smash Hits magazine and cringe. My brother would take this as a cue to go to bed and my dad would doze with his glass in his hand, occasionally jumping at a particularly loud, off-key note (of which there were many). But not me. I was in for the whole show, the grand finale. I loved a bit of tone-deaf, drunk karaoke.
It was fun watching her become more horizontal with each track. Eventually she’d be laid out on the sofa, one limp hand dangling over the edge of the sofa clutching a smouldering cigarette, while the other arm snaked around in the air and miraculously continued to perform as Shirley Bassey. She was hardcore, my mother. I’m pretty sure Oliver Reed wouldn’t have made it through to cigarette seven and a fervent delivery of ‘Goldfinger’.
At this stage dad would go into the kitchen and potter with the dishes, every so often shouting, “is the Shirley arm still going?”.
As soon as I answered “nope, over and out,” we would chuck a coat over her and go to bed.
Of course, this was all very well on a normal Saturday, but a hangover the size of the Grand Canyon, didn’t help my mother embrace the joy of Christmas, and it certainly didn’t improve her cooking. Despite all that, and having a face like an injured bloodhound, she did at least attempt to enter into the festivities. This might include wrapping some tinsel round her neck or wearing a Santa hat as she served up the lunch, slapping down slices of turkey and, with a ladle, dolloping mash onto our plates with all the finesse of a bricklayer building a wall.
We always had a nan or two at Christmas. They would compliment my mother on the meal - which is how I learned the necessity and the art of ‘polite hypocrite-face’ - and then they would fart through the Queen’s speech. After that, my mum would get the nans suitably drunk by working through the dregs of leftover drinks and spirits, gleefully inventing unusual cocktails involving Babycham and rum or a ‘Mansplatten’ which was something to do with whiskey and tomato juice. Once they had passed out my dad would do the pots and we would all watch the Christmas movie. We had a cat at the time who twice a day would launch herself at the tree, scramble to the top then cling on to the fairy as the whole thing fell over, scattering baubles so far and wide that we were still finding them in May. Usually, this sent my mother into a nosedive of blue language and meltdown, but as Christmas Day drew to a close, as far as she was concerned it was over. Fuck it. The tree stayed on its side until someone could be arsed to pack it away on Boxing Day.
Our family Christmases weren’t exactly swimming with the spirit of Christmas and goodwill to all men, but it did have its charms. The Morecambe and Wise Christmas special was always a hit. The big movie premier was a highly anticipated, must-see in the days before video recorders and streaming, and the regular, impromptu parties with the neighbours were fun. And here’s the thing - weirdly, everyone else enjoyed it. I suspect because it was something out of the ordinary at a time when ‘ordinary’ was mind-numbingly dull. In other words, fuck all happened. While I’m endlessly irritated by those ‘generation’ memes, by way of explanation I’ll give in and say, if Gen Z are over-stimulated to the point of mania, by comparison, Gen X were practically comatose with the lack of excitement in our lives. We had music, fashion, books and magazines, all of which we could barely afford without pulling a bank job. So, when Christmas came around it literally was the most exciting thing to happen all year. Just having your dad home all week was a treat when the rest of the year he was at work 6 days a week. Eating chocolate until you were sick, when normally it was rationed, was actual fun and seeing the expression on my mother’s face when I gave her a musical Christmas card with Cliff Richard’s smiling face on it, that played ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ when opened was a joy like no other. We were easily pleased.
As my brother and I grew up and I made my own party-focused, stay-out-all-night Christmases, my mother gave up pretending altogether. She would start swearing about it around the end of September and not let up until it was over. Having grandchildren briefly lit an advent candle under her arse but on the whole, she just wasn’t feeling it. She tried of course, such is the pressure to have a good time and create a festive atmosphere, but in many ways my mum was the kid pointing and shouting, “he’s naked” at the Emperor. She had a bullshit detector the size of the International Space Station and she simply couldn’t turn it off just because a John Lewis advert told her this is how people should behave at Christmas.
As the years ticked by, we became the hosts, she became the Gold Label drinking, Shirley Bassey singing nan on the sofa, and she was a lot happier for it. Her only contribution was to bring her own cigarettes and buy a few presents, which suited us all. For some reason that I never fathomed, in her last years she took to buying me horrific timepieces that she had purchased from QVC type channels. One year I got a chipped, gold painted, plastic carriage clock with a printed picture of a hydrangea on a cardboard face. The next, it was a watch with lime green plastic strap and a picture of a lady wearing a big red hat on the face. The last one she bought was a watch that was so tiny I couldn’t see the numbers and barely wide enough to fit around the wrist of someone who had been dead for 3 years. She was bizarrely enamoured with them and excited to see my reaction when I opened my gifts. Luckily, my ‘Yorkshire face’ has been tamed over time and a suitably enraptured response kept her happy all day. Well, that and the Gold Labels.
Although I’m not totally anti-Christmas, I have to be honest, I’m not overly chuffed with the hype, the tedious shopping, the endless landfill that we buy, the shit films, and the fact that it now starts in August. But like my mother, I go through the motions and some years we have had cracking Christmases, others, not so much. It depends what’s going on the rest of the year, on how skint you are and, as we age, it very much depends on who we are missing. Surely, even the most ardent Christmas lovers can’t have a John Lewis Christmas EVERY year! I had such a shit year once that I ended up going to Istanbul, with a mad friend and the wrong clothes, just to get away from it (but that, my friends, is a whole separate post). My point is, nothing stays the same. Christmas may be crap, but next year it may be better. Maybe you hate it every year like my mother, or you could be one of those people who have the Christmas movies on, your face shoved in a tin of Quality street and the tree up from 1st of September. You don’t have to all-out love it or all-out hate it. You don’t have to pick a side. Christmas, like everything else in life, changes with each year.
This is the nineth year without my mum, eight without my dad. Christmas changed again when they died. And no doubt it will keep on changing as I watch my grandkids grown up. Now I’m the mad, singing nan on the sofa, half-cut on Baileys and moaning about the price of turkeys and how “kids have got too many toys, not like in my day,” but I do it with a wink and a nod to the Queen of Christmas humbug as I rev up for my own rendition of Goldfinger.
So, Merry Christmas Titsvillians! I hope you have a fantastic time and Santa brings you lots of goodies, but if it’s one of ‘those’ years, don’t worry, it will pass. It’s only two days. Invent some cocktails, put some music on and sing along. You’ll be surprised how fast it will go!
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