All I Want For Christmas Is...
...stollen for breakfast, Whispering Angel, £240 of beauty samples, a working Sonos speaker and a once a year cigarette in the garden. My 20 Top Tips for making the most of the festive season.
Before I start, can I just make it clear that I do REALLY love Christmas. My very best memories of my Dad are from Christmas past; he’d whack on the record player at 9am and we’d wake to the sound of the Christmastime album by the Swingle Singers playing from the living room, or even better, the pan pipes - there is nothing that says Christmas to me more than the dulcet tones of a pan pipe. Presents were much anticipated and highly exciting in the 70’s and 80’s. The unwrapping of a Girls World was the culmination of months of lusting, the entire day spent wheeling her hair in and out before crayoning it purple and defacing her with blue eyeshadow. The year that I received the Sindy cardboard house (basically two bits of cardboard that slotted centrally to create four rooms) ranks amongst my very best. The eighties sent me a Walkman, LP’s (Thompson Twins, Frankie Goes To Hollywood) and Babyliss crimpers (give thanks to Toyah Wilcox). We spent less then, but the rewards were good.
Make your own dolls house kits were big business in the late seventies. One year we rushed downstairs to find a blanket covering a dolls house made by my Dad that replicated our own home - he’d used left over wallpaper and carpet offcuts to duplicate and added fairy lights for central lighting which were controlled by a switch in the roof. No, my Dad did nothing by halves. During my Farrow & Ball era back in 2005 I redecorated it for Ella - Pointing in the living room, Cooking Apple in the kitchen, Cornforth White in the bedroom - and replaced the racing green carpet with stick on wooden floor. My sister then took it on for her own daughter, Olive, and redecorated it again; a Christmas gift that just keeps on giving, 40 years later. You don’t get that with a Stone Island jumper, I tell you.
When we were kids, all the extended family lived in and around London so we’d spend lunchtime at one grandparents and then the rest of the day at the other. This comes with far too many caveats nowadays - someone can’t drink, some live miles away (well, South East London which might as well be John O’Groats, tbf), no one wants to get off the sofa after lunch, etc etc - so we do Christmas Day with one side and Boxing Day with the other. This has generally worked well, although drama has occasionally ensued. Many years ago, we were celebrating Christmas at Joe’s parents house. Joe’s mum, Judith, had invested in a glorious Christmas greenery candle ring from the local florist, topped off with a large cream pillar candle - the perfect table centrepiece. These were the late nineties when it was standard to have regular fag breaks during dinner, ashtray in front of you - sitting around the table drinking Baileys and Tia Maria for hours on end was standard practice prior to kids.
Anyway, around 5pm we left the table to retire to the living room for coffee and James Bond, completely forgetting that the candle was still burning away amongst the table detritus. When the smoke alarm on the third floor of the house went off during For Your Eyes Only, we rushed next door to be accosted by a ring of flaming greenery. Due to the fact that we had surrounded ourselves in a veritable smog of Silk Cut fumage, our diminished sense of smell hadn’t picked up the fact that the dining room had gone up like the Towering Inferno (classic seventies reference, fyi). The moral of this story? Greenery candle centre pieces are not for Christmas, let alone for life. And ashtrays are much better kept outside, ha.
Then we had kids and resigned ourselves to them waking at 3am Christmas morning to open their end of bed stockings, took highchairs, Fruit Shoots and chicken nuggets at the celebratory table in our stride, worked the Big Day around daytime naps and argued about who was going to get them down from the table and watch them in the other room whilst the other sat with the family adults drinking wine. Fast forward 22 years and they are now all (almost, anyway) adults themselves and we are at the point of return to the ‘old days’ of table chat and long lunches. Yes, yes, they’re lovely small and all that, but they’re much better company when they’re older, I promise.
Anyway, this year we are heading South to both families to do the alternate day thing and I can’t WAIT. But if I’m being honest, although Christmas Day is great, I always find the anticipation, the lead up, much more exciting. Stollen for breakfast, Christmas jumpers, lunches with friends, Michael Buble. All the stuff. So in the interests of incoming festivity, I thought it was worth writing my Top 20 Tips for making the most of the Christmas season. With a LOT of tongue in cheek, obvs. Well, some of it anyway. Ha. Happy December to you all.
Commence the ‘what are we doing for Christmas?’ conversation with your family straight after the summer holidays if not before, mostly so that as an efficient person, your diary is neat but also to slightly irritate the members who don’t like to talk about it until November.
Do not jump in early and offer to host unless you are 100% sure that you are able to cope with the responsibility of everyone expecting The Perfect Day. And also to confirm that no one else wants to do it which is the preferable option.
The Extended Family Present Draw - where every adult buys for one other adult only, thus saving money - is ALWAYS a good idea. Unless, of course, you have two adult children who are at University and don’t have any money to cough up £50 each so you end up buying theirs for them as well as your own. And your husbands.
And on that note, always offer to do the Extended Family Present Draw, promising everyone faithfully, cross your heart and hope to die, would I lie to you, etc etc, to use ‘an official online draw app’. Proceed NOT to use an official online draw app.
Pinterest for MONTHS ahead to get the perfect wrapping combination of paper and ribbon for your gift giving so that your presents are Instagram perfection. Order very gorgeous and can’t be found anywhere else wrapping paper from Zazzle at extortionate cost before realising upon its arrival that what you thought was the price for three metres was, in fact, the price for three foot.
Save your Liberty Beauty Box money for an entire year in order to buy yourself the Liberty Advent Calendar, telling yourself and everyone else that you didn’t actually pay £240 for a box of samples (50% of which you probably won’t use) and that you ‘basically got it for free’.
Give in to the joy of the season by rushing to the local Farm Shop to buy your Christmas tree mid November, ensuring that by the time it gets to mid December you’ll want to grab it and throw it out the window.
Drag out the £125 tree stand from Germany that you bought as an investment last year to discover the trunk is too big for it (even though it’s the biggest and most efficient tree stand in existence with ALL the ratings), fail to find the saw and have to carve it back to fit with a bread knife.
Rejoice that you had the foresight last year to roll up your fairy lights neatly for ease of use, before realising that you didn’t pack them with the transformer plug which is nowhere to be seen, therefore rendering them defunct.
Hang your much loved and curated decorations on the tree in the knowledge that within 24 hours, the cat will have ripped down anything below three foot and that thanks to the cat, only 50% of them will make it back into the box in January.
Attention, bottom left. ALWAYS watching. ALWAYS ruining. Save yourself from gifting disaster by sending your husband a link to everything you want for Christmas at least six weeks in advance, secure in the knowledge that left to his own devices, he’d buy solely from Big Tesco toiletry aisle at the same time he picks up a meal deal for lunch.
Promise yourself you are going to ‘stick to a budget’ for your children this year, before deciding the day before Christmas Eve that they don’t have enough presents to open and rush to Monks Cross Shopping Centre to buy them more, even though they are basically now adults and don’t even need anything.
Continue the family tradition of laying Christmas stockings at the end of the bed for your children, despite the fact that they are now 22, 21 and 15 and go to bed AFTER you so you have to set an alarm for 6am in order to do the job.
Be safe in the knowledge that even though you are first online and manage to secure the very best Christmas supermarket delivery slot, it will still arrive on Christmas Eve with 75% substitutions or out of stocks and you’ll have to hysterically send your husband to the supermarket to save the day.
Know that your husband will simply scan your detailed WhatsApp message list with the flick of an eye, before ignoring your requests for Whispering Angel and chucking the cheapest wine he can find into the trolley as he doesn’t really drink wine and thinks Whispering Angel is too expensive.
Promise yourself you are NOT going to drink loads of the cheap wine on Christmas Eve as you have so much to do the next day and can’t function with a hangover. Get carried away when your sister arrives, drink loads of the cheap wine, go to bed at 1am and wake up with a hangover.
Family lunch. Yes, I like a decoration or two. On Christmas morning, all gather for gift giving with a glass of champagne and smoked salmon swirl canapes. Have argument with husband about choice of gift giving music before realising that the Sonos isn’t connecting to Spotify due to wifi issues and resort to Michael Ball on Radio 2 as a festive backdrop.
Spend the next hour saying ‘if you don’t like it, you can take it back’ before the gift recipient even opens the present.
Serve lunch, then spend two hours clearing up whilst drinking more cheap wine, before secretly going outside for your one cigarette of the year, only to be discovered fag in hand by your appalled family. Be bombarded with abuse for the next six hours.
Joyously take down your tree on the 27th, with the excuse that it’s your daughters birthday on the 28th and you like to differentiate between celebrations, but also you’ve had it up since mid November and it’s making your eyes bleed. Job done.
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Love these posts on Family/nostalgia/tips so much!
Absolutely love this! Hilarious and disturbingly accurate and relevant! 😂😘