My Alternative Gift Guide for the Festive Season

Featuring a huge, unwieldy turkey

The festive juggernaut is gaining speed. Even if you don’t measure the season by the first Coca-Cola advert or think of Thanksgiving as a starting gun, there will be signs that might be omens. On Substack the sign appears to be the avalanche of gift guides, guides to books of the year and hot on their heels no doubt, guides as to what to do with a huge, unwieldy turkey. *

I love that the word guide is employed such a lot. It suggests what I so often feel, which is that Christmas is very much like going on a nice walk in Snowdonia that starts off in good weather but inevitably ends up with you precariously teetering on a rock in adverse weather conditions praying for mountain rescue to get a wiggle on. That’s when you wish you had employed the help of a guide.

I have nothing against a guide, but I am a woman whose nature is to kick against the traces, so it’s a tricky one for me. On the one hand, I have come to loathe and detest being the family gift oracle. The question ‘What does X want?’ makes me want to set fire to things. On the other hand, being told that ‘this’ is a fantastic present for the man who loves harpsichords and ornate facial hair, also makes me want to bestow the gift of pyromania. I contain multitudes. All of them fiery.

What I want to focus on is the ‘gift’ part of gift guide. This post is my Christmas gift to you.

My gift to you is to offer you the words: ‘You do not have to.’

When I was a child I used to love Christmas. By the time Christmas Day rolled around I would be giddy as a kipper with the excitement of the whole thing. There was so much of everything, food, gifts, sparkly things, telly, sweets. All the things that were on ration for the rest of the year were saved up and then casually heaped about for the taking.

It was a lot. I spent a lot of the festive season in overwhelm. I never slept on Christmas Eve. The anticipation was immense. Everything became very big and very fragile and very much freighted with importance. There was a feeling that I couldn’t possibly hold all that feeling, and I often didn’t. Tears were also a big feature of the festive season for me.

Later on, my role was to not only deal with all my own feelings about Christmas but to organise and hold everyone else’s too. The political to and fro of who would be visited and in what order. The staggering amount of gift admin. The endless demands of other people’s expectations from school plays to card etiquette. The last minute dash to buy things for people who never saw you for the rest of the year but who would mysteriously turn up on your doorstep with a box of chocolates in the week before Christmas.

By the time the day rolled around I was done. I went from loving Christmas to actively loathing it. I would write about it on my old blog, and people would get very upset with me for my heresy. The oft trotted out sentence was: ‘But think of the children.’ Just because it became a millstone round my neck didn’t mean I made my children suffer my Christmas malaise. We Christmassed with the best of them. I have asked my children about their childhood Christmases since they grew up and not one of them has mentioned feeling left out or short changed.

In order not to lose myself completely however, I learned to give myself some early gifts. I gave myself the gift of thinking long and hard about what worked for me and what didn’t and the permission to negotiate my terms. I gave myself the gift of understanding that just because everyone else does it like that, it doesn’t mean I have to. I gave myself the gift of renegotiating those terms year after year, because things change and what Christmas is can change too. I gave myself the gift of ‘You do not have to…’

The biggest gift I gave myself was the right to honour my feelings. All of my feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones. What I learned was that even as a child, Christmas was too much for me. I learned that I very much do not like being overwhelmed, even by good things. I learned that I do not like surprises, even if they are nice ones. I learned that I manage much better if, instead of putting all the expectation and focus on one day, I spread things out more evenly. I learned to pace myself and that if I did that, I wasn’t the only person who benefitted. We all did.

I gave myself the gift of time. I learned to reclaim it by not spending it doing things I really hated. I reclaimed Christmas Eve by refusing to spend the night gift wrapping everything, spending hours agonising over something that would be torn up in minutes the next day. Instead I spent it watching films with my children. We used to watch Love Actually every Christmas Eve. A few years ago I fell out of love with that film, so now we watch Bridget Jones, because things change and we adapt and that’s ok.

I gave myself the gift of saying no. I hate playing games. I hate board games and card games and charades, all of them. They make me anxious and prickly and stressed. There are reasons for that and instead of ignoring those feelings and pushing on because everyone else wanted me to play, I learned to say no. The games still get played and now everyone has a great time, including me. I love the joy they bring everyone else and now I get to feel it myself.

In the last few years I have given myself the gift of not giving gifts if I can’t find the right things for people. I want the people I love to love the gifts I give them. If I give them something they don’t want, what I am actually giving them is an obligation to do the same for me. I don’t want people to feel stressed and obligated about buying me things. I’d rather receive the right thing in May than the wrong thing in December. I’d much rather receive nothing at all if getting me something means someone I love is in an emotional or financial mess because of me. I know what that feels like and it’s horrible. In absolving myself and breaking the bonds of obligation I absolve everyone.

I gave myself the gift of ignoring other people’s Christmases. I don’t care if you start planning for next Christmas in January. I don’t care if you drink pints of eggnog and love cinnamon scented candles. I don’t care if you want to send monogrammed Christmas cards to everyone in your postcode and hand knit your own stockings. If you genuinely think this is the most magical time of the year, I am absolutely delighted for you. That’s a gift in itself. And amidst all that I shall continue to take what I like and leave the rest.

I also gave myself the gift of eschewing traditional British Christmas food with a firm hand. I’m not going to love sprouts, not even the way you make them. I hate pork pie, turkey, stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, mince pies, Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. I hate mulled wine and have very divided opinions about cinnamon. I hate marzipan and brandy butter, candied peel and sugared almonds. I tolerate pigs in blankets at best. I resent the hours and money spent making a meal which I wouldn’t choose to eat unless I was dying of starvation, so I don’t make it.

I gave myself the gift of keeping Christmas Day at home, regardless of what other people’s schedules look like. After a few years spent running around like a lunatic, eating multiple dinners I don’t like, perched on camping stools and sleeping in airing cupboards, I realised that I could never square that circle. There was always someone who was going to be pissed off with me, and I was always pissed off. So I decided that I would please myself and at least everyone else would be equally pissed off with me.

I gave myself the gift of not expecting things to be perfect. This year there will be no tree, because boat life. My eldest daughter has complex obligations which means I won’t see her on Christmas Day. It will be lovely anyway. It will just be differently lovely.

I gave myself the gift of not treating Christmas like a siege in an endless war where nobody ever wins. The amazing thing is that I have never fallen out with anyone by doing Christmas my own way. Nobody has written me out of their will and life goes on exactly as it did before but with less nervous breakdowns, which is another surprising gift.

Here are some of the things that I do love and gift myself when I can:

A real Christmas tree that smells of wet forests and pine scented snow.

An outrageous jumble of baubles and Christmas ornaments which are neither tasteful nor matchy matchy.

Garlands. I love a garland. I bought a felt star garland last year that I love so much I never bothered to take it down.

Fairy lights. See above. All. Year. Round.

Related to the above. The right to put my decorations up and take them down whenever I want. I once kept my Christmas tree up until July. This only works if you have a fake tree, obvs.

Christmas food I really love: panettone, smoked salmon, pates of all shapes and sizes, expensive champagne, rare roast beef studded with garlic and peppercorns, mountains of roast potatoes, boxes of buttery shortbread dipped in Demerara sugar.

Naps.

Snuggling.

The time to ferociously squeeze the people I love until their bones rattle and laugh till we weep.

The biggest gift of all though, is, I think, the gift of understanding that you can do these things all year round if you want to and for me, life is a lot, lot nicer if I do. I don’t need to save the best things for a time when I am so busy I can’t appreciate them. I can do all this whenever and however I want. The gift isn’t Christmas. The gift is your life and how you choose to live it. You can have Christmas every day, if you understand what Christmas really is to you, underneath all the extraneous stuff.

And sometimes the gift is knowing what ‘you do not have to’ as well as what you do.

*the best thing you can do with a huge, unwieldy turkey, is let it live its best life and die of old age.

*the second best thing you can do with a huge, unwieldy turkey if the first option is no longer a thing, is to throw it out the window and order Chinese food instead.