Here’s to a perfectly imperfect Christmas, complete with exhausted kids and chooks in foil bags

Here’s to a messy Christmas – it’s these perfectly imperfect moments you seem to remember more than last year’s colour scheme, writes Karlie Rutherford.

It’s these perfectly imperfect moments that I seem to remember more than last year’s colour scheme. Picture: iStock

Around November, every year, I start thinking about the colour theme for my Christmas table. I spend too much money on Christmas themed home interiors magazines, particularly those that prescribe how to get a country style Christmas (so relevant for someone who lives in the middle of suburban Sydney).

I rewatch Nancy Meyer’s masterpiece The Holiday for the 87th time, only this time noticing that Amanda Woods’ door wreath has olives in it, and maybe I should do olives this year? Would that look good?

And the algorithms hint that a cocktail with rosemary garnish would be perfect for Christmas Day.

While planning, in my mind, a perfect Instagram-looking Christmas is a yearly tradition, the IRL version is vastly different.

Like when I was a child, I have vivid memories of my mum immediately throwing Christmas wrapping paper in the bin after my sister and I would open a present. The minute that paper touched the floor, it was in a bin. If not sooner. Now, the memes tell parents not to hurry to clean up the Christmas morning wrapping mess, it’s the magic of Christmas, blah blah blah. But now I’m a mum, I do exactly the same. How the hell are you supposed to not lose those tiny Barbie shoes or Lego pieces, if there is wrapping paper everywhere?

Another Christmas tradition is how we insist on having a traditional hot Christmas lunch every year, despite heatwave conditions. Picture: iStock

Another Christmas tradition in my family is how we insist (okay, I insist) on having a traditional hot Christmas lunch every year, despite heatwave conditions. It means every year my dad ends up seasoning the pork with his sweat. And every year the house is filled with carols of people chanting, “How hot is it?” and “Next year, we are going to do seafood and salad”. [Narrator: they are never going to do seafood and salad.]

It also means that every year, like clockwork, just before serving the baked dinner, my mum will have a meltdown and yell at everyone to “get out of the kitchen”!

We lost my grandmother this year, but when she was alive she was in charge of bringing the chickens. My nan wasn’t Martha Stewart. Those chickens she brought weren’t elegantly plated on some antique nutcracker tray. They were served in the foil bag, direct from the charcoal chicken shop.

But now she’s gone, I never knew how much I would miss seeing that unglamorous bag on the table.

To cool down after lunch, everyone jumps in the pool, but you know what doesn’t make for a glamorous Christmas? Squeezing into a “supportive” swimsuit when your body is equal parts ham, gravy and champagne.

Cooling down in the pool after Christmas lunch. Picture: iStock.

And while in theory it might now be time for dessert, in my family by this stage we are all over it and so forget that we’ve left the ice cream out and it’s melting on the table next to the Christmas cake that no one has touched.

Add to this day overtired children who have been up since dawn, existing only on sugar, who are fighting over pool toys, or adults (read me) who get way too competitive during board games, and you’ve got a chaotic Christmas.

Yet it’s these perfectly imperfect moments that I seem to remember more than last year’s colour scheme.

For so many of us, Christmas is messy. This year certain people – by choice or by fate – might not be at the table. Heck, there might not be a table at all.

This cost-of-living crisis means the menu might not be as grand as you’d dreamt. Or while Michael Buble keeps declaring it to be the most wonderful time of the year, for many people, and many reasons, it doesn’t feel like that. But maybe we should mark those moments as well?

The imperfect Christmas moments might be much harder to find online, and certainly don’t exist in a Nancy Meyers film, but here’s to honouring them too.

Here’s to a messy Christmas!

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