Christmas would never be the same again, but new habits eased the pain

When my mum died 10 years ago, I inherited her ratty plastic-covered recipe book, bursting with torn-out pages stolen from magazines in waiting rooms. Those I mostly flip past, but the recipes written in her cursive hand stop me every time, and immediately transport me back to being a child. To the days when I would perch up at the wooden bench, sometimes tasting, sometimes helping, and sometimes just watching as she chopped and mixed and invented.

Mum’s kitchen was always busiest leading up to Christmas. She had grown up in public housing with an absent father and a working mother who was cash-strapped and time-poor, so when mum had her own children, she built her own traditions. And many of them involved food.

There were always jars of fruit steeped in brandy, soaking until Christmas Eve, when she cooked trays of delicate mince pies with the lightest of pastry. A pudding stuffed with several sixpence, hung wrapped in an old sheet until it was boiled for lunch on Christmas Day. And gingerbread houses that grew larger every year, that we decorated with lollies and icing and a chimney wide enough for a jelly baby Santa to crawl down.

Mum’s kitchen was always busiest leading up to Christmas.Credit: Getty Images

We grew up without religion, so Christmas was ours to invent. We settled on a sack of presents opened before the sun had risen in the morning, hours of driving from one side of town to the other for gatherings of family, and Mum being busy in the kitchen feeding us all. When my brother and I moved out, we still came home for Christmas. Over the years, those gathered at the table changed as grandparents died, cousins moved on and we started bringing friends, lovers, and orphans, but the pudding, mince pies and gingerbread remained.

The only Christmas Day I missed with Mum was when I was in Ireland with my partner, Aidan. Nothing was open, so we ate sandwiches on the end of a pier, listened to The Pogues singing Fairytale in New York and watched the daring brave the cold waters of the Galway Bay.

After we had children, Christmas Day still belonged to Mum. Her house was full again with little people, which meant they helped cut out gingerbread shapes and ate the Smarties bought for eyes. She spoiled them with stockings she sewed herself and a real Christmas tree that smelled like those of my childhood. Even the ancient fairy made an appearance. Her hair razor-sharp where I’d given her a trim as a kid, and her bum naked because I’d once hacked into the dress mum had made her, she soared high up on the tip of the tree, dragging it down with her plastic weight.

When Mum died, I attempted to host Christmas, mixing the pudding from her recipe, and enlisting my kids to help with the gingerbread construction. Other families joined us, my dad came, and my brother, but she was noticeably missing. The pudding didn’t taste the same, I forgot to add the sixpence, and the gingerbread house was an A-frame, not a mansion.

For years, Aidan and I dabbled in creating our own traditions. We gathered to watch Will Ferrell in Elf on Christmas Eve, we left out milk and carrots for Santa and his reindeer, we woke early with the kids and gave presents, and I tried to keep cooking the foods of my childhood, but the day itself lacked a centre.

When Aidan died in 2020, Christmas changed again. The first year we spent with dear friends who loved us, fed us, and drove us home at the end of the day, but the kids and I were lost. Aidan was the reason we had Christmas music playing all December, the reason our tree stood up straight and the Christmas lights worked. He was the only person in the house who ate ham, and suddenly our traditions had been upended.

I’d never understood the need for traditions until two people I loved died. And then I went hunting for them in the foods that I ate and the smell of the Christmas tree dropping pine needles on the floor. I’ve learnt that for me, traditions are a way to dampen grief, but it is hard to keep them going when the people who invented them have gone.

We grew up without religion, so Christmas was ours to invent.

Two years ago, my children and I found ourselves alone on Christmas Day. We’d moved to a new apartment, one Mum and Aidan had never seen, and I forgot to buy a Christmas tree, so a friend dropped off a silver one with folding branches and tinsel leaves. We decorated it in a mildly interested way, until the kids found the fairy with the haircut. She didn’t make the tip sag because it was wire and not wood, but she still managed to remind us of earlier times.

That day, after swapping presents early in the morning, eating chocolate for breakfast and discussing the letter Santa had written to my teenagers, we decided that instead of cooking and staying home, we would go out and see what Melbourne offered to those who didn’t have plans.

There were fewer restaurants open than we imagined, but we found an Italian place and waited for a table. I ordered something I would never normally eat, and the kids laughed at me as they tucked into enormous bowls of pasta. It was like we’d stepped outside our real lives for the day, and everything felt precarious. After lunch, we drove to the pool hall in Fitzroy and climbed the many stairs, and, taking a three-quarter table in the back corner, we played our own form of round-robin, which I’m sure I won.

Our family established new yearly traditions.Credit: Getty Images

The kids drank milkshakes, and I had a coffee and we played pool for a couple of hours like it was any other day. We were not alone. There was a couple laughing as one beat the other, some players practising alone, and a family of three just like us.

When I asked the kids what they wanted to do this Christmas, they said they wanted a real tree, a letter from Santa even though they’d stopped believing many years ago, a breakfast of chocolate and cups of sweet tea and a visit to the pool hall after eating lunch at home. I smiled, wondering if this would be our new yearly tradition, unorthodox and simple. It seemed fitting somehow. And then I promised to buy a real tree. One that smells like pine needles and childhood, one that bends at the tip when that fairy flies up high.

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