A different kind of Christmas

It was a different sort of Christmas this year: how could it be otherwise, when Mum wasn't there? I remembered her in a hundred different ways in the weeks coming up to Christmas. So did everyone else in my family; every present bought, every plan made, ached a little, because of her absence from this family feast.

J and I spent the weekend before Christmas with Dad and my family in Norfolk. Her presence, reminders of her were everywhere. Mum loved Christmas, really loved it, and there was much remembering about last year; how, after the Christmas Eve midnight service we came back and got into bed and as we fell asleep, heard Mum on the stairs, clip-clopping coconut shells together and making farting noises - pretending to be a reindeer accompanying Father Christmas as he left presents. Stifling her giggles, as the Christmas stockings she loved to prepare were left outside every child's door, though the children she left them for were all grown-up now.

I will keep that tradition; stockings from Father Christmas stuffed with small and silly or useful presents - nutcrackers, face flannels, miniature of whisky, things for the kitchen, a paperback book, a satsuma and a bag of chocolate coins left in the toe.

As children of a vicar, we had a different sort of Christmas to our schoolmates: the family Christmas could not start until lunchtime, when Dad got back from all the Christmas morning church services. The stocking, left at 2am by an exhausted parent back from midnight church on Christmas Eve, and opened in bed on Christmas morning by an excited child was a way to keep us happy, until the real present-unwrapping could begin - after lunch, and after the Queen's speech - a long time to wait when you are small, but now I see a delight in anticipation, a stretching-out of the joy.

The night before Christmas Eve this year, Dad had a drinks party for friends and neighbours and parishioners, and so we decorated the house that afternoon, unpacking boxes of wreathes and cribs and baubles carefully labelled in Mum's clear writing. J put up the tree, my sister hung it with the trinkets accrued by the family over forty years. Dad mulled wine, and I heated up canapes and we handed them round. And afterwards, when the dozens of people had gone, had admired the house, drunk and eaten their fill and wished us a merry Christmas, we said to each other 'Mum would have approved'. We had kept the show on the road. We had thrown open the doors and shown the world that we were coping, that the house was still full of light and music and good cheer. We were all right. Don't worry about us, we are doing fine.

But it was too much to try to recreate Christmas Day without her at the family table. J and I went back to London, to have our first married Christmas alone together and the rest of the family went to the Lake District to have Christmas away from home.

I am still feeling my way: making my own Christmas traditions, thinking about what I will do for my own children, if I am lucky enough to have them, holding the thread that connects me with my mother, and her mother before her. I know that Mum, and her mother used to listen to King's College carols whilst wrapping presents on Christmas Eve, and so I did that this year, as I have done for the last twenty years, even when I was in another country and listening on the BBC World Service. That solo chorister's voice singing the first verse of 'Once in Royal David's City' still makes my skin goosebump, still makes my eyes well up, still means that Christmas is almost here.

Now Christmas is gone, and the ache of missing my mother is still here. I wanted to tell her about the Christmas lunch I prepared, ask her advice on whether to mix sausage meat into the stuffing, whether to cook it inside the bird or on a tray. I wanted to call her all the way through Strictly Come Dancing final and Christmas special; we used to watch it and call each other to discuss each dancer when the series started this year. I miss her. We all do, her brother, who moved from the Lake District to Norfolk to be with her in his retirement, her other children, my brother and sister, my sister-in-law. But it is so much worse for Dad. He and Mum were always together, day and night, for thirty nine years. Whatever my own grief is like, it cannot match the visceral pain of his physical separation from her.

Sometimes grief is a thump in the gut, a tear at the heart, sometimes my eyes well up without warning and my throat aches. Often I am angry. Sometimes it comes in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, or when a nightmare wakes me, but usually it is when I do something, see something, think of something and want to share it with her, and realise that I can't, and I never can, never will again. I want to cry for her; I want to cry for my whole family. I want to cry for all of us, but mostly I can't cry at all. There have been too many times in the past when I would not allow myself to cry, and now that I need to, I can't.

She used to read this blog, every word, every comment, which is one reason why I haven't felt like writing it much these last few months.