As the year hurtles towards the close and we rocket towards the Solstice, Christmas and the New Year, I find that this blog has been sorely neglected, as time has been slipping through my fingers at an alarming rate.
I have been working long hours in the studio making work for the Off Centre for the Christmas shopping madness, which has been quite mad. I often wonder why people don’t buy random gifts for their loved ones all through the year rather than just a huge splurge at Christmas?
The pressure on me has been quite intense and I know I am not alone, as I have watched potter friends work furiously to capture their share of the Christmas market. Maybe I will be better prepared next year for the Christmas rush or maybe I will opt out of the commercial cycle totally and take next December off in protest.
Now that I have planted that seed in my own brain by letting the treacherous anti-commercial sentiment of those words drip onto the page, I find I quite like the idea.
When my children were small I drummed into their heads that Christmas was a time for family and food, not bucket loads of gifts. I could never quite convince my relatives to come around to my way of thinking and each year I would be given a gift with the disclaimer, “We know you don’t do presents Kim, but …” and I would then feel guilty that I didn’t have a gift to give the giver. It wasn’t that I didn’t do presents, it was that I found the whole commercial aspect of Christmas obscene. The shilling of the merchants, the pressure to conform, the lack of money combined with the impossibility of ever meeting anyone’s expectations, all conspired to make me dread December, whilst looking forward tremendously to the actual day.
I would do small things to try and make Christmas special for my children. I would fill their bedrooms up with balloons on Christmas Eve. I would prepare red jelly and ice-cream, or chocolate mud cake for breakfast and I would try very hard to give the children the gifts that I knew they wanted. And then I would turn the music up, crack a beer and cook up a storm.
This will be our fourth Christmas without Mum and I am getting better at it. I even bought some new decorations for the tree in November with full intentions of having a Christmas tree this year. But I just couldn’t muster the energy required to nag, “The Spouse” into cutting down a pine tree, all the while ignoring his grumbling about the mess a tree makes. And so I gave the decorations to the grand children and watched them hang the shiny plastic baubles onto Veronica’s shiny plastic tree. Maybe next year I will do a tree. Maybe.
But even as I miss my mum and even as my annoyance with the commerciality of Christmas grows, I find I am looking forward to the day itself. I am looking forward to eating our traditional Christmas lunch of sushi, salads and smoked salmon, with a wheel of South cape brie and Mount Gnomon Ham. I am looking forward to having a barbecue and eating pavlova, playing Christmas cricket and feeding my over excited grandchildren red lollies and fizzy cordial.
I have deprived my son of bacon all year, hammering him relentlessly with my, No I will not buy bacon made from tortured pigs message, that David is now quite delirious with anticipatory excitement because I let slip that his Christmas gift from me this year was a kilo of Mount Gnomon Bacon.
All I have to do at the moment to make my son smile is whisper to him, “nom nom Bacon” and his smile manages to make me smile in return.
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“nom nom Bacon” … could be considered a form of torture to some, but so glad that you are finding pleasure in it. Smiles are a good thing. Always.
I hadn’t thought of that at all Cindi, sorry.
Oh, I was just thinking along the lines of your son… I’ve not had bacon in a while myself and when you talked about it my stomach growled… but like you ~ am reluctant to indulge. No need for an apology. 🙂 I am glad, however, that you are feeling a bit more in a holiday spirit.
If you need someone to cut a tree down and “the spouse” doesnt feel up to it, give me a hoy. I’ve got a sturdy chainsaw
Thank you Harry, I appreciate your offer 🙂 . It is me, not being bothered with a tree, not “The Spouse” being difficult.
Have a wonderful Christmas – whatever form it takes.
I am now going to ask a favour. Sunday is Sunday Selections number 100. Would you, could you bring yourself to play this one last time? It would ber sooooo much appreciated.
Yes, I can do that for you 🙂 it will be my pleasure
I don’t enjoy the commercial aspect of Christmas either. Stores all busy telling us our families won’t love us as much if we don’t spend gazillions of dollars on them?
Phooey! I say and Phooey! I repeat.
When the kids were younger, I bought things I knew they really wanted throughout the year and hid them away until Christmas, now we do gift cards from a particular store if we know someone is saving hard for a particular item, such as a blender (son), we all got him gift cards from the shop that had the one he wanted.
I like your Christmas lunch tradition.
I want sushi now.
we may have gone a little overboard on the gifts this year for the kids. I guess we are trying to make up for last year’s rushed xmas because we had just found out we were moving to India on the 2nd Jan. Thank all the deities we are in Australia this xmas with no rush to go anywhere for awhile. Santa is bringing the big thing he had to put back last year and all the gifts from rellies in NZ have already arrived for us to place under the tree and I fear we may not have any room in our tiny lounge room to actually sit to open the copious amounts of gifts.
We only do gifts for kids so at least I haven’t had to buy for the eleventy billion adults in my multi divorced and remarried family on both sides. We make bigger deal of birthdays.
Have a wonderful Christmas Kim. xx
I’d be happy to see children given time to linger over gifts instead of rushed to open present after present at “present opening time”, thereby depriving an often-neglected grandmother the small satisfaction of seeing her gifts actually appreciated for a few minutes. Sorry, did I say that out loud? Your sort of Christmas sounds pretty damn good to me!