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Just signing back on for a quick post.
I don’t remember too much about last Christmas, as we were in flux and still living in a half finished house with a tiny baby and a boiler that was about to start leaking carbon monoxide into our brains. We hosted the dinner in our house, but my mother-in-law, I believe was largely responsible for making it. So that made this year our first ever properly hosted Christmas where we (and by we, I very much mean my wife) cooked the turkey…
To be fair it was still fairly transistional as Catie’s mum helped a good deal. But this still felt like our first hosted Christmas and the baton has now been passed to our generation.
I did the most difficult task which was to lay the table and did a brilliant job. Except I miscounted how many people were coming to the feast and laid an extra place setting. But that’s always useful to have, just in case Jesus turns up on the day. Either as himself, or disguised as a succession of disadvantaged strangers.
We had such a massive turkey that even someone with Jesus appetite and disposition to test you with disguised versions of himself would have been satisfied. And it was bronzed and beautiful and a triumph of over night slow cooking.
Doing Christmas is pimpsy.
It was of course lovely to watch our daughter opening her presents in the morning, which were mainly the Paw Patrol toys she didn’t yet own. Though she did complain that she’d told Santa she wanted a pup that I hadn’t even heard of, who must appear in some peripheral episodes (not Everest, who obviously I know, but a different one). What a fucking idiot Santa is. He ruined my daughter’s Christmas.
He had though drunk all the whisky and not all the milk, which proved that I had been right yesterday.Though I didn’t want to crow too much, mainly because I had a bit of a hangover for some reason.
But we had a fine morning, mainly playing an insect based bingo game that was entirely based on luck, but which I played with fierce competitiveness anyway. Chance favoured Phoebe to begin with and she beat me and her mum three times in a row, but then I won one and acted like I’d finally got the Pointless trophy that would make my life worthwhile. It was a bold tactic and Phoebe was upset about losing for the first time and cried a little. She didn’t even understand that beyond her being sharp enough to realise that her card had the insect picture that had just been turned over on it, this was a game of luck. I worried that my victory dance had been too much and we thought maybe we should put the game away, but Phoebe wanted to carry on playing. She wanted to beat me.
And though there were occasional tears throughout the morning she started to understand that you had to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same (except do an in your face dance when you won) and even said “I don’t mind if I lose” at one point.
It was an education for us all.
Mind you, when I was playing with her and her father-in-law and she won seven times in a row and I came third every time (and only once because I’d not noticed that I had a grasshopper on my card - I would have won if I had done) I also felt like crying. How had she managed to win that many times? It was literally impossible. Then I won one and celebrated, but my daughter was happy too. She’s already more mature than me.
Drink flowed, we over ate, I read my book about the
Real Great Escape and we had a lovely time. And some how our kids survived in spite of our drunkenness.
It was particularly nice to still be on Twitter, unlike the signing off idiots, to see people receiving my book and other stuff for Christmas and to be getting messages saying how helpful the book had been. Christmas is the perfect time to use it. Plus thanks in part to a selection of questions in
the Times (worth it for the disgruntled comments from Times readers who think they are above this kind of thing) and in part to Amazon making the book half price, my ranking in the charts shot up again and by the end of the day it was in the top 100 books for the first time. It was a Christmas miracle.
