Oh Christmas Tree

Unboxing memories of light.

The great British public likes a poll. A cause to get behind. Where do we lie on issues like Ukraine and Trump? Important, I agree. However, come November, the big issues all but disappear from the headlines as the great debate begins to raise its ugly head like an unthawing Maria Carey.

Is it too early to put up your Christmas tree? Who are those people who have the audacity of a bearded man coming down your chimney, who put it up in…November?

Or, can people, dare I ask, do as they please?

I know. I have been a November judger. Raised in the ‘real tree’ camp, ours went up the weekend before Christmas; 1970s trees weren’t built to last the season. Oh, the disappointment if on Christmas morning, you were met with a pile of prickly pine needles. Well. Trees have come a long way.

When I got married and lived in Germany, people in our village put their tree up on 6th December-hoorah! Then…I dared to nudge that to the 1st of December. Curtains began to twitch.

Well, today it is Thursday, 25th November, and I am putting up my Christmas tree. This year. I need light. I need that extra little bit of joy. And I will tell you why.

This time last year, I was driving from London to my childhood home in Scotland. I had already spent the summer there helping my mum through her mastectomy. Now it was time for her radiotherapy. But first, she had to regain the strength needed to raise her arm above her head for the treatment.

Thirty years of multiple sclerosis had slowly stolen her ease of movement. I remember watching her face etched with determination as she struggled to manoeuvre even the lightest blanket across her lap. How would she even manage to get out of her wheelchair and onto the table for treatment? We didn’t know.

Well, she did.

And we braved the winter months, back and forth to the hospital in the nearby city each day. Christmas lights in the windows were a blur of colour, only marking a longing for a time I wished we could have again.

She was ill. She looked frail. We would need to buy a house back in our hometown so we could be nearby.

By March, we were in our rented flat in London, signing the papers on our new-found house in Scotland, when the phone call came.

Mum had stopped breathing.

Heart failure.

She wasn’t going to make it.

I don’t remember much about the journey, but we got there in time. She survived the night. And the next. And the next. And the next two months in hospital, while they tried to nurse her back to health. She appeared to be melting away before our eyes, and I dreaded Mum would spend her last days in this old Victorian hospital. With the woman from bed three who roamed around like a spectre in the night. And the woman from bed five who wailed and wailed and wailed until her husband came in, when she would stop. Stare at the wall. And not make a sound.

If you let Mum out, I will move home now and take care of her, I had said. They did. So I did.

Summer was tough.

After a couple of weeks, we had to get carers in; I couldn’t do it alone. So four times a day, they came and went. My birthday had passed all but forgotten, and my children’s birthdays. When trying to resurrect a life, all celebrations of anyone else surviving another year around the sun felt insensitive.

I drove between London, where we still had work, and our new house, emptying a couple of boxes per trip between catheters, and bed baths, and making meals from ‘The Royal Marsden Cancer Cookbook’, and cleaning, and my bruises from being gripped so tight transferring from wheelchair to chair to wheelchair to toilet to bed and out of bed and on and on and on.

“I never wanted you to see me like this.” She’d say every time. Barely clothed and scarred and me scrambling around with tubes and pads trying to pretend I knew exactly what I was doing, but didn’t know what I was doing and was terrified each night I’d come back in the morning to find she had perhaps exploded from the inside out in her bed because I had attached a tube to the wrong place.

Breathe.

And so, daytime TV, and your polls, and debates about the timing of displaying a festive symbol in your house too early.

Why not let November bring a little light and joy—a reminder of those cherished childhood memories when Dad was still alive, and I wasn’t yet Mum’s carer? Back then, when winter days were filled with wonder, pine needles prickling your toes or not. What if we allowed ourselves the simple pleasure of putting up the Christmas tree today? Or any day we so feel like it.

I will carefully place each ornament. The cable cars with Santa hanging out the back that Dad brought me from his work trip to San Francisco. The little wooden raccoon poking out his head from the tree stump Mum brought back from another holiday. The glistening little butterflies from Japan. Grandma’s candle with the little drummer boy she bought when Grandad returned from the Second World War.

No. I am not consumed by consumerism, thank you very much 83% of the great British public who declared so on TV this week. It is my tree. My cherished tree that shall soon be adorned with the most precious of memories, of family long passed. And family who will one day pass. A tree on which I will hang trips and gifts, and the clothes peg that once was an ‘angel’ but now has one eye, and the remnants of a crumpled piece of yellowing net that my son, now about to turn thirty, made in nursery school.

So, perhaps. Just perhaps. If all the natterers and doomsters considered the meaning of Christmas. The spirit. The joy of snuggling down at night, or on a wintry afternoon, with fairy lights and memories and just that little release from the stresses of the rest of the year. They may concede and put theirs up too. Or, at the very least, not judge those of us who need a little early light.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” — Charles Dickens.