A Christmas that changed me: I was in no mood to celebrate. Then came an epiphany on Hampstead Heath
We are a Christmas family, but not a Christian family. My mother is a Buddhist-Shintoist. My father enjoys a good stained-glass window, a jolly carol, and thinks it doesn’t really matter if Jesus was real. It is my mother who adores Christmas. During childhood she’d spend the year saving up tiny perfect things for our stockings – a doll-sized tin pail, a bear so small he disappeared if you closed your fist around him, a fat red pencil. Some of the family ornaments date to her girlhood.
She was raised by two immigrants neither of whom believed in Christmas but who wanted to give their daughter everything. So we hang those angels despite their broken wings. The religious might say that to love Christmas without believing misses the point. But a solstice celebration of food and family still seemed beautiful to me.
Yet Christmas in 2022 was changing because my family was changing. My parents were separating after nearly 40 years of marriage. My father was living in temporary rented accommodation. As the lights went up on Oxford Street, the John Lewis advert was revealed and the crank of consumerism turned up the volume to remind us that Christmas had arrived, I found myself not in the mood. I was safe and well, which is more than many can say in the winter. I didn’t want to wallow but nor could I summon any sparkle.
It didn’t help that I was trying to do everything I could to get ready for the birth of my first child – from washing hand-me-down babywear to getting as much work done as I could before she arrived. Scribbling essays and recording promotional videos for the novel that would be out in the spring, I told myself Christmas didn’t have to be a big deal.
Still, I wished I could get into the spirit. In some ways, it would be the baby’s first Christmas. I was nine months pregnant. I read an article that led me to believe she’d even be able to taste Christmas dinner in the amniotic fluid.
Rowan’s partner, pictured with their baby on Hampstead Heath. Photograph: Courtesy of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
My partner loves Christmas – mince pies, Christmas cake, Christmas carols, Christmas jumpers. One evening, already wearing his penguin socks, he asked: “Couldn’t we start some new traditions?” By which he meant, couldn’t we start a tradition that has a meaning beyond the fact that you’ve been doing it since you were five years old? I considered. The year before we had borrowed a friend’s tradition. She makes cinnamon buns every Christmas that she eats with pomegranate seeds. Surely, there had to be other things like that we could try.
We hung a paper star in homage to our Swedish friends. It was pretty enough. I remembered that many Japanese people eat KFC but decided against that. I watched videos about creating garlands of dried oranges. We asked friends about their holiday traditions. A Portuguese friend eats fish. Another spends the day with her partner, watching movies and lighting candles. Another follows a gift giving rule: one thing you want, one thing you need, one thing you wear, one thing you read. One visits the Kew Christmas lights. Some non-Christian friends treat it with no more importance than a bank holiday. One friend runs a Trussell Trust fundraiser. (She’s an inspiration and I encourage you to donate to their excellent work.) But I still wasn’t in the Christmas spirit. Even the emo Christmas playlist I hummed along to half-ironically didn’t work.
Meanwhile, the admin of this new Christmas continued. My brother came over to help my mother put up the tree. He and I organised her stocking. After some discussion it was agreed that my father would come to the family home for lunch. As we decided what to do with the day, a vision of staring at each other across the sitting room for hours seemed too bleak. Then I remembered all the friends who liked to go for a Christmas walk. It was agreed we would go to Hampstead Heath.
The day came, feeling surreal. The baby kicked me awake. We ate a lunch that included both pomegranate seeds and Brussel sprouts. Then we headed out. I wore fleece-lined boots, soft and flat, that I’d bought to bear the weight of my child. When we reached the Heath, it was cold and clear. The dog ran ahead of us smelling the path. On Parliament Hill someone was playing a loud Christmas jingle. Someone else was drinking champagne out of a plastic flute. The city hung like a bejewelled forest below us.
But my father doesn’t like crowds and so we sought out a quieter path. We walked past trees grown thick with years. A pack of corvids laughed at us, flitting past a small dog. My mother who had been putting on a good show, grew tired and asked to sit. The sun was already getting low. There were no twinkling lights hanging from these branches, no angels, no ribbon, no candied oranges.
And suddenly I felt it: the great swoop of time. The thousands of dogs that must have run under those branches. The woodlice that have curled in the mud unaware of the date. The generations of illicit lovers meeting in ruffs, frock coats and running fleeces. All gone now. And I tasted that sweet achy solstice feeling of having made it through one more year, mostly intact, mostly together. It was a feeling different from sparkle but it was enough.
On Boxing Day, I told my partner that out of everything we’d tried, I’d like next Christmas to take our daughter to look at a big old tree. For everything else, we’ll have to discover what she wants to do.