Ah, Christmas in your hometown. Twenty odd years ago I might have been that girl outside this bedroom window at 3am, making a bit too much racket en route back to her parents' - to late, too many drinks, too high heels, too many school friends to catch up with in the three day (and three long nights) festive home visit.
Now I don't seem to know any of my school friends any more. At least not outside Facebook.I was rather too good at making a life elsewhere for myself, and perhaps they smelled my arrogant derision for this place, the home town that had formed us all, and that I was too good, too interesting for - or so I thought.
Occasionally now I'm in the local Tesco and I suddenly recognise a familiar face from a gym class, a choir rehearsal or a school dinner queue - but now it seems to be set in an overweight and hurried middle aged person - shopping or behind the till. They are looking at me thinking the same, probably - don't I know that tired woman from somewhere?
How did we all get like this? And have they been in our town all those years since school - and if so, doing what? How come I didn't I notice them before, on those annual visits I used to make when all was well and my parents' were conveniently (for us kids) trapped in middle age. Or have they too come back here because of family woe, a private tragedy like ours, something that somehow marks their face and demeanour and makes it recognisable to me again - a mark of some kind, that we afflicted daughters and sons share?
So there's no time off or social distraction from the parents and the house now, and anyhow there's far too much to do here now.
As kids our pre-Christmas calendar was a delicious cycle of homemade tree decorations, carol concerts, un-PC telly comedy and revising lists of what we wanted from Santa. My sister had a talent for wrapping gifts, my hand writing was deemed good enough for the tags. After homework on long December nights we were tasked with sorting the many gifts our family would buy for our nine cousins and all our many aunts and uncles (great and otherwise). Our (real of course) tree was always a breathtaking and magical spectacle in our playroom bay window, and it was a stolen night time treat to kneel silently on the edge of the vast pool of gifts beneath it, inhaling its delicious scent and believing that surely every Christmas for the rest of your life would be this wondrous. My father's huge, stripy rugby socks were hung up on Christmas Eve, four in a row on the mantelpiece. On Christmas morning we would often swear to each other we'd glimpsed Santa's sleigh in the sky as we'd struggled to stay awake, and we always seemed to have literally piles of gifts, plus the obligatory tangerine in the sock toe. Great Auntie Minnie (our ersatz grannie) and her brother Uncle Robert (a cantankerous old Capstan-smoker) would join our family of six for Christmas dinner, our grandparents having long since died. I was an adult before I had the very straightforward realisation that Robert WAS my grandfather in fact, having been Mum's adoptive father. For some reason Minnie had always seemed the important one, the do-er (a feminine traie in our family) and Robert was so repellant to us and so it also seemed to Mum, that I literally failed to make the connection. It wasn't concealed, it just didn't fit my world view that we could be in any way related to such a man.
One of my strongest Christmas memories is however one of disappointment, albeit of a rather hilarious and very Scottish sort. We four kids all raced down one Christmas morning - I think it was 1978 - to find an impeccable child-scale golf bag replete with clubs, under each stocking. The disappointment was crushing - I'd asked Santa for a Girl's World after all (a rather grotesque doll's heads you put makeup on) and had less than zero interest in fulfilling Dad's ambition that I would one day become Scotland's Ladies Golf Champion. The only aspect of this gift I appreciated was that the leatherette of my bag was the very ginger shade of my hair. After examining these woeful presents for a brief spell, my oldest brother Mark turned to us and confessed that he'd found them under our parents' bed weeks ago. And he'd known it would be best to spare us the news and let us keep our Christmas hopes up. Bless him.
Five Christmases ago we'd only just extracted Mum from hospital some six months after her devastating stroke. In the family photo taken after the Christmas dinner, she still wears her cracker hat, poised and regal in her wheelchair, having managed to feed herself her meal. And boy had she eaten. I didn't know then that they starve the elderly in hospital. Not on purpose, but with every discharge since she has been literally famished for weeks. So the event was something of a milestone.
I don't honestly think I expected her to make another 4 Christmases on top of that one, so it's not surprising I'm feeling a little maudlin now. Today I cooked the meal at her house solo for the first time, the baton having been passed around a few siblings and venues before resting with me. My father, my brothers Mark and Campbell, Mum and me ate together - Mum can no longer travel far enough to enjoy a dinner elsewhere. This time, Mum reclined in her vast bespoke lounge chair, a little vacant and under the weather. I positioned myself beside her, where I could split my attention between our plates. Mum's appetite was modest this time, and she can no longer feed herself anything more complex than a bread stick. The atmosphere of the event struggled to rise, alcohol helped eventually as did stories about the family Chuck Berry cassette (one of only 5 our father ever possessed) and our pets. The men all ate my feast very rapidly (and who knows, perhaps appreciatively - they don't say much, the men I'm related to) while I seesaw-ed between Mum's plate and mine, swapping cutlery and bite sizes.
Mark had made a very decent cold dessert, which vied with the traditional pudding, but shortly afterwards he vanished upstairs. Working nights, he has a very odd body clock. Or maybe he just wanted to avoid the washing up. Which he did - he always was a clever boy.
