Sue looked around her living room, a lump in her throat. Her husband Dan was disentangling the extinguished strings of lights from the Christmas tree, already stripped bare of its tinsel and tiny wooden toys. Without the lights and their multiple reflections in the windows behind the tree, the corner seemed terribly gloomy. At the windows at the other end of the room, the star and candle arch still shone, bright pinpoints of light fighting a rearguard action against the looming darkness outside, soon to be stood down themselves.
Across the room, Chrissie and Jean were dismantling their Christmas village, pulling off the cotton wool snow to reveal the jumble of random packaging they’d used to construct a sleighing hill for the little plastic figures. Tears were sliding down Jean’s cheeks, and Sue sighed. It was always a difficult time when they had to take the Christmas decorations down. The magical two week holiday of twinkling lights, fairy tale stories, films and games, desserts and sweets was at an end, and they were facing a dark, wet January, back to school and back to work. Every year it got the kids down, and every year they pleaded to be allowed to keep the decorations up a bit longer. But Sue was adamant. The sixth of January – Twelfth Night – Epiphany – was absolutely the end.
She understood, of course. When she was little, she too had often ‘wished it could be Christmas every day’. It was part of the process of growing up, to realise that to extend Christmas too long was to kill its spirit. Even as an adult, however, she often had to fight back tears when taking down the decorations. Knowing that Christmas had to end to keep it special didn’t make it any easier to face the dismal days ahead.
What had helped her was the way time seemed to speed up as she got older. Counting down to Christmas as a child, a year had been an eternity, and even the month of December stretched out interminably. Now, December barely contained enough days to prepare for Christmas; it flashed by in a madhouse of shopping and cooking, attending Christmas plays and concerts, writing cards and wrapping gifts. Even a year seemed to fly by, the children’s birthdays 4-5-6-7-8 ticking by as if they were minor stations on a high-speed railway.
At the table, Sue’s sister Lydia was helping Joe to break up the gingerbread house. Sue gritted her teeth as she saw the pieces of perfectly iced biscuit efficiently disappearing into a neat pile of tupperware containers. She had always iced the house together with the older kids, laughing together when the sugary goop dripped down in sloppy icicles, making jokes about the crooked walls and roof. The last few years, Lydia had taken over. The houses always looked perfect, and Sue felt both outdone and excluded. She couldn’t remember there having been any discussion about who was going to do the gingerbread house. Not this year, nor in either of the previous two years. The first time Lydia had done it, Sue had wanted to protest. But the kids had been going through a rough time that year, emotional and easily upset, and Sue hadn’t wanted to make the holiday any harder for them.
Dan pulled the plug out of the extension lead, and the light from the star and candles died. Sue couldn’t help it, the tears started to roll down her own cheeks. After years of Christmas becoming steadily more prosaic, an exhausting logistical exercise followed by a peaceful recuperation at home rather than a magical season of wonder, for some reason it had recently regained its emotional power for her. The previous two weeks seemed to have been packed with joy. She couldn’t get enough of looking at her family, amazed at how the children had grown since the previous year. Watching how Dan lovingly cared for them, his eyes sparkling as they played together, his energy and humour reminding her of when they had first met. The inevitable end of the holidays felt like plummeting into a black hole, the grief it provoked totally out of proportion. After all, there would be another Christmas next year. In fact, it felt recently as if life went by so fast that it consisted of little other than Christmas, the festive start of the holidays and the melancholic end, repeated over and over. Sue frowned. Now that she thought about it, she really couldn’t remember anything from the time in between the last few Christmases.
Done with the gingerbread house, Lydia was wandering through the room, scavenging for Christmas odds and ends and tucking them away into a box. She’ll probably find everything, Sue thought. For her, it had always been an unintentional tradition that no matter how hard she searched, a week or so after all the decorations had been laboriously tucked away in the loft she would come across something she had missed, a wooden reindeer tucked away beside the television, or an angel dangling from a window handle. Lydia paused in her hunt, standing still in front of Sue. Sue waited for her to say something, but Lydia seemed lost in contemplation.
Dan walked over to stand next to Lydia. Sue was surprised to see that his eyes were also filled with tears. Was he getting sentimental about Christmas in his old age? ‘Are you sure that you still want to keep this?’, Lydia asked, gesturing. ‘I could understand it at the time, but it’s been a few years now…’. Sue’s immediate reaction was to vigorously defend whichever of her Christmas decorations Lydia was trying to throw out, and she glanced around her, trying to see what it was that they were discussing so that she could argue back. ‘We’re keeping it’. Dan’s tone was final, and Sue was astonished, as he was generally the clearer-upper of the household. In fact she had often had to rescue treasured items from the bin after one of his throw-out sessions.
Her amazement grew as his voice now broke in tears. ‘You don’t understand’, he said. ‘Sue was putting out that ornament when it happened, when she, when she…’. He stumbled to a halt, as Chrissie and Jean came running to wrap their arms around him, crying themselves. He hugged them tightly, then planted kisses on both of their foreheads. He cleared his throat, then said, almost inaudibly, ‘Having it there, it’s almost like she’s here with us for Christmas, in some strange way’. Lydia looked sceptical, and Sue could see her start to roll her eyes. But then her expression softened, and she simply took Dan’s hand and squeezed it tightly.
Sue felt as if her head were spinning. She wanted to take her husband and children in her arms, but she couldn’t move. Something stirred in her memory… Putting up the Christmas decorations together, worrying that there were so many jobs still left undone. But she just hadn’t had the energy, hadn’t been feeling herself – so tired every day, her ankles so swollen that she just wanted to sit down and put her feet up in the evenings. She left the big job of the tree to Dan, putting the small decorations in their places as she felt more and more short of breath, her heart fluttering strangely in her chest… Then sudden pain, followed by – nothing. Until it was Christmas. Again, and again.
Joe approached, carefully carrying a shoebox decorated with drawings and scrawled messages in the distinctive styles of all three children. Looking carefully, Sue could make out the word ‘mummy’. She remained unable to move, realisation flooding through her as she was gently lifted and placed in the box. ‘Bye bye mummy, see you next Christmas’, whispered Joe, and the box filled with darkness as the lid was closed.
See you next Christmas, she whispered back, already counting down.