It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, that’s for sure. The trees decked with this year’s colour scheme and always too many lights that shine out of rain specked windows, the wreaths upon the occasional door and the house on North Road that is legendary throughout Cardiff, with more lights than a Heathrow runway.
The TV churns out advert after advert, providing parents with a Christmas list to deal with that brings guilt and pleasure in equal measure for those who are forced to count pennies and not pounds. Radio stations give us a reminder every hour that even though the nation loves it so much, nobody can actually claim to know the words to The Fairytale of New York. Reindeer hats sit askew seventy pound hairstyles as forty somethings trade kisses and innuendo at office parties and always, always there is the hope that it will snow.
This really is the most wonderful time of the year and my memories as a child are full of the wonder and innocent joy that Christmas brought. I would struggle to decide which pyjamas to wear to bed as a child on Xmas Eve. In the mind of a six year old there was a realisation that this evening was special and the thought of leaving one pair out just felt awful. I wanted everyone and everything to be caught up in the magic.
My father always seemed to hate the chore of decorating at Christmas time. I remember the raised voices as, after untangling lights that he had laboriously and methodically put away the year before, they were finally strung across the tree. These were the old style fairly lights of course. If the filament in even one of the lamps had blown you then had to search for which one because if one didn’t work, none of them worked. Every year without fail they would refuse to function first time, almost mocking him, as he was an electrician by trade. He would get more and more annoyed and Jesus Christ was not a term of religious meaning associated with Christmas for me, rather the man my father seemed to want to blame for his faulty wiring.
We went to town on decorations, with window stickers that I can still remember the feel of to this day, snowmen and candy canes and the biggest of all, Santa Claus himself. There were wise men that would hang from the ceiling in an almost comedic pose, and streamers galore. The foil ones that were ten a penny, gaudy and cheap but the stuff of midsummers dreams for a young child. Of course there was a nativity scene and ours was ancient. The figures were detailed but my father had made the scenery himself. He was an electrician and not a carpenter so it was little surprise it involved a Daliesque stable and a plywood floor. The poor Angel Gabriel, for some reason mounted on a pole like a Spartacus extra, would need to be superglued each year and I am not sure the cotton wool snow was historically accurate either if I’m truthful.
The tree was the icing on the Yule time cake for me. My earliest memories of it are that we always had a real tree bought from the Deri Stores. It would be placed in soil in the bucket he would use for his gardening, and wrap tinsel around it like it was going out of fashion. When my dog Sherry came along however and he would spend his evenings plucking pine needles from between the pads on her paws the purchase of an artificial tree was just a matter of time. My Aunty Marg in Ferndale had a beautiful white tree and I loved it, but being the bluff old traditionalist my father was, our trees were always that winter green, with their colour coded branches in case you couldn’t recall what a Christmas tree should actually look like. Baubles were always kept in two Carrefour carrier bags and I can remember them not as if they were last seen thirty odd years ago, but as if they were bought just yesterday. There were frosted icicles and snowflakes fighting for position with string covered behemoths that made the branch sag like a pensioner’s triceps. There were foul purple elongated things, with an indentation like the Death Star, and then there was my robin. I hated my robin. I had made it in the first year of infant school with crumpled up bits of coloured tissue paper, a yellow cardboard beak and the body made of a toilet role tube. I begged with every passing year, that it should be binned. As a child you become embarrassed at your lack of artistic skill, shamed that once you were so young and childish, compared to the master craftsmen you were when you were still in single figures but a ‘big boy’.
Only in later years did I realise that this look at the last ornament made by their youngest child was more than just an appreciative nod to the past, it was a direct link to something you can never reclaim. So long as that robin stood proud on the tree, then, well I guess they could see me as that little boy again. Not growing up, not highlighting their own advancement towards middle age but a talisman for us all, a red breasted messenger from a happy time. I saw that in my own children and the schoolmade decorations they would bring home. There is something about Christmas that was everything, Easter eggs and birthday cakes meant very little to me. I realised why, but again only years later when wisdom took hold and the petulance of youth diminished quietly. My father wasn’t working. Christmas Day he would be home with us all, every year. I never had a bad Christmas.
I loved everything about Christmas Eve too. My father would finish work early and unlike the usual appearance at the door of a haggard and tired man that only those whose fathers held manual jobs can truly appreciate, he looked refreshed. He looked happy. He would hug me, and that was a huge rarity for a man who saw outward signs of affection as a weakness. I have commented before about the sometime fractious relationship my father and I held up until his death, but this was not the same man. For me the absolute magic of Christmas lay not in a man in a red suit but with a man that also only visited once a year, my daddy. I loved him always but for the next twenty four to forty eight hours he was not the hardworking man who would fall asleep in a chair but a man who I could clamber over, I could be his boy and he my dad. It was unspoken of course, but I think we both drew equal pleasure from these moments.
We would eat tea and watch TV and then I would go for a bath, hair washed with Mr Matey shampoo and come back downstairs. My father would comb my hair and I would argue, with an applied logic that I have thrived on ever since, that this was pointless, as the moment my head hit that pillow, my hair would do what it wanted anyway. By the time I was eight the next part of the ritual involved me walking up the stairs but in those really early years of my life, he would carry me in his arms. We would take the stairs slowly, for there were three songs that would be sung on the way. ‘Christmas Time is here, as we climb the stairs’, ‘When Santa got stuck up the Chimney’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. I loved that minute or so more than any other minute of the year.
I am filling up writing this not out of sadness I suppose, but that as a child I couldn’t find the words, though I felt the emotion, to tell you how happy that made me. Ridiculously happy in fact. I wish more than anything I could take you back from the grave for just one minute each year and take my turn to carry you whilst singing those same songs. To let you know that I can find the words now, that I loved you and never more than in those moments that were truly magical for me. That in those drawn out seconds that ticked by almost endlessly, you were my entire world, that the presents you worked so hard to provide were actually secondary all those years ago. To see you actually being you was the greatest gift of all.
So to bed, and with it the task I found so incredibly hard. Sleep on Christmas Eve was an absurd proposition to someone who had Christmas Day as the next dawn. I would fight it, and often got past midnight but sleep would always catch me unawares. I would be up at five without fail. I didn’t need an alarm clock, not this morn. I would open my eyes and within a second know that at the bottom of my bed would be a plastic sack full of presents! I would be allowed to open them on my own as my mother had soon realised that there was little fun in me bounding into their bedroom at silly o’clock to open a load of presents that although they meant the world to me, were really just the starter to what would follow.
She also learned quickly that I loved to read and to write, for every year there would be packs of pens and crayons, books appropriate to my age and a box of maltesers, a tube of jelly tots and a chocolate orange. I would colour and I would write, I would read and I would look at the clock willing seven thirty to arrive when I was allowed to go and wake thee house. To this day I remember the three best stocking fillers I ever received. My first ever Star Wars figure, a standard Stormtrooper, a calligraphy set that made me take a pride in my handwriting I carry to this day and one book, one book above all else. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Some of you will remember it I am sure but that book opened up a side of me that still exists today, the part that still wants to fight dragons, to wrestle demons and eventually win.
When I had sated my appetite for the literary aspect of my wellbeing I did what I wanted to do more than anything else. I would gallop into my mum and dads room. I would pounce between them and inform them loudly that it was Christmas morning, just in case it had somehow slipped their mind. My father would get out of bed in his bloody awful pyjamas, put on his slippers and do the unthinkable. He would wake my sister. Being eight years my senior I am sure that she would have rather the extra time in bed but there was no chance, she had once had her excitement and nobody was going to deny me mine. Sorry Sis.
There was a definite pecking order in our house and I was at the bottom as the youngest. My mum and dad would open their presents last and my sister would be first. I am not sure if she did this to wind me up, though it did, but we had very different ideas on how to open presents. In one chair would be her pile, the other chair would be mine. I would struggle to open some presents because my hands would be trembling with excitement, and my father would admonish me in gentle tones not common to him, to slow down. My sister on the other hand was indescribably calm. She would open a present, fold up the wrapping paper and heaven forbid she would open an annual, because she would want to bloody read it before moving on to the next.
When I was ten I did something that still shames me today, especially as a parent myself who struggles to get the best he can for his kids at Christmas. I found the stash. I found the Aladdin’s cave at the top of her wardrobe with the presents all wrapped up. I opened every one. I wrapped them up again but she knew, of course she did. It made her cry, I know that too and I am so sorry to have taken that bit of magic that only a parent can feel at Christmas away from you that year. There is something that touches the very core of you as a parent when a child unwraps a gift that they wanted more than anything else, and I stole feeling from my mother that year.
I was incredibly lucky as a child. I had far too much bought for me but if there is any consolation to be found, my appreciation didn’t last for one day, or even a week, I carry it with me to this day. I remember every present as if it was yesterday, really, I do. I recall the moulded yellow plastic and the stickers that needed to be placed on my Frogger electronic game. I remember the Acorn Electron computer that I would spend hour after hour on. Astro Wars, Pacman, Donkey Kong and Astro Blaster. Stratego, Monopoly, Scrabble and Tank Command. Battleships, Mousetrap, The Game of Life and Cluedo. Top Trumps, toy cars, toy soldiers and books. Of course I remember the underpants and the t-shirts which in later years were replaced by Tacchini trainers and Pringles (Scottish knitwear, not crisps to those of you under 30), Adidas Colorados and Patrick Jackets. I can’t forget the Sun Football annual and reading that Steve Moran the Southampton striker was born in 1962. I mustn’t ever forget and hope my body fails long before my mind because I never want to forget.
My mother never reads a thing I write, to her it is pointless and perhaps there is an element of truth in that, she may have a point. But in written word I can express an emotional eloquence that is not best delivered in my deep Cardiff brogue. If you ever did read this you would know it wasn’t just about dad, it was about you too. I am a dad now, and I know the sacrifices you made, the upset I caused you that one Christmas and that you put your children first, always. I try to do the same. Whatever they think now I hope they get the clarity that only age can bring when viewing what once was for what it really was. The absolute delight I took in buying presents that I thought they would love and cherish, books to nurture their mind and toys to learn the simplest joy of just playing. I miss that today, I do every day, as kids turn into young adults and money is the gift they want most.
As you can see, Christmas meant the world to me. It always should have, but sometimes life has other plans for you and you are able only to react rather than plan, to accept and not fight. Now I view things very differently, I hate Christmas. Actually, that is not true, I fear Christmas. It started the year my marriage ended.
I will never reveal the exact ins and outs of my marriage ending, for both parties hold very different views of what actually happened and some things even I won’t share but whatever the reason, it ended in September 2005. In some ways I was unlucky or maybe blessed in some manner for at the same time my marriage ended, my father was dying, eaten away by cancer. Save the tears, I have, I am simply telling it as it was. You see, sometimes there is a sense that when life throws you a brick it is easier to juggle two than carry the weight of one alone. My emotions were never allowed to settle for too long, one minute I would be mourning the loss of my marriage, the next pushing my father up his bed to try and find a more comfortable position as he tried to sleep. He said to me once, weeks before he died, that he wished he owned a shotgun. He wished more than anything to end his life before he lost all dignity. I’m glad you never had a gun Dad, because you had more dignity than I could ever wish to carry on my shoulders the rest of my life.
My first Christmas as a single man and it was agreed I would sleep on a sofa in a house in Sleaford that my children now called home. We had Christmas morning as a family, and we had dinner together. I upset my kids that day because as soon as dinner had finished I announced I wouldn’t be staying. I was going to drive to Cardiff. My ex-wife was not impressed and of course I can understand why but I had a reason. That Christmas morning I had spent with my beautiful girls, but two hundred miles away my father was celebrating his last Christmas day. He would not be eating a roast dinner for the cancer had denied him that luxury, his last meals would be the kind of drink that you only give a dying man, with more calories than a pound of lard, in the desperate hope that enough stays down to allow the body to fight for one more day. You see there was one thing that struck me eating the sumptuous feast laid out for us all that day. I had seen my kids, it was only fitting my father got to see his too.
When the marriage ended I wanted to be fair. I gave the kids maintenance money without fail to my ex-wife and I paid for everything else I could but something had to give. It was my two year old Vauxhall Vectra. I couldn’t afford the payments on it and it was taken away by the repo men. Merry Xmas lads!! I had a friend then, a good one, and he still is though he lives in a place JR and the Cowboys now call home so our paths may never cross again. The day the car went he arrived in style with his heavily pregnant wife’s mint green 18 year old Vauxhall Nova. The journey home to Cardiff took four hours as a rule but that day I unashamedly went full throttle all the way home. Two hours thirty nine minutes. I cried from the moment I left the kids until I stopped a mile short of my childhood home and composed myself. This was not a time for celebration I know, but neither was it one to mourn. For the father I loved and his wife of forty plus years, I had to be strong. The smiles may have been forced and the banter a little slower but they needed me now in the same way I had needed them as a child. It was the very least I could do, and I did it, however hard it was.
Less than a month later I was in a funeral home in Whitchurch village kissing my father’s corpse but we did have that one last Christmas together, and despite the immense sadness and poignancy, it was the last one I treasured. I am many things to many people but underpinning whatever perception people choose to take of me, I am utterly honest, emotionally and to my cost. I am old school in many of my values and above all else I love my children more than they can ever know. Knowing the delight my father took that Christmas Day, I realised that now the kids had to come above everything else. My first week back in work I volunteered to work the next Christmas. There was no way my children would have any of the magic I had been party to as a child removed from their life. I never wanted them to have to decide which parent to spend their time with on Christmas morning so I took that decision away from them. They would spend it with their mother, and that was that. They would not be torn apart on December 25th like a cheap Christmas cracker, afraid to enjoy their day in case it caused offence. I didn’t want them opening presents and deciding which ones were going to be saved to be opened in front of me. I had to take the hit and despite it diminishing my love for the big day, I know that they have had fantastic Christmas days surrounded by family and eating what they want, and above all feeling what they want with no recriminations or pangs of guilt. I have worked every Christmas since.
Every year since we have celebrated our Christmas a couple of days later. For them it is very much the done thing and we try to replicate, or at least I hope they’ve felt that we have, that sense of excitement. But for me it is the hardest of all charades. When you wake up on the 28th December it isn’t Christmas Day, how could it ever be? There are no Christmas Eve films to watch. There is no advert for the latest toy, only for a sofa to lay your turkey filled carcass on. It simply is, as I like to say all too often, what it is. I don’t regret the decision I made a decade ago but I have paid for it. Few people are ever truly alone but those Christmas mornings when you wake alone in a darkened room, knowing a twelve hour shift will follow is more ‘Shawshank Redemption’ than ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.
There is another inevitable downside to Christmas when you aren’t a family, especially when you are single. For me Christmas is about giving. As a child I was extremely fortunate as I stated before but that instilled in me a sense of wanting to repay that sense of fulfilment. Of course, as anyone who really knows me can testify to, I’m possibly as unmaterialistic as you can be in the 21st century. What I earn from work isn’t a wage. That I would give away tomorrow and I often do, it is the sense of self respect that comes from earning respect. I would rather have respect than anything else. I recently got told that someone had lost respect for me. I have endured hurt in my life, as we all have but those words will torment me for longer than I will draw breath, that much I know.
I receive invites every year off friends to spend that day with them but I am not the sort of person that can impose myself on another family in such fashion. I am also too selfish for I know that to watch another family open presents, as pleasant as it may seem, is also the same stick that would beat me, reminding me that I was an extra, a charitable addition however well meaning the offer. It would only serve to remind me of what I have lost, and that is something I have no desire to do to myself. Sometimes you must suffer alone for it is not right to put your festive gloom onto others.
Every year I ask for nothing because I know the thing I want most can’t be bought. I cannot make right what is wrong and there is nothing that matters more to me than others happiness, even if the price I must pay at times can seem too high. My wish list this year, if forced to make one would be a pair of yellow football socks, maybe white, and a packet of ten Hamlets. I can buy those for myself though, in March or on a roastingly hot day in July. One of the girls that I help train at football gave me a present last week. Apparently she really wanted to, and it choked me, because that is the first time in years where somebody has wanted to out of their own free will as opposed to obligation. I will not open it until Christmas morning because it meant so much to me.
Something happened this Saturday to me. I became a ghost. I mean it, not in the sense I was dead, but in the sense that I felt invisible. I had just left someone to catch their train home and had to walk back through town to the Capitol centre where I had parked the car an hour earlier. That stroll was like something I have never experienced before. It was surreal.
I walked through the indoor market. I stopped at the fishmongers as long as my nose would allow me to, because since I was a kid I have just liked to see the variety of fish they stock. Weird yeah, I know, but this is my walk not yours, so sod off. From there, I cut through the little alleyway on the Hayes. I wanted to avoid Waterstones for that place has memories I can’t deal with and passed the St David’s Hall, another place that evokes such a massive sense of emotion in me. There will be no more Christy Moore or Declan Sinnott but my God, that night, was something else. I couldn’t walk passed it for fear of openly crying. I may be a sap, true enough, but I am honest.
Then it hit me. The outdoor stalls that for so many years I have just wanted to walk amongst, hand in hand with a good woman. Looking at the crafts and the Christmas fayre. Stopping for a bratwurst or frikadellen with a line of ketchup zigzagging along the top. Wrapped up with hat and scarves and simply being together at such a special time of year. For ten long years this one thing would mean more to me than it ever should but it is a simple truth nonetheless. But I wasn’t with a good woman, I was on my own, again, and it hurt. I saw couples laughing and joking, planning their gifts for loved ones and knowing that in three weeks they would see them unwrap these presents that would mean so much. I had a hundred pound in my wallet but nobody to buy for. It is that I miss and I realised it then. I want to feel something at this time of year more than any other. It is not about the sex aspect of a relationship. That matters less and less on a physical level and more on an emotional one with every passing year.
I just miss that sense of being, of knowing that I matter to someone who sees me for me not because I am their father or their son, brother or uncle but because they see through the beard, the shoulders and the hats, and they see me, really see me.
I walked through there as a ghost I know because nobody saw me, nobody knew that I was there. I was invisible and as such, I ceased to exist for that moment in time. I walked past the Owain or whatever it is called these days and turned onto Queen Street. I walked passed McDonalds, no honestly I did as hard as that may be to believe, and I knew the next ten minutes would be a trip down memory lane. I had worked in that restaurant, at the time the only McDonalds in Cardiff, during the extended summer holidays between my GCSE’s and A levels. Marc Cozens and I, a right dubious pair in those days who gave away free burgers to any girl who would smile at us. I met a French girl that summer, Celine Palachio, and we kissed in the castle grounds, her English and my French a very clear obstacle but we kissed nonetheless. Perhaps she was enamoured by my insistence that you turned right at the bilbiotheque and the patisserie was opposite the bank, and that I could put a ruler on the table. I will never know how on Earth I achieved a grade B in French.
Onwards from there and passed a non-descript clothes shop that will be gone within two years but where Olympus Sport once stood. We would meet outside there as thirteen and fourteen year old kids, with stars in our eyes on Saturday afternoons after football and urge Mathew Paterson to beat his record in Wimpy. One day he ate eight hamburgers, EIGHT!!
I had time enough to remember where Roopa once stood and I bought a yellow Kappa t-shirt and electric blue jumbo chords for the Christmas party where as a thirteen year old I kissed everyone else’s dream girl, Louise Tanner, though she was never my cup of tea to be honest. And there was Athena where you could buy cards that could convey motions you never had the ability to express yourself, or failing that buy a picture of a woman scratching her arse in a short tennis skirt. I know there are women my age who are rolling their eyes but get over yourselves, every last one of you had that bloody awful picture of the man holding the baby, spread-eagled across your bedroom walls. Yes you did!!
There was another trip down Nostalgia Avenue as I remembered rifling through the singles in HMV at that age. Was it really thirty years ago I bought Last Christmas by Wham! and learnt the words to the original Bandaid? It was. Life goes quickly, sometimes too quickly. I stopped where a children’s Frozen ride was spraying fake snow on the little occupants who were screaming with utter delight and it lifted me. That innocent laughter, that belief that in a few more sleeps Santa will be flying through the night sky defying both time and gravity, which was proof enough and I knew. I’ll be ok. The magic in Christmas is finite, it cannot be shared equally amongst us all. I will trade all my Christmases future for those kids to have the magic in their Christmas now, for that is the reality.
My memories will never be tarnished and my future is something I should be grateful for, whatever it brings. I woke up the following day to the most horrendous news concerning a woman who I hold in the highest of regards. The manner in which she is now dealing with the most hideous of circumstances offering a stark reminder that Christmas is a time that heightens each sensation, and I have shed more tears over the death of two people I never met than I thought possible. There has been so much outpouring of love for this bereaved saint that it made me realise that I will never change who I am. If something is real, if I feel it in my heart I will write about it for one day those words could offer solace and comfort to help ease my own passing for those that care more than I realise. I would not trade my life for anyone’s because to do so would be to deny what was and only a fool would wish that.
Title photo courtsey of Sergé at Flickr
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