How to Have a Post-Modern Christmas

Posted by Katy Regan at 11:36 on 3 Jan 2010

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Well, for all my pre-Christmas worries / stresses / time spent in snow-related traffic jams I think the festive season 2009 may go down as one of the best. However, of course it had to get worse before it got better. On Christmas Eve, Matt Black arrived at my house, late afternoon, to go to the pub for a jolly, festive drink to find me in my dressing gown with what Egg calls my "All-my-family-have-been-wiped-out-in-a-car-crash face."

I don't know why I was so miserable:  a culmination of partying overload and a recent spell of calamities, mainly snow related (have you worked out am not really a fan?) that left me barely daring to leave the house in case I got savaged by Alsatians / run over by a canal barge / trampled by Mary and Joseph's donkey and other things that after that week, didn't seem entirely unfeasible.

MB then had to endure possibly the least festive walk to the pub ever known to man (seasonal good cheer? Not a chance!)  with me snivelling and intermittently informing him how I'd ruined my life in 2009 and was (I think my actual words were) "a disaster of a human being."

I then walked into the pub, burst into tears only to spot one of the mums from school out of the corner of my eye who was looking at me, a little bit scared to tell you the truth. "Sorry, festive breakdown" was my teary-eyed response once I had summoned the courage to face her. Well what can you do? I had to say something. It was either that or she thought that MB was a total bastard who had chosen Christmas Eve to dump me when the reality was I had chosen Christmas Eve to inflict my seasonal breakdown on him.

On reflection, I have three letters regarding Christmas Eve.

PMT.


So anyway, that was Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was glorious. I stayed at Egg's the night before so we could be together Christmas morning and woke to Fergus staring at his stocking at the end of his bed and declaring: "I must have been good! He's been mummy, he's been!" You don't get much more delightful than that. I've decided that five years old must be the optimum age for Christmas enjoyment. After that it's pretty much downhill until you get to thirty-five and all you have to look forward to is very public breakdowns.
Anyway, then people came round for a thoroughly post-modern Christmas. Usually I go to my parents' on Christmas Day but this year I broke from tradition and Egg and I invited people over to his.  It was such a success that I thought I'd share with you my thoughts on how to make this work:  

How to Have a Thoroughly Post-Modern Christmas

• Have it at your baby-daddy's house. ( This is my new term for Egg stolen from a friend of mine who said that ‘father of child' was too harsh a term for someone I actually quite like.) A babby-daddy by the way is not your boyfriend or your husband, or your ex but a friend with whom you had a child with and then remained just good friends. To date, I only know Egg and I who fit into this category but so many people comment that this seems the ideal set up (normally those who don't really like their other half and whose eyes light up at the mention of ‘two separate houses' and the fact I can simply send Egg home when he's annoying me.) that I wonder if it might catch on.
• Invite a varied selection of people over who aren't - for a change - the friends or the family you've known for the past twenty million years. They are new people, which can be much more fun because there's so much more to discover, they constantly surprise you and most importantly, they're not sick to the back teeth of you yet. For me, these included: Matt Black (who does know me rather well and doesn't seem to be that sick to the back teeth of me just yet although give him another Christmas Eve like the one just gone and he may think differently..). Matt Black - among other things i.e. party organiser / partner in crime / all round top bloke - is also my ex-boyfriend and friend of my baby daddy so that adds another dimension to the post-modern picture. So, apart from Matt Black and my baby daddy there was also Matt Black's eleven year old son (single parents and their kids: all very PM) two local new friends and drinking buddies and a dog for good measure who Fergus was slightly wary of but who behaved better than anyone else all day!
• Buy presents for people you don't actually know all that well. Make them as random as possible: an Ikea lamp for example, some small bowls. MB has been so good to Egg and I over the last few months giving us lifts to and from school because our car was in the garage that Egg bought him a mirror for his new house. Possibly massively gay, but this is a post-modern Christmas and therefore there are no rules.
• Don't adhere to any sort of timing / cooking rules. This is ok TO A POINT although I have to say that Egg's free-form style did leave me hyperventilating slightly when one hour before people were arriving, we were dismantling a dining table at mine to take over to his and we hadn't even put the vegetables on yet. Then Egg broke my door trying to get it out. Ho Hum. Then we drove to his with the table and four chairs in the back of the boot with the boot wide open. I do worry what the neighbours think of us.
• Play charades all day. Get a five year old child (i.e. Fergs in this instance) to do his own version using his ancient video collection as inspiration. I tell you, Bambi is a killer.
• Get very drunk indeed until you even go free-form on Charades doing ones ‘all in one' rather than word by word, using props if necessary. Egg's charade version of Towering Inferno involved standing on a chair with a lighter.
• Realise that although this isn't what you thought Christmas would be like when you were thirty-five, that it's actually loads of fun. You have great new friends, a beautiful son, a babby-daddy you really quite like and who can pull together a Christmas Dinner for seven in about forty-five minutes even if he breaks down a door in the process. You are shit hot at charades and list eating your own weight in sausage-meat among your many and varied talents.

Happy New Year everyone.

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