A Family Christmas

Well, I wouldn't be a true blogger if I didn't include a blog about Christmas!! I mean, seeing as this blog is almost like a diary for me, I can't exactly by-pass the two most stressful, emotional, amazing, chaotic weeks of my life.

So much preparation goes into it all year round doesn't it?
Personally, I am not a great believer in Christmas apart from it being a great excuse to have a few days off and spend time with all the people you care about the most. I am fairly religious in a spiritual way but do not believe in any bible or anything like that. To me, I could celebrate Christmas any day of the year.

Anyway, disregarding my own beliefs, I know that most people believe Christmas to be a very special time of year and I always do my best to accomodate everyone and to make sure that everyone is with the people they love and doing the things they love the most.

For me, Christmas started in September when I realised that nobody had yet got round to inviting my gran from Surrey to stay. She is on her own there and the rest of the family live up North. I asked my mum if she was planning on asking her, not wishing to tread on toes, and mum said she was too busy and stressed to think about anything like that. So, knowing gran would have to book train tickets and make plans anyway, I invited her to stay with me.

Al was pretty sure he would be going to Poland for Christmas to be with his family so it made sense for me to share out my three-bed house with family.

The lead-up to Christmas was pretty hectic as Al began to think twice about going to Poland. It was easy to book flights months ago when Christmas was so far away, but as it crept up, we realised we really wanted to spend our first Christmas as man and wife, together.
Anyway, there was no going back on those £240 tickets.

So, I thought I may as well invite my brother and sister and nephew too for a few days, who I love spending time with.

My mum lives in the Lake District and just wasn't feeling Christmas at all and was adamant that she would spend it on her own. Our emails went back and forth, emotions running high, and in the end we decided that mum would travel down early Christmas day to spend a few hours with us. Then dad would come and pick us kids up to go to Liverpool for lunch, and then I would return home to mum and gran.
All this fuss that goes into Christmas! One day to see everyone!

Well, Si, Kate and Jack all turned up on the 22nd. It was lovely. We had a really good night eating takeaway and drinking beer. The dog was hectic and Jack was naughty and so many things went wrong. Jack had just learnt to throw and practised with everything. He mostly threw things at the rabbit and revelled in the shouting he received from us. The dog loved that Jack was being shouted at and did all she could to aid his naughtiness.

There was a point that night when we would be laughing our heads off at the ridiculousness of everythig being destroyed and tipped over and stood on and lost. There was no sitting down for a second.

The next day my gran arrived. She was a lot slower with her walking than I remember and the 5 minute walk from the train station took nearly an hour in the freezing cold with the dog desperately pulling on the lead to walk faster. Kate and Si 'went to the shop' on the way home and disappeared for over an hour, leaving me to baby-step home with my gran.

We got home, and I think my gran literally took the armchair and glued herself there with a 6-day fixative. I hardly remember not seeing her sitting there and I had to prise her away from the TV to come and join me for dinner. Even then, she would be watching the TV from the awkward angle of the dinner table and all conversation was lost.

I felt her disapproval whenever Jack did something naughty and we shouted at him, or when Olive went crazy fighting with me and I quietly tried to discipline her whilst trying not to get in the way of the TV.

Not being able to sit down for a second, vastly reduced to a nano-second as the dog made the most of the amount of people and attention in the room. My gran welcomed the dog jumping up on the sofa and all of our training days took a nose-dive within an hour.

Pestering my gran to have a drink all the time, I was exasperated when at every meal time, just as I had asked her for the tenth time, and then finally sat down to actually eat the dinner I had been preparing for ages, she would then decide that yes, she would quite like a drink if it's not too much trouble - what do you have?

Grrr....

I looked forward to Christmas day so much when mum would arrive and look after gran and the dog for the whole day, and dad would come and pick us up and cook dinner for us and give me the day off!

Mum arrived at 7am!!!

Knowing that dad was picking us up at 10am and that we wanted to spend a few hours with mum, I was baffled that at 7:30am, my gran decided she needed to use the shower first!

My dad arrived at 10:30 and came in. It was fairly awkward as we went to get all of our bits and bobs together and he and mum were left in the same room as each other. I don't know if they said anything to each other but they were civil at least. And then I said goodbye to mum, knowing that my day off was courtesy of her and that she would suffer from my peace.

Christmas day has been a quite manic day in our family for the last few years, since we started having our dinner at the sheltered accomodation that my gran lives in. We use their kitchen to cook our dinner and invite any of the old ladies that are free and have nowhere else to go that year. This year was the first year that no one else from the home was coming. Still the kitchen is very basic and my dad and aunty split the ingredients between them and cook a lot of it in their own kitchens at home. Then we all transport it over to grans.

Christmas dinner was the best ever this year. Everyone else has turkey but dad got me a lovely piece of smoked salmon fillet from M&S, and it was all served with two types of potato, veg, cranberry sauce, stuffing and everyone else had pigs in blankets.
And then delicious christmas pud! My fave!

To be honest, it takes a lot longer to prepare the dinner and then to tidy up again, than it does to actually spend time together as a family eating everything. It's a shame and something which I've noticed the last few years. Everyone is so busy fussing about cooking and cleaning and setting the table that you don't actually get to spend much quality time together at all.

In the olden days, when we all lived in one house, we would wake up, go downstairs and have a bucks fizz, and then we could open one gift before breakfast. After breakfast we would open the rest of our gifts, and then there were always a few bowls of nuts and sweets around to nibble on.
We would eat our Christmas dinner and then spend the rest of the afternoon playing with our new toys, drawing on our sleeping dad, and nibbling on crackers and cheese and selection boxes. What happened? Why is it not like this any more?

These days we all live in different houses so there's a lot of transport involved, no leftovers, no nibbles.

At the end of the meal, rather than chill out, we had to rush off back to my house, as dad had to get back to see his girlfirend and I had to let mum escape.

Over the course of the 'festive period', I lost numerous plants due to Jack pulling them over or the dog uprooting them, I lost my mobile phone from Jack throwing it down the loo, I lost my two remote controls due to them being dunked in orange juice, the dog finished off two of my pairs of jeans, I got a cup of orange juice thrown over my suede sofa, my christmas tree lights and two lamps upstairs were destroyed, countless loo rolls decorated the landing and stairs.... can't remember what else but I do remember one night when me, si and kate all just laughed uncontrollably at the ridiculousness of everything going wrong!

I lost a huge amount of sleep, got extremely fit from not sitting down the whole time, got blisters from the sweeping brush being a permanent fixture in my hands, and now have the driest hands from all the washing and cleaning I have done!

I couldn't even walk my gran to the station at the end of her stay. I knew that the five minute walk would take her at least 40 minutes. So I called her a cab to get to the station, and the second I closed the front door on her, I looked down and spotted loads of mud on my hallway floor that she'd just wiped off her dirty shoes to make them look all nice and clean for her journey, and I did that thing that they do in Hollyoaks and Eastenders where you scrunch your eyes and up and melt down the door with your mouth open in a silent cry, and then just sit there crying for ages!!!! I needed that though!!

Alex got home a day later and that's when my Christmas holiday started! I let him wake up at 6am to go down to our barking dog, and I let him bring me a cup of tea, and I actually left muck on the floor after Olive traipsed it in from the garden. I left it there for at least a day. And I just chilled for about 2 days.

At the end of it, I got a cold and sore throat and muscle ache and headaches, but hey, that's Christmas!!!!