We’re on the countdown – but in our own kind of way…

The penny dropped last night and my husband finally acknowledged that Christmas ain’t far away.  ”We need a list” he said!  I smiled.

Actually to be fair he began approaching Christmas with some trepidation a couple of days ago – he bought our tree  Now you may recall that there was a bit of discussion in our house this year about whether we would have a real tree or whether we would invest in an artificial one that we could drag out every year.  I left it to Peter to decide and waiting with some excitement to see what he came up with.  Hooray folk, we have a tree, it’s up AND, best of all IT’S REAL!!!!

It’s true, when the tree goes up it seems to send out this signal to everyone in the house that it’s almost THAT time. My son has had his school dance, Christmas cards continue to be delivered on a daily basis and we’ve started thinking about our Christmas food preparations – well I have anyway.

There are only the four of us this year. Myself and Peter, my son Spencer and Peter’s mum, Sylvia. Normally we would have Christmas lunch in the conservatory, as that’s where the dining table is, however this year things need to be tweaked a bit. There are lots of different levels and stairs in our house and it became apparent that stairs are definitely a challenge Sylvia could do without on Christmas day. So, we hatched a plan. Rather than focus on her frailty we mentioned, as we were putting up the tree ,that the conservatory is really quite cold at this time of year and that we thought we would have Christmas lunch in her little apartment in the house. I said, “well if you think about it you came to us for Christmas dinner last year, so we thought we would come to you this year”. Sensitive though this was (it can’t be easy facing up to the frailty that comes to you when you’re 94) she was delighted. I later heard her on the phone telling an elderly friend that ‘everyone’ was coming to her for Christmas this year.  A big part of being a carer is trying to help people maintain their independence and drive – I think our plan worked – RESULT!

So, last night, feeling rather smug about how things were all falling into place, I sat drinking my coffee and flicking through one of this ‘how to have the perfect Christmas’ magazines.  Granted it was dated 2010 – but hey if you’re looking for perfection does it really matter what year you aim for?  It was the worst thing I could have done.  The magazine, full of pictures of shiny happy people, perfect houses decorated in beautiful homemade decorations that apparently “are so easy to make” are just a million miles away from what our house is going to be at Christmas.  We will be just delighted if we can manage to get the table into Sylvia’s little sitting room and provide a Christmas lunch that fits with all the necessary bits and bobs that our family love.  Of course the difficulty is that we don’t all love the same things so I will have to pitch it somewhere in the middle.

So as for the perfect Christmas 2010 – if I’m honest I didn’t aim for achieve it last Christmas and having flung the magazine in the recycling pile I don’t think I’m going to be attempting it this year either.  I think I’ll just aim for some reality wrapped in tinsel with enough love and hilarity to make our Christmas day special. That my friends will be good enough for me.