There is something exquisite about Melania Trump, and I am not talking about her appearance or what she (probably) smells like. She doesn’t defy interpretation so much as beguile it; you want to strip away the layers, but you know you do so at your peril; the layers might be all there is. Mystery piles on mystery: who owns a jacket sporting the words “I really don’t care”, like the one she wore to a detention centre for child migrants? What binds her to her husband, a man whose proximity seems to affect her viscerally, and not in a good way? Can she really freeze human organs using only a look?

This week, all eyes were on her Christmas trees: why were they red? Why were there so many of them? How can something made out of berries look so creepy? Was opulence the problem? First ladies traditionally play down their wealth, whether for Democrat reasons (the ugliness of inequality) or Republican ones (ostentatious display, while not immoral, is at odds with being relied on to make your own biscuits). But this is an altogether different first family: they occupy high office; they run their own clothing company; they have email accounts on multiple servers; no one expects pretend humility and down-to-earthness, the standards of the old school. And Melania wouldn’t get out of bed to defy a convention that was already dead, let alone deck her hallways blood red for it.

Possibly, as has been suggested already, she is trying to separate us from nature, with trees the colour no tree has ever been lined up in a harsh, firing-squad formation. That would work thematically with last year – lots of uplit dead twigs, very much a winter-is-coming moment, in the Game of Thrones unkillable zombie sense, not the jingle bells one. I remain open to the possibility. Except she always seems so subversive: those sceptical eyes, those strategic eyebrows; decades hence, I will not be surprised to hear she prevented a third world war numerous times with some tactical chicken nuggets. I don’t think she wishes us ill. If she has a long game, the conjuring of a post-bucolic hellscape is only a waypoint.

Then someone on Twitter stuck white bonnets on the trees, turning the festive scene into The Handmaid’s Tale. There hasn’t been a better Melania-themed Twitter joke since she dressed in black lace to meet the pope, and someone scrawled on a photograph of the event: “Dress for the job you want: Widow.” And there is the ghost of a possibility that Melania isn’t mysterious at all, that she is an open book, a blank slate that social media inscribes for itself. The theories it throws up – she is a robot; she is a North Korean plant; she is about to make a rabbit sign behind Trump’s head – have nothing to do with her and everything to do with the diseased hive mind. Yet, these trees are not just a little bit reminiscent of the Netflix series; they look uncannily like a Handmaid set-piece event, just before someone gets stoned to death.

This is what it is all about; first, she puts us in mind of a dystopian future where women are enslaved; later, she will appear and make some blinking eye signals that the entire fandom of Lost will have to drop out of their Reddit threads to solve; soon, we will be ready to smash the patriarchy on her command.

How we celebrate the anniversary of my dad’s death

We have been celebrating my dad’s “deathiversary” every year for 14 years. “Deathday” would have been less of a mouthful, but sounded too blunt at the time. He died on Thanksgiving, which always brings about a soliloquy from someone about creeping Americanisms, so we never mention it.

The format is always the same: we go to the Cork & Bottle in Leicester Square, London, and pretend it was his favourite, which is legitimate because it has a licence and therefore falls into his favourite genre of places, but really it is because it is on the Northern line. We never spend much time talking about the man himself: gathering to toast someone and also praise him would be like going to church and ending up with a hangover, the worst of all possible worlds.

But a mystery occurred a short time after he died: a kind man lent us a boat so we could go out to sea and scatter his ashes, and someone stole the man’s barometer. My stepmother jokes that the boat owner is a dangerous fantasist and the rest of us think it was my brother. We spent the first seven years talking about that, as if we had all got together for a live-action game of Cluedo. Since the urgency of the missing equipment has evaporated – we never got to the bottom of it, although we did reminisce about daring Williams thefts through the generations – we have mainly talked about feuds. Why doesn’t X talk to Y? What happened to make A go and live off-grid, with no forwarding address and no means for anyone to contact them (except their friends, who see them all the time)?

Two observations: it is incredible how much news can come out after all this time; and the root cause is always something to do with sex, unless it is to do with money.

Who would think Santa could be a man?

The town of Newton Aycliffe has enjoyed a parading Santa every Christmas Eve since the 1960s, and there has never been a shortage of men for the role. What possessed two women to volunteer this year is an enigma, at least to the Labour councillor Arun Chandran, who finds this unnatural. He worries that children, especially, expect a man, given that Santa’s other name is Father Christmas. Gender-essentialist trait-finding doesn’t interest me, but I will say this: Santa has two core skills; remembering who to get presents for (everybody) and wrapping them. Never mind: “Can Santa be female?” In what known universe can Santa be male?