My vision of a perfect Christmas comes from my mother.

The Christmas tree – a real tree, not plastic – went up in November, and stayed put until February or when the needles fell off, whichever came first. The top of the tree always touched the ceiling, and the bottom covered an entire corner of the living room.



The tree was decorated in a three-stage process. First came multiple strings of big primary-coloured lights, each with a little aluminium reflector to keep them from drying out the branch they were attached to. Second came the hanging ornaments, dozens of them of every vintage, style and quality, covering every inch of every branch until there was no room left for another. Finally came the silver tinsel that created the shimmering, shiny Christmas dream that is still my goal today.



Christmas in our house had no religious significance. We didn’t attend midnight mass, and we never had the figure of baby Jesus or the manger. Instead, we had Christmas cards from anyone that my mother had ever met, lined up on strings over the living-room sofa. The writing and sending of cards was her job, and they were handwritten without a photocopied newsletter.

My father paid four times his weekly wage for the greatest gift of my life Read more

Of course the only thing that mattered to us children were the presents. While we could never afford the biggest or best of the toys that were being advertised on TV, we certainly had lots of other, smaller and cheaper gifts, carefully separated between boy toys and girl toys. Even better, we were one of those families that never believed in saving and reusing gift wrap. We tore it off with great abandon and then tossed it into the fireplace to burn.



The most amazing thing about our Christmas was that it even happened, and that it was a wonderful day year after year. My mother claimed that Christmas was “for the kids, not the adults” but the truth was that this was the one day of the year that she protected from my father’s interference. It is only years later that I realise just how hard that must have been.



My parents were married in 1952. They were both just 24 years of age, and my father had been widowed only six months earlier. His first wife had killed herself by walking in front of a train, leaving behind her husband and her infant child, my half-brother.



I do not know whether that trauma was the cause of my father’s psychosis, or whether her suicide was the result of something that had been with him throughout his life, but I do know that he was a desperately unhappy man. I grew up never knowing affection or approval, and my mother’s life was even bleaker.



Her marriage was entirely about housekeeping and raising children. There was no possibility that she could get a job, and what few friends she had in the local community of mothers were subject to intense scrutiny and criticism. I don’t recall her ever having a hobby, and the idea of volunteering or joining a club was never considered because of his assumption that it would somehow impinge on my father’s needs. My mother’s entire life was curtailed by the phrase “but what if I need you to ...”



My mother has always made a point of saying “at least he didn’t hit me” with an unspoken understanding that abuse takes many other forms. Some, like the unending criticism and undermining of her confidence, were evident. Others, like the indignity of asking every week for the “grocery money” were not.

When once each year she was allowed to travel to visit her family it always involved a long 12-hour drive, a half day at my grandparents’ house, and another 12-hour return journey the next day. This was perhaps the worst punishment possible in a family like my mother’s that thrived on visiting and “just sitting around talking”.



And yet somehow my mother made sure that my father stayed far away from Christmas, and managed to protect that one day for us kids. The decorations that she hung were never touched, and while we children were tearing open stacks of presents my father slept late, until finally waking up and half-heartedly opening his own small collection of unwanted gifts.



More and more it feels to me like she was actually a lot stronger than I believed.

I suppose it’s possible that my father simply understood that this was the line he could not cross, but looking back I have to think that my mother actually stood up to him and demanded that he stay far away from Christmas.

To have done this would have taken considerable courage, and I take pride in my mother’s determination to give all of her children one magic day each year.