Three years ago last week, on an otherwise average Monday afternoon, my dad stopped breathing, faded to black-and-white like an old movie, and – I don’t know how else to describe it – flattened slightly, as though whatever force was keeping him in three dimensions had abruptly packed up and moved on. I don’t believe in God or heaven or ghosts or reincarnation (and neither did he, as far as I know), so that was that. He wouldn’t be visiting us in the form of a wailing bed sheet, or playing backgammon on a cloud with Jerry Orbach and my childhood cat. I just didn’t have a dad any more, and I never would again. He was, and then he wasn’t. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.

He was sick at Thanksgiving, two weeks earlier, but we didn’t know how sick. Cancer doesn’t hand you an itinerary. It’s not as though, up to a certain point, you have an OK amount of cancer, and then one day the doctor’s like, “Uh oh! Too much cancer!” and then all your loved ones rush to your bedside (in your clean, cozy bedroom at home, of course – no catheter bags or grumpy nurses or antiseptic smells in this fantasy) for some poetic, wise goodbyes. Nah. Cancer, at least in my dad’s case, is a complex breaking down of multiple systems, both slow and sudden. You have six months and then you have six hours.

So, that Christmas was strange. Honestly, I don’t even remember it. I slept a lot that month (and in the Decembers since), and I’m sure I didn’t get anyone any gifts. I think my brother came to town, but I only say that because I’ve seen pictures of myself holding his baby for the first time, which must have been very nice. I like babies. I doubt we cooked, but there were still plenty of grief casseroles that nice people had dropped off on our porch. It was a holiday defined by absence, not presence.

When you’re not religious, like me (and, what do I know, maybe when you are religious, too), holidays don’t mean much beyond connecting with the people you love. If you take the magic baby out of the equation, Christmas is actually a pretty bizarre ritual wherein you drag a dirty tree into your house, drain your savings account for no reason, and lie to children about a reverse-burgling Kenny Rogers who rides a flying deer and is impervious to fire. Without faith, it’s nonsense. Except that, really, rituals aren’t nonsense. They’re highly functional. They impose the illusion of order on a chaotic life; they cement our place within and commitment to a collective.

Christmas in particular, to me, has always been about re-affirming my sense of home. But without the person we loved the most, was there still a point?

My dad had three functions at Christmas: boundless enthusiasm, musical accompaniment (he played the piano), and stockings. My mom’s the CEO – the one who keeps track of what people need, what their lives are missing, how much can be spent – and she left my dad to run wild as the Vice President in Charge of Tacky Ephemera. I still have a cardboard box marked “???”, which I dutifully cart from house to house every time I move, filled with silly, useless things from my dad. A flashlight shaped like a slug. A plastic sheep that poops chocolate-covered raisins. Forty-five satsumas. A poem. He’d fill his own stocking, too – he knew the rest of us were too scattered to get around to it, a selfish oversight I will always regret – pulling out each “gift” with a gasp of gratitude so convincing you almost forgot it was bacon-flavoured throat spray he was beaming over, and that he’d bought it for himself.

I took the concept of “home” for granted for a long time. I thought it was a place, a constant, a given. I never understood, until things changed, that “home” was something my parents actively built around me, all the time – a construction, a collection of comforting samenesses, a privilege. The fact that I got to have a dad at all – let alone such a marvellous, funny, devoted one – is among the luckiest coincidences of my life. And for months after he died, I didn’t understand what happened next. My home was dead too, I thought. My family was broken.

But then I realised, oh, of course: I have a partner now, I have kids, I have in-laws and a house, I have a mom who deserves to be wrapped up in the kind of warmth and ease she’s been weaving around the rest of us for all these years. Home doesn’t just happen – we make it; and mine didn’t vanish – the responsibility of building it just passed to me.

I’m hanging stockings this year, and, Kenny Rogers willing, they’ll be filled with the most magnificent collection of useless crap the world has ever seen.