LETTER FROM AMERICA: FIONA MCCANN on her first family Christmas as a mum
‘TIS THE NIGHT before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature is stirring. Wishful thinking, given the arrival last month of my brand new daughter, who is a champ at precisely the kind of nocturnal stirring of which the poem’s St Nicholas is said to disapprove.
At six weeks’ old, she is unaware of his imminent arrival. It will be some time before she understands who Santa Claus is, and hopefully much more time before she understands anew. But I understand that this year I am expected to step into his shiny boots for the first time. I am somebody’s mammy, which means I am also her event coordinator, and I really, really want her to love Christmas as I did.
Growing up, I accepted that Christmas was magic. And I don’t just mean the part about the bearded geriatric in a flying sleigh who manages to dispense presents to millions of children all over the world in the space of one night. I mean it was magic because on Christmas day even the ordinary became somehow enchanted. Tins of USA biscuits multiplied mysteriously in the front room, the turkey fed all comers like a biblical miracle for meals on end, and ’twas the season, the only time all year, when my parents set their food on fire. As a little girl, the anticipation of all that dazzle and joy had me wide awake and frantic with excitement in the early hours of my childhood Christmases.
What I didn’t realise was that the magic was carefully crafted by the two people whose sleep I interrupted at 2am on Christmas morning to ask if it was time to go down and open the presents.
This year, it’s all up to me. Not just the stocking filling and present purchasing, but the Yuletide vittles too, which means I’m supposed to have the turkey ordered weeks ago, the Christmas cake wrapped in tin foil and stored on the piano, and all the presents neatly wrapped and nestling under the tree. Who knew that magic was such hard work?
For this and other reasons, the run-up to the festive season has been markedly different this year. Gone are the rounds of boozy parties, the calendar packed with mulled wine evenings, office dos, catch-ups, pub crawls and other festive perennials. I may still look like I’ve been drinking around the clock, but that’s post-partum dishevellment, not party dissipation, I promise you. Plus, without that pre-packed calendar of meet-ups and The Late Late Toy Show to alert you, Christmas can really sneak up on a body.
To add to the newness, we moved country to Portland, Oregon, and thus my daughter is spending her first Christmas in America, which despite the lack of Rubberbandits on the radio, has its own advantages.
The Americans may not technically have invented Christmas, but they sure gave it the Hollywood gloss. With ballsy new worldliness, they dispensed with some time-honoured traditions – the heavy fruit cakes and suet-laden pies are gone, for example – but they’ve gone hell for leather on things such as refined sugar and fairy lights. There are Christmas cookies, cakes and candies ar fud na háite and every house is bedecked within and without in a wattage of coloured lights that would greatly inconvenience Al Gore.
And those of you who groan at Christmas creep ought to see how the Americans can drag the arse out of this festive season. Within seconds of polishing off the pumpkin pie on this year’s Thanksgiving, which fell on November 25th, Christmas trees were up all over Portland.
Rather than the usual car-park purchase, I tramped into a forest like a gutsy pioneer and chopped down my own Christmas tree. Granted, to call it a forest might be an exaggeration – this was more of a large field of trees on a farm. Ditto the claim that I chopped it down myself – my inexperience with a hand saw meant I had to call on the tree farmer to fell seven feet of Noble fir on my behalf.
But the tree was carted from forest to front room, and all those big fluffy fir boughs weren’t going to ornament themselves. I wanted that kind of mish-mash collection – gaudy glass baubles, balding tinsel and lopsided angels – that I remember from my girlhood. But I see now that these will take years to amass, and for my daughter to imbue with the kind of significance such geegaws have for me. These are part of the Christmas pasts of my own childhood, along with the crib in the shoebox, the concertina strings of metallic paper thumbtacked to the ceiling, the candle in the window, the dozing mother flushed by the fire, the fairy-light-burdened father twiddling bulbs with whispered blasphemies, the pyjama-ed sisters stealing the caramel barrels out of the Cadbury’s Roses box, the games of cards and singing uncles and brandy butter eaten straight from the bowl.
But this is Christmas present, and tomorrow morning is our daughter’s first. She may be too young to appreciate it, but tomorrow my new family will mint its own traditions. Without the Christmas cake and caramel barrels, maybe, but with fairy lights and sugar highs and a little girl wide awake
