I cringe when people ask, “Are you ready for Christmas? Have you done all your shopping?” I don’t really ‘get ready for Christmas’ in that way that many people do. I don’t like Christmas shopping at all. I feel panicked and uncomfortable and what used to feel exciting now feels flat and causes my heart to ache in my chest.

I cringe when people ask, “Have you done all your shopping?” I don’t like Christmas shopping at all. I feel panicked and uncomfortable and what used to feel exciting now feels flat and causes my heart to ache in my chest.

The other thing I don’t like is when they ask, “What are you doing for Christmas?”. When I say, “Oh! Nothing, just staying at home.”, they invite me to share their Christmas. They don’t know that this feels OK to me. I will light some candles and make some food and sit behind the wreath adorned door with my books and my thoughts and my wishes for a peaceful world. Too many of these messages these days profess intentions to get to meet up that don’t come to fruition.

The other thing I don’t like is when people ask, “What are you doing for Christmas?”. When I say, “Oh! Nothing, just staying at home.”, they invite me to share their Christmas. They don’t know that being alone feels completely OK to me. I will light some candles and make some food and sit behind the wreath-adorned door with my books and my thoughts and my wishes for a peaceful world.

My mother’s recipe for a Christmas tree was to cut a branch of Forsythia and bring it into the house. She would use silver poster paint to decorate it then set it upright in a vase, stabilised with silver foil. Maybe one of us children would assist with the painting. Then she would send my dad up to the attic for the glass baubles and use them to decorate the branch. As the branch encountered the warmth of the house, gradually and inexorably, the bright yellow flowers would bloom amongst the baubles.

A Christmas tradition that I love is to create a wreath for the door. Another of my mother’s recipes was to take a wire coathanger—our house seemed to breed those things—and to shape it into a ring. Then we would gather holly sprigs, frantically seeking those with some berries, and painfully attach these with wire to the loop. Finished with a red ribbon this would go on our front door.

Then she would bake. Something I love is Christmas baking. When I was a teacher I used to do this in the October half-term break, making mincemeat and Christmas puddings and maybe a cake. I would gather the children from their Nintendos and get them to take a stir the pudding and make a wish. I remember lining up to do this at infant school in the school kitchen. I don’t know what I would wish for at the tender age of five.

It hurts to do the Christmas baking these days. I both love it and it hurts. Grieving is loving “that which has disappeared from view.”, as Stephen Jenkinson so beautifully said, and Christmas baking is one of the ways I grieve for my boy, Sam. And that is the nature of grief, it takes me close to my son and it hurts.