How to make it to Christmas
December exhaustion | the power of story | a wild and wonderful place
‘It is always this way. You fit a year into December’.
Last year I read a short story entitled December by Tasmanian writer Lizzie Barrat1. December is a beautiful meditation on the ‘things we do’ in the weeks leading up to Christmas. With humour and delicate wisdom, Lizzie illuminates the anxiety, exhaustion and expectation of our festive season.
Homemade gingerbread for the masses. Two carol services a night. A family donkey trip under brittle stars. You can move out to a stable but you still have to entertain guests – kings no less – dirty clothes shoved hurriedly under the manger, afterbirth a secret hidden by your halo which must not slip’.
Then she turns our attention to the big ideas pulsing through the month of December — family, giving, gratitude, and joy.
‘But it is always this way too. The noise stops. The angels pack up and fly away. The cattle leave for the fields and the guests depart by camel or plane. And there you are, sun on your eyelids. Green garden exhaling around you. New life breathing, miraculous, in your arms’.
You know the feeling —
your ankles sunk deep in fresh snow;
your first love asleep on your breast;
your children waking on Christmas morning to gifts they cannot believe you could have made;
the joy of ‘making it’ to Christmas.
*
Stories like December are wonderful. Powerful even.
In a conversation with Richard Fidler on ABC Conversations, master story-teller and Australia's Queen of Fairy Tales, Kate Forsyth, said that stories:
connect people by helping them empathise with others;
carry encoded messages of wisdom which help us to learn how to live better; and
inspire us to think, explore, and create change.
And I’ll add, to write and share our own stories.
In December last year, I wrote a short story entitled, How to Make it to Christmas.
It was our first Christmas without our beloved Baba. It was my first Christmas with my mother overseas. Some of my friends were stuck at home enjoying a COVID Christmas. Others were visiting family they hadn’t seen for 3 years.
That December I added early mornings at my writing desk to my Christmas list, which made me a little tired (grumpy even, Anders?) but once it was done and I had shared it with my family and close friends, I felt like I had learnt how to fly — above the hustle and the tinkle of December.
How to make it to Christmas
It’s the first of December. A little before six o’clock in the morning. Christmas has jumped out of the boxes in the lounge room and is jingling around the house. My four children are wearing their festive pyjamas and building a homemade sleigh with the washing basket. Did I mention it’s a school day?
“Mum, you have to be asleep now or Santa won’t bring you any presents,” my littlest boy tells me as I set the table for breakfast. He is wearing a reindeer headband, a bulging pillowcase slung over his shoulder and a Grinch-green smile on his face. I sigh, if only I could go back to bed, I could do with a little more rest. But alas, the month-long pilgrimage to Christmas has begun and there is much to do.
There are end-of-year parties to attend three nights a week and sustainable gifts to make with the kids. A kindergarten musical that my husband and I can’t miss and parcels to hide from my online shopping fling. A gingerbread house to engineer with egg-white and sugar and decorations to hang without making clutter. Magical stories to spin night after night and the promise of Christmas to keep: everlasting light.
Perhaps this is how December is meant to be. Your to-do list is ever-expanding, like the girth of Mary’s belly. A heaviness in your legs from the weight of it all. Soon I won’t be able to see my toes. I wonder how I will make it.
*
“Christmas is all about lists,” a friend muses at school drop-off. I admire her halo and race home to get started. Christmas cards are first up. We decide to make potato stamp prints, they are cute and environmentally friendly — tick, tick. Except there is a potato shortage in Tasmania — a cost of climate change. The kids get paint on the good table and I’m left printing all the cards.
What’s next? Hang the Advent calendar, a homemade creation, with twenty-four felt pockets for tiny treasures to hide in. This countdown reminds us to be patient; to wait. Good things come to those who can self-regulate. Except no one has command of their head and they squabble, “Mine, mine, mine.” The chocolate Santas hit the wall as they shout, “Mum, is that all?”.
But wait, we have Advent candles too — one, two, three and four. A little ritual that started years before, one I adore. We light them each evening and read stories in a huddle. The press of their bodies, all piled on the couch: a moment of calm, our daily grace above the rabble. The boys like the lighter, the smoke and the danger. I worry that our house will go up in a fire.
At least I have Santa to rein in the behaviour — “You know who’s watching?” And an ‘elf on the shelf’ to back me, completely. But Santa always delivers and no one gets coal. So I switch on Netflix to watch over the flock. Then get back to my Christmas list.
Harvest succulents from the side of a highway to make tiny terrariums. Drive across town to pick up second-hand bargains. Haul the Christmas tree inside, in its metre-wide pot. It’s a feat that requires a trolley and three adults, the top almost scraping our ceiling. And just when I feel I am making some progress, my husband announces homemade crackers for Christmas breakfast. So to my list I scribble: collect toilet rolls and festive one-liners.
By the eleventh of December, I’d lost it — my mind and the list. The festive hysteria is building. The children are braying, the house needs mucking out, and little black insects have hatched in our tree. I really need my cleaner but she’s got COVID-19.
Thank the stars my husband is here — mowing the lawn and blowing the deck. And we have somewhere to sleep. The Christ child arrived with less than a bundle. So this Christmas I will practice gratitude. Our messy home will be cherished and our health and safety blessed. Then I’ll head outside under a charcoal-grey sky to watch rain and sleet call summer a lie.
*
And I’ll remember to breathe before school in the hallway, the kids lined up with their bags, thinking Mum has gone crazy. Perhaps a mantra would be useful for times like this — ‘It’s only breakfast for 30. Kate, you can do this!” Except this year I won’t have Grandma to help, she’s flown overseas, now a magi on Skype. And it’s up to me to continue the family traditions, to tell our Christmas story with native additions.
With seven days to go, I begin to relax. School finishes, leave starts, presents are wrapped. My list drops. I’m ready for the final push. It’s the Eve Santa is coming, I have almost made it, one more sleep. Except the summer sun keeps my children awake and I worry that this Christmas will go past its due date.
But early the next morning four children burst, into our bedroom with sacks full of loot. They wake Mum and Dad still asleep in their bed and trumpet the news, “Happy Christmas,” like birds. I gather them one by one in a hug, wrestling limbs, paper, and boxes with string. Their joy rises with the sun on our street — over the hills, across the river, higher and higher, until it disappears into the clouds.
A wild and wonderful place that I am dreaming of …
And you?
What wild and wonderful places are you dreaming of?
How do you make it through December? What’s your secret?
With love and gratitude,
Kate x
P.S A little Frankie update — last week, on a rainy grey Sunday we drove south to Franklin to visit our favourite lamb. It had been five weeks since we had dropped him to his home on the farm. We hoped he would remember us.
When we arrived he was waiting by the backdoor for his bottle of milk, his nose pressed against the glass.
I recognised his woolly face, but not his stocky physique, ballooning belly and missing tail. He was a real farm boy now. Except his fleece was clean and his ears pricked at the sound of the children.
Frankie let Lottie feed him, then Sylvia walked him around the garden, her arm around his neck in a strangle hold, just like those days she played with him in her bedroom, until he was startled by the dog and burst free from her grip. Sylvia tumbled knees first into the sodden grass slick with poo.
Frankie still loves the couch.
He hangs with the flock during the day and sleeps on the outside couch with Gracie, an orphaned calf, recovering from a broken leg. And he still loves a bottle. Perhaps lambs are like human babies — some take longer to give up ‘the boob’ than others. Sylvia and Frankie share that in common at least.
I wonder what sort of sheep he will become? And I hoped we were not responsible for his bad habits.
We herded the flock into a neighbours paddock full of tall green grass. Then returned to the house, where we found Frankie waiting for us. We said goodbye with full hearts and wet boots then drove home with half a lamb, cut up, in a box.