The other day I picked up a leaflet at the butcher’s, highlighting the festive delights of a side of lightly spiced beef, and I nearly wept.
It was the shock of waking up to yet another approaching December, of wondering where the year went. How come, given that the seasons have changed, world leaders have shuffled on and off the stage, and Melania Trump has circumnavigated the globe in a pair of 12-inch Louboutins, I still haven’t managed to put a bulb in the bathroom?
A reluctant Christmas reveller at the best of times, I do know that I’ve everything to be thankful for, namely a roof over my head and a credit card, and yet I find myself less willing than ever to march in time to the tinkling, snow-crusted band. Barring accidentally stuffing the car keys into the turkey along with the sage-and-onion mix though, this year’s festive season promises to be as predictable as a bog-standard Yule log.
Once again, I’ll happily ignore all the advice for a perfect Christmas that I haven’t asked for, which permeates the season like the scent of gingerbread-man air-freshener. (I wish I were joking.) Once again, I’ll wait in vain for the chirpy community of Christmas idealists to advise staying in bed with a book rather than soaking the pudding in the sweat of our powdered brows, boning, stuffing ’n’ rolling the birdie, counting the kitchen chairs, polishing the cutlery, unravelling the knotted fairy lights and staring at the hall carpet as if we’ve never seen a red wine stain before.
According to the Yuletide countdown community, there’s not a minute to lose. Currently, we should all be on our hands and knees, looking under the stairs for the rusted tree stand we nearly brained ourselves on last June when we were ferreting out our flip-flops.
Nope, there’ll be no snoozing under a blanket with your marzipan elf until you’ve stood in line for two solid hours with a supermarket trolley full of soft cheeses, hard fats and frostbitten Brussels sprouts while Michael Bublé croons from the depths of his velveteen Y-fronts to wish each and every one of us a very merry Christmas.
In truth, rather than felling my own spruce and birthing my own Christmas fairy before the autumn leaves began to fall, what I have been doing in preparation for the season is wandering around the supermarket thinking about dead people. One of them, my mother, stood next to the tinkling piano in my crowded kitchen last Christmas and shakily sang a couple of numbers from her repertoire, while I, on the run from sentimentality, busied myself under the sink searching for a plunger.
In those bleak years when we’ve lost people, the Yuletide season’s relentless celebration, prescription bonhomie and requirement to indulge in collective fun can feel as unwelcome and inescapable as the graceless drunk on the last bus home.
Recently, though, I received an invitation to a function to celebrate the Mexican Day of the Dead (as you do). I wasn't able to stay for long, but I put my head in the door and accepted a glass of wine from a beautiful woman made up to look like a ghost. Wandering past suited men holding animated conversations in Spanish, I found myself face to face with a traditional Día de los Muertos altar. Beautiful, garish and brash, the shrine was neither sorrowful nor pious, but joyfully celebratory, wild, and eminently festive.
I stood looking at the pink and yellow tissue-paper rectangles strung above the altar, at the photographs and trinkets of the dearly departed, at the offerings of bread and salt and food and water, at the vase of bright yellow marigolds, at the candles in colourful glass containers intended to light the deceased’s journey onwards to the next world (or maybe just to guide their spirits back into the hinterland of our own memories), and felt strangely uplifted.
I wondered whether this festiveness could be recycled at Christmastime, whether I should employ my fairy lights and scented candles to make a Día de los Muertos memorial of my own, just a little to the right of the tree, to cover the grubby paintwork. Maybe the idea might even catch on and we'll find it trending as part of next year's countdowns to the perfect Christmas: order the ham, stuff the carcass, and honour your dead with a celebratory shrine, some smiling skulls and a big bunch of marigolds.