“It doesn’t feel like Christmas,” people sigh.

“Will Santa still come?” children plead.

“Christmas is cancelled for millions of people,” international Covid-19 headlines bellow in 2020.

“Cancelled”.  That word claws at me. 

I remember the year that it was.  

How old was I?  Twelve?  Thirteen?  So many of our Christmases were terrible that they blur.

But, reminded by Covid-19’s ‘cancelled’ Christmas, that year stands out. 

“I’m going to cancel Christmas”. 

A snarled warning from our mother. 

Because… there we were, fighting over the star, my sibling and I, a gold plastic glittery thing, coveted, but never a source of conflict.  Until that year.

It may have seemed trivial, but Christmas decorations were objects of joy in our house.  A temporary bit of magic in a place full of tension.  So, for him, for I, it had to be perfect. 

But that year, inexplicably, we had different visions of ‘perfection’.

Far more beautiful than any of my Barbies, she had a cone under her dress instead of legs so that she could go on top of a tree. 

Smug in my logic, I was certain I would win our little war. 

However, also hell bent on getting his own way, my red-faced brother, throwing me a monstrous look, rammed the star on top of the tree, where it wobbled momentarily before I, from the other side of our 6-foot plastic fir, snatched it and threw it behind a chair. 

Lobbing it back and forth, screaming forcefully, we barely noted the arrival of our mother, wooden spoon in hand.  A spoon yanked so rapidly from her saucepan that it still dripped some sticky substance.  Fascinated, we watched the goo ground into the carpet as she paced back and forth, screaming “quit it, or I’ll cancel Christmas”. 

Of course, we ignored her. 

Nothing and no one has the power to cancel Christmas.   

Indeed, for a week or so it was quiet enough that we didn’t panic, in full faith that we would end up with a ‘normal’ Christmas. 

So, messy silver tinsel continued falling from the tree on every breath of air, and the angel or star sat aslant on the top, switched whenever one of us kids walked past, both ornaments now minus their glitter from the force of our hands.  

For those few days, we tramped off to school, then back, creeping in to visit the tree.

There I would gaze at it, counting the packages underneath as though the tree might birth more whilst I, in a distant classroom, was failing math.  

Slinking into the house, pausing to peel off sweaty socks and dump them by the door, I tiptoed down the hallway, around the brick dividing wall, to arrive in the living room. 

Where I stopped.  Silenced. 

Not only was my angel not there.  The star was also gone. 

There was no longer any tree to put them on. 

Our Santa’s grotto was stripped bare. 

The jolly-red-faced-man-and-his-reindeer mural had vanished from the hall wall, and the dainty heirloom crystal bowls of sweets, all the crocheted hanging things previously draped off doorknobs, all of it was gone. 

On the carpet, not even a plastic pine needle remained.  Only the marks of a vacuum cleaner on thick carpet. 

Pestered for a deadline by which everything would reappear, she revealed only that there would be no Christmas lunch – neither here nor at the home of any relative.

So, with three days to go until December 25, and no more school (thus in an unhappy lockdown for the next 6 weeks), I plodded into the tree-less living room three or four times a day, obsessively checking on the presents sent by relatives and now tossed in a pile in a corner. 

I feared she may throw them away. 

Or more likely incinerate them, our preferred method of rubbish disposal. 

Silently tracking him with my eyes, I noted that, although we had no pudding to boil, our father had become a bubbling pot.

Non-churchgoers, there was no church, so in the end our marker of Christmas day was one overheard telephone conversation, our mother’s clipped voice reiterating, as she twisted the cord around her wrist like a shackle, that we would not be attending the extended-family lunch.  

Accurately assessing her mood, no relative approached our house, leaving us as isolated as though we were quarantined. 

Hidden behind our living room curtains, nose pressed to the glass, I watched traffic, recognising the vehicles of various relatives as they glided past. 

Admittedly, I was torn - we were missing the Christmas food, but also the drunken tension of the entire thing.

Like flies we were attracted by the contents of our grandmother’s kitchen. 

We were not particularly attached to some of our relatives.

Anticipating the dismay of extended family, on Boxing Day our mother finally allowed us the presents. 

Swiftly, scooping them up, we scattered to separate rooms, where crouched on my bedroom floor, I listlessly ripped paper off boxes, now too drained by the atmosphere in our house to care about the contents. 

Christmas had been like a bizarre grief process – first the shock of the ‘death’, then disbelief, sadness, and anger, wrapping up with fear for the future.

Because, slumped on my bed I was super-silent, aware of the impending inferno. 

Adrenaline-pumping-ly alert, I stared at nothing, waiting… 

And so, that was Christmas.  The year it was cancelled. 

And yes, there was yelling, too soon it did come. 

Another year over, the next one simply a date change.

 Originally written December, 2020