Fake Christmas
Farewell to number forty-seven
Hello Friend,
Years ago, in the late nineties, when I worked for British Airways I longed for a real Christmas. This meant one which happened at my family home and on the actual 25th of December, and not the ‘Fake Christmas’ my mother indulged me in each year. Out of the twelve Christmases as cabin crew, I spent nine of them at hotels abroad. It wasn’t that I was alone, there was always a gleam of cabin crew there who I got to know pretty quickly as a makeshift family. I remember this as both natural and odd, how we would meet in the briefing room, and how I might know one or two of the crew, then decide whether or not the next days might be fun. It seems I was a character too, famous for wild partying, laughter and so much drinking. Occasionally I would perform to the crew by donning a lampshade borrowed from a hotel room lamp and lip-syncing to Shirley Bassey. This echoed my childhood when I was the family entertainer at Christmas. Back then I would write plays about ill donkeys and lost Mary’s, roping in my poor cousin Claire as the donkey. In later years as a teenager, my ‘turn’ would be announced by Mum to jolly up the post Christmas dinner slump. I would do a series of impressions of famous women. Margaret Thatcher, Janet Street-Porter and Sue Ellen - the glamorous drunk wife of J.R. Ewing in the hit TV soap DALLAS. I even slipped in a Ruth Madoc ‘Hello campers’ from Hi-De-Hi. My payment was applause from the family and the delight in my sister visibly squirming with embarrassment.
When flying, the food abroad at Christmas made me uneasy. On Christmas day I longed to be sat around the table at number 47, with crackers and all the trimmings, the whole lot of us, squeezed in, with the steam off the boiled carrots wetting the nets at the windows. The air thick with roasted potatoes and the promise of cream and custard with pudding.
In contrast, I would be put up by British Airways at a swanky hotel. One year in Mauritius, when the crew met for Christmas lunch in the hotel restaurant, I still remember my sorrow of being served a single Brussels sprout alongside a self consciously placed roast potato with a signature tick of gravy.
I remember the first time I saw a black Father Christmas, sweating in a stick-on cotton wool beard by the pool in Kampala, Uganda. How this opened up my eyes to how different ethnicities and cultures fashioned their father Christmas into their own image, something which now seems quite naive to have believed otherwise.
Then there were other Christmases with steak and beautiful wine in Cape Town, or in Venezuela where we were served steamed corn dough stuffed with a stew of meat and olives, fresh onion wrapped in rich parcels of banana leaves called Hallaca. On each of those Christmases I drank more than enough to ward off the feeling of absence.
In my twenties homesickness was part of the job. Back then ‘home’ meant many things. It’s the question at the heart of my first novel, In Search of the Missing Eyelash. What is home? Is it a building, a relationship, your body? A mother? And what did being ‘at home’ really mean when you were gay and homophobia was at every turn. Looking back now, that novel answered itself. The ‘Eyelash’ was about settling the past, recalibrating the body with the self.
I know me telling you this is me avoiding what I really want to say. How this Friday, along with my sister, I handed the keys from number 47, our childhood home, over to the Estate Agents for the new owners. This was the house which was always ‘home’. Not totally a comfortable one growing up, but a pin in the map of where Mum was if I needed her. Now there will be a new couple making it their own. When they strip the walls, they will find caveman (cavechildren?) drawings from me and my sister. In marks drawn by felt pens they’ll find our names and pictures of Tammy cat. A new baby might get born into my bedroom overlooking the back garden. Sex will reignite my mum and dad’s room after all the quiet.
We have been emptying the house over the past year, slowly slowly, adjusting to the idea that she is not there and in those final days of walking around it, I documented each room with my camera. Even with the heating off, it carries the warm atmosphere of Mum. Years of laughter, pets, snoozing, comical farts, kindness, all those things left unsaid, and cake. Hoping I might catch sight of the past, I kept taking more pictures, then examining them for evidence of her. When so much can leave us, it makes sense to record what is left, to firm this up. It is a way of saving our lives. An illusion that one day, all this of my life, of me, will not disappear, even though I know it will. But for now, I am trying to out-art death.
I’ve never known a year like this one. The Queen once called hers an ‘annus horribilis’. I remember thinking how dramatic this statement was, but now with my heart on fire, I understand it. With the build up to the sale of the house and the one year’s anniversary of Mum’s death on the 8th December, I experienced heartburn for the first time. My friend Sam, a yoga teacher and naturopath, advised me to breathe into the pain. She saw it for what it was: clenching and sorrow manifesting itself through the PH imbalance in my stomach. She also suggested I hold the colour green. So I found a lime in the fridge door and a sprig of broccoli and sat cross legged on the floor. As I breathed in, the knotty burn in my chest unfurled and I spluttered out all the sadness. I cleaned the kitchen floor and hormones swirled, rage building like a storm until I wailed down the phone to Min while she was at her office. It was a Super Moon that night, and I was a teenage girl again. I felt like the wolf disguising itself as Little Red Riding Hood in an Angela Carter short story.
After I had let everything loose, I went back to number 47 to the front room where Mum died. I lay on the floor in the very same spot where I tried to resusitate her. I asked her to say hello. I told her how we were selling the place, and I hope she was not going to be upset. I waited for noise, sensation, a knock. Nothing happened. Not a dicky bird. Simply a man walked past the window in a puffer jacket. This was all. The black coat.
When I was researching remedies for heartburn this week, I returned to the wonderfully witty writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron, whose autobiographical novel, Heartburn is a fictionalised retelling of Ephron’s doomed second marriage to the political journalist Carl Bernstein. She learned he was having an affair while she was pregnant with their second son. After filing for divorce she channeled her heartbreak into the screenplay featuring a food writer, Rachel, whose journalist husband, Mark, has an affair, while pregnant with their second son. Her ex-husband to be, Bernstein, threatened to sue. He never did.
“My mother taught me many things when I was growing up, but the main thing I learned from her is that everything is copy. She said it again and again, and I have quoted her saying it again and again. As a result, I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book - if I could just stop crying. One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy - and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.” - Nora Ephron on writing Heartburn in the Guardian interview here
I thought I would bring some live action to this letter by reading to you from my memoir Lifting Off. It seems appropriate to share the portrait of mum with you. It’s a comfort to know she, via my writing, is flying out into the world for you to meet her.
The following reading is taken from Chapter Three ‘ The Pretend Christmas’ and is accessible for my paid subscribers. Do consider becoming one if you enjoy my letter, or perhaps buy a copy of one of my books from your favourite bookshop, or perhaps enjoy a Brussels sprout and wish me well. Thank you, and I wish you all the lightness, humour and good health in 2026.
Write soon, write often,
Karen xx