A Christmas ghost story

For all of you feeling really f**king deeply, crashingly weird and lost and discombobulated and sad and fundamentally disconnected from this allegedly Most Wonderful Time.

I don’t really like Christmas very much.

Oh, God - I’m sorry! I am!

But I don’t.

It’s not because I’m a misanthropic vibe-shitting joyless Scrooge McGrinchface borderline depressive who hates to see other people happy.

I’m not.

And it’s not that the loss of structure, the loss of a bloody schedule over the break leaves me untethered and aimless, it’s not that all that time amounts to nothing short of an existential crise, a downward spiral into What Am I Doing and Why Does It Matter? It Doesn’t, Does It? None Of It? It’s not that I miss work like a lover, or that the excesses of food and booze make me anxious or that the freaky formless days, the 27th, 28th, 29th feel endlessly, interminably bleak, and their horizon seems long and low and flat and grey and the only thing I can think to do is, cinema? …

Well, it is.

It is that.

But it’s mainly how terribly, terribly sad Christmas is.

Want to hear a Christmas ghost story?

It’s Christmas; Christmas itself.

Christmas is haunted. It’s wall-to-wall ghosts. All the people we’ve lost - to death, of course; those who were there, every year, for better or fractious worse, the grandparents and parents and friends who played a part, showed their faces, cracked their bad jokes, flashed their iffy politics, reminisced, embarrassed, patronised, adored; but not this year, nor any of the other years to come - but also: those we’ve lost to time. To rows, and misunderstandings, and mistakes. To circumstances. To a bland dwindling, an everyday ebbing. Oh, that lot comes whooshing back at Christmas, all those ghosts. They come individually, or all at once. Knocking on our bedroom windows in the middle of the night, whispering in our dreams, flickering on the peripheries while we eat a potato, rewatch The Holiday, poking us in the ribs with some sudden, unexpected cause to recall; asking to be thought about, considered, missed.

And is if they aren’t enough? As if the creeping, aching, complex pity of that multiple pile-up absence isn’t enough…? After them, come the ghosts of all the people you think you should be, but aren’t. All the ways you fail in being, all the concepts, the ideals, the models on acceptable comportment and configuration which society enforces upon us particularly stringently at this particular time, because the urge toward Christmas compliance is a friggin’ violent one. They’re spectres, rather than ghosts, I guess. Seasonal Dementors.

There’s the one that thinks you should be happier than you are; you know: generally, but particularly now. (It’s Christmas! What’s wrong with you? Why are you crying?) And there’s the one that thinks you should definitely be part of a better, more functional family set-up. A family like the ones on the films and in the adverts! Loving, despite it all. Accepting. Warm. Capable of epic fall-outs, of course; but in the end? Eternally your true north, your people, your home. So why doesn't yours feel like that? Why does it feel distanced and fractured and fragile and dangerous and off? Why, when you head for the town where you grew up, in trains otherwise packed out with haute Driving Home For Christmas energy, do you feel like you’re being sucked into a trap? Emotional quicksanded? And that sicky, out-of-body feeling you get on Christmas Eve, when you find yourself back in the same old pub with the same old crowd, friends from school, the Firstname-Surname brigade who used to form your entire world - but now? You feel so detached from them, so like a fraud; the conversation sounds tinny and empty and so do the songs, and you look around and long for the soulless anonymity of the city in which you live the rest of the year, and you think:

How did I come from this? Who am I?

The spectres do that.

And there’s the ghosts of all the things which should have been, but aren’t. The longed for pregnancies which didn't take. The job promotions which never happened. The relationship which had seemed so good, so promising, so sure, but, in the end… just wasn’t. Which is why you have no one to bring to dinner (again).

Christmas is a reckoning. Christmas is a stocktaking; and its accountants are ghosts.

And then: there’s the ghosts of Us. All our past incarnations, all at once, flooding back, from every Christmas there’s ever been. If we had happy childhoods, we’re haunted by the bittersweetness of their passing, that weird feeling you get when you drive passed a place in which you used to live, where you were happy, and you think: “If I squint at the windows, will I see myself? Is part of me still there?”. And we think about our own children, and how they will grow too, because everyone grows up and grows old and dies…

And if we didn't have happy childhoods, then we’re haunted by that; of course we are! How could we not be?

And then, there’s the intimation of all the ghosts to come. The sudden, unavoidable realisation (perhaps) that your relationship truly is doomed - beyond doomed: it’s over. It’s done. You’ve hung on and hung on but can feel it creaking and crashing away under you both like a melting ice cap, and you can’t ignore this any more, you can’t - it’s not for nothing that the first working day of the New Year is called “Divorce Day” in legal circles, that’s how busy divorce lawyers are - which means, you know this time next year, there will be yet more ghosts round your Christmas table. Yours’, and your kids’. More ghosts for all!

There’s more. I’m sure there’s more. I’m sure they’ll come and find me over the next 10 days, but for now: there you go. That’s your Christmas ghost story.

And if you don’t experience it like this, if Christmas is all joy and twinkles and infinite wonder and gratitude and love and warmth: I am glad for you. Truly! The more happy people there are in the world, the better for the rest of us.

But if it’s not That for you, if you currently find yourself trapped in a world which insists it IS all wonder and joy and absolutely nothing else and anyone who thinks otherwise is f**ked; if the dissonance that causes you is sickening and scary and giving you a distinct sense you’re broken in this respect, broken: in the art of Christmas…

Know that you are not. Know that Christmas passes, but that it is definitely haunted. Know that I see you.

You - and so many damn ghosts.