I'm Dreaming Of A Weird Christmas (2/2) By Maurice Fairfield

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This year for the first time I decorated the house with lights - a new tradition copied like so many things from American films. The grandkids don't care about the cultural ins and outs but they love the lights. My neighbour has gone psycho with the lights. All his trees are Christmas trees decorated with tiny twinkling buds of light nestling in the evergreen leaves. The snowy tradition exported from the old country is kept alive by a fur clad , inflated plastic Santa Claus and a blown up plastic snowman standing six feet tall on the sun-scorched brown grass of the front lawn.

He showed me this with some pride and I sympathised with a straight face when it burst with a startling bang in the heat of the blistering sun.

On the whole it's a puzzling and disturbing time of the year but as the day draws closer and the presents are bought and the cards sent to people, some of whom I barely remember, and others I met and loved in recent times I remember Christmas mornings as dawn broke,and hearing the excited chattering of my then young children as they discovered and compared their presents. The eldest is fifty now and a distant internationally famous lawyer who will not remember me at this time, and the other one lived only until she was seventeen, but my youngest daughter and her children, and the oldest grandson are still here, together with a motley crowd of in-laws of all shapes, sizes and sexes.

Abused, exploited, anachronistic, expensive, and celebrated in illogical ways, it will still be Christmas. Happy Christmas everybody!

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