Dear Fiona,
My husband and I had quite different upbringings – mine was quite traditional English, he grew up an expat, moving frequently around the world, and his parents are each a different nationality. Our Christmases, therefore, looked completely different. He’d be the first to admit that, growing up, Christmas wasn’t that big a thing, or at least, was no bigger than New Year. Sure – they do stockings – but it’s not Father Christmas (or, as he calls him, Santa) who fills them, instead, everybody puts things into each other’s stockings and they’re all completely open about who gave what. They don’t go to church, and their special Christmas meal (which is not turkey) is in the evening. There are no crackers, but that aside they do go pretty all out for it – menu discussion goes on for months in advance, huge thought goes into the wines, and every course reflects somewhere they’ve lived. They do it another variant at New Year, but altering the country-course order and incorporating party games. Then there’s something else on the 6th January – involving more games, and a special flat cake.
I’ve spent Christmas with his family before – and it’s been lovely if different – but this year is the first year that we will have spent Christmas with them at their house with our young children who are now four and two. I so want my children to have the sort of magical Christmas experience that I had growing up: getting excited about Father Christmas, putting out mince pies for him and having Christmas lunch all together with crackers and hats and all the rest – but it’s not looking like that is going to happen. My mother-in-law, who on the one hand tells me how excited she is to be spending Christmas with her grandchildren, also told me that she thought we’d still eat in the evening, “after the children have gone to bed, because that will be more fun for the grown-ups.” (My husband’s siblings are going to be there too, and they don’t have children.)
I’m suddenly dreading something that I should be looking forward to and feeling really emotional about it. I think I’m worried that my children’s Christmas is going to be spoiled – or that I’m not going to be able to protect my vision of what Christmas is, and make it magical for them. My husband doesn’t entirely get it, because he never had it – he doesn’t think that a belief in Father Christmas is vital to a happy childhood, and I know that his siblings are going to do their stocking thing as usual, and they won’t remember to protect the myth. I suspect, from reading your articles on Christmas decorating and Christmas traditions and everything else, that you love Christmas too, and thus are going to be able to empathise. Do you have any ideas as to how to rescue this, short of pulling out of going altogether (which I’m really tempted to do)? But equally I’ve got to find a way through because this is potentially going to be something that happens every other year. I know that the answer is probably something to do with compromise, but I don’t even know how to broach it – my relationship with my mother-in-law can be tricky – and I hate the idea of Father Christmas being lost. Am I being ridiculous?
Love,
All-About-Christmas-Traditions XX
Dear All-About,
Thank you for your letter and yes, you are quite right, I really do love Christmas, and all the traditions, and strongly believe in the sanctity of many of them. And I have children, and in-laws – so far, so same-same – but what I also have, which is going to be a help to you, is a hotline to others who have experience of navigating inter-cultural Christmas clashes. For instance, Henriette von Stockhausen of VSP interiors grew up in Munich, and has spent almost every Christmas of her life in a small village in Austria, where the main celebration takes place on the 24th December and Father Christmas doesn’t feature at all (it is the Christkindl who is the gift-giver, but not via stockings.) Her husband, however, is British – and they and their children live in Britain. Then there’s Alexandra Tolstoy, who is bringing up her children to enjoy both British and Russian Orthodox Christmas traditions – which again involves celebrations on different dates, and the Orthodox Christmas is preceded by a forty day fast, during which British Christmas takes place. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you the good news, which is that there are solutions to every single one of your issues. Before we start on those, I just want to reassure you that your feelings on this are not ridiculous, and nor are you by any means alone. “The thought of having to endure someone else’s traditions makes me queasy,” admits Philip Hooper, joint Managing Director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler.
The thing is that traditions, by their very nature, can be extraordinarily emotive. People often refer to their importance, without necessarily enlarging on why – or the fact that they can form part of our family identity. If you feel like a lone upholder of, say, belief in the existence of Father Christmas, or the necessity of going to church on Christmas morning, it can make you feel very lonely in a group of people who don’t share those traditions, or indicate that they’re not going to respect their significance to you. And I do want to point out that there are some who would advise you to follow your initial instinct and pull out. “Once you have a family and children of your own, I think you just have to do a Christmas takeover, claim Christmas. Let the in-laws come to you,” advises Cathy Nordström. And that is a potential solution, but this year, I think it is almost definitely too late to do it without causing enormous hurt, unless you can find a seriously good reason. Nor do I know if you have the space to host that many people.
Happily, there is another way forward that does not involve either faking flu, or even compromise. For if we examine the ins and outs of Henriette and Alexandra’s Christmases, we’ll see that the joy of them is that nothing gets left by the wayside. Some years, recounts Henriette, she and her family have had an Austrian Christmas on the 24th, and the Christkindl has come in the evening and put presents under the tree, and then Father Christmas has come that night leaving “very token” stockings to be opened on the morning of the 25th, and then they’ve all enjoyed an English Christmas lunch. “By spreading it out, it takes the pressure off – there’s no longer one, single manic day, and it’s more enjoyable for everybody,” she explains. Similarly, Alexandra and her children break the Russian Orthodox fast for the Western Christmas, having, in effect, two Christmas days.
So, with that in mind, let’s get into a detailed look at your concerns. Firstly, regarding Father Christmas or Santa (the name is a red herring, “children really don’t mind what he’s called as long as he brings presents,” says Henriette) I think perhaps you could ask that the narrative be upheld, however, I think you can also tell your children that Father Christmas only visits children – which is why grownups fill each other’s stockings. Next, church; if it’s important to you, then find an appropriate service nearby (Google will help) take your children and go. You could ask others if they’d like to come – you might well find that they’d be glad to. Then, lunch and supper, to which my solution would be to do both – providing that you can find a means of catering the first without interfering with what else is going on in the kitchen. To that end I reckon you concentrate on the specialness that crackers will communicate (Philip Hooper advises bringing your own) and know that they can accompany pizza or scrambled eggs or smoked salmon blinis just as effectively as they can chaperone turkey and all the trimmings. That particular menu, meanwhile, could – for your family – become a literal moveable feast, which happens on a different date (and sometimes more than once; your children will doubtlessly be given an interpretation on ‘Christmas lunch’ day at school.) For your in-laws’ evening meal sounds incredible – and I imagine that it is something that your children are going to enormously enjoy once they are older and able to sit down for longer, stay up later, and are excited by trying new foods. I expect that they’ll also enjoy and embrace New Year, and Epiphany (which is what I suspect is being celebrated on the 6th January, that flat cake is a Galette des Rois) and I urge you to do the same, and join those traditions up with your own. “There is nothing better than prolonging the magic,” says Alexandra, who has succeeded in making Christmas last literally weeks (“I get an extension on British Twelfth Night and don’t take the tree down until the 19th January, and the Russian Orthodox Kreshenie,” she explains.)
The only thing that we haven’t covered is how you’re going to broach this conversation, which is important, for some things – like Father Christmas, and the fact that you’d like to have lunch for your children with crackers on Christmas Day – need pre-planning. I think it might be worth your briefly trying something that my fellow agony aunt, Philippa Perry, recommends in The Book You Want Everyone You Love To Read – which is “to take time to imagine what it is like being the other person, to have had their life and their upbringing, and appreciate the things that they have made from that.” Because from your description of your husband’s peripatetic childhood, it sounds as if, in focussing on being together and food, your parents-in-law tried to hold fast to what they could in a regularly changing environment, and aimed to give their children something consistent. In other words, it’s very possible that you and your parents-in-law have more in common in your approaches to Christmas than it might initially seem, and therefore they will very probably understand your desire to protect certain elements, and be glad to find a way of incorporating them, providing you go in with that attitude – an attitude that wants to find a way for everything to happen, and that concentrates on what you’ve got in common. It’s very easy, in life, to see differences (we’re trained to do so from an early age, via ‘spot the differences’ games) but perhaps, with a little reframing, you could focus on the similarities?
That said, I can’t promise that there won’t be moments during this Christmas when you feel unsettled by the unfamiliarity of what’s around you, and out of control of your children’s Christmas experience. There might be times when it will help to “envision yourself dipped in the finest olive oil,” suggests Cathy Nordström. “Nothing sticks, everything just slides off.” But in at least trying, you are showing your children another vitally important traditional value, which is that family matters. And it might just all be a triumph.
So good luck – and wishing you a very happy – if slightly different - Christmas,
With love,
Fiona XX
