Single Parenthood & I: A Christmas Diary
Christmas is all about the kids, isn't it? So how do I get through all of this on my own, with a very excited seven year-old and a very excited nine year-old?
Christmas Eve
7.30am: The kids are already up. I can hear them squawking away at each other downstairs. I run downstairs and fix them crumpets and blueberries. Today is a busy day. I have a lot to do. One podcast to edit, two podcasts to upload, one other thing I’ve got to write. I’ve got enough time to fit everything in before I get everything else done.
11.00am: Time to knock work on the head until after all of this is over. Every email is double-checked to have actually been sent. I’ve got to be on it on the 27th, and to get that far, I’ve got to retain my discipline.
11.05am: For reasons too complicated to go into here, my children only got their advent calendars earlier this week, and the upshot of this turns is that by the time I get downstairs they’ve eaten about 11 days worth to supplement what they’d already eaten. So much for that healthy breakfast, then.
11.15am: Wrapping. I count a total of twenty things to have to wrap, spread across three people. I have separate wrapping paper for the two kids, and I do theirs first, child by child, so that I know exactly whose are whose without having to resort to labelling things. Labelling things is for people with more spare time available for wrapping than I have at my disposal.
I do not like wrapping, primarily because I’m not very good at it. Well, that’s not quite right. I’m inconsistent. But I am at least enthusiastic, and that must count for something, right? By the time I've finished, I've acquired a goatee made of sellotape and the kids have heard more swear words than they have throughout the rest of 2024 put together in the last three hours, several of which I’ve made up specifically during this period.
2.15pm: Lunch. A late lunch, but lunch nevertheless. The chocolate sweats appear to have subsided.
2.45pm: A partial attempt to tidy the house. I usually do this once a week on Fridays, but I've decided to have a bit of a go because: a. I don't want my house looking disgusting on Christmas Day. b. Oh my god there's going to be a lot of mess tomorrow. c. If I'm cooking a Christmas dinner for three of us on my own, then goddammit I need to know where everything is.
4.00pm: We're baking cookies, but under my instruction of essentially, “wash your hands” every thirty seconds, you grubby little tykes. I won't be surprised if they taste mildly of soap. The kids like to get involved and after not too long we've made a functional dough which they can then squidge into cookie shapes. They only take 10 minutes and, Fanny Cradock of the South Coast that I am, I've even pre-heated the oven. I put them in the oven at 4.20pm.
4.35pm: Remember that the cookies are in the oven and run to the kitchen, where they're just turning from dark brown to black. Two are beyond repair. I'd say RIP, but they've already been cremated. But the remainder are edible, particularly if you're not especially fussy, and my kids are certainly not especially fussy.
5.00pm: Put the kids dinner on. It'll be done in about twenty minutes. In the meantime, I wash up. Again. I've lost count how many times it's been in this eternal battle that I cannot win. I've lost count how many times it's been today. But then something unusual happens. The hot water tap runs cold. I wander out to the boiler. Silent. I look at the gauges as though I have the first idea what they could possibly mean. There is no instruction book.
5.15pm: I run back to the kitchen, give the kids their dinner, and return to the boiler. I switch the heating on and it remains ominously silent. I'm not sure how cold it's going to be tonight. I check my phone. There's a branch of The Range 100 yards from my front door, they sell little halogen heaters, and they close at 6.
I know our boiler is ancient. Our last gas safety checker said as much. I also know that getting the landlord to get someone out will be a pain in the arse at this particular time on this particular day. We all showered earlier today, so we are at least clean. Our hands definitely are after all the washing during that dough-making. But I don't have time to see if the comes back on in the next few minutes. I decide that I've not got time to make a decision over whether the boiler is just having a moment or not. That'll have to wait until after Christmas. I coat and shoes the kids up and we're off to The Range.
6.00pm: We get back from The Range, which looked like the set of Dawn of the Dead. Retail carnage everywhere. But we got two small, cheap halogen heaters for £25 and they're useful to have, come what may.
6.30pm: The central heating starts to come back on of its own accord. At least I have two halogen heaters now, and we’ve got hot running water again. Let’s take those as victories.
7.00pm: Make hot chocolate with marshmallows for the kids. I probably shouldn’t be giving them this amount of sugar at the point at which they’re starting to wind down, but it’s difficult to explain that to them that at this time of year.
7.15pm: We settle down to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. They’re too young to understand the comment that Charles M Schulz has to make about the commercialisation of Christmas, but they understand that the little tree deserves to be loved and that the importance of this time of year isn’t what you receive, but what you give and who you spend it with. As we watch and they eat the biscuits we made earlier, I receive plenty of audible reminders that these supposedly ‘gooey’ cookies now have the consistency of prestressed concrete.
8.00pm: Time for bed, for these two. Younger child has only just got over a pretty heavy cold, and I have few doubts that he will sleep well tonight. Older has had problems sleeping for years, though his plate-like eyes indicate that he might not find staying awake easy tonight. I sit with him for a bit and we talk. He has a melancholic air, and I worry a lot about how he perceives the world. “You’re the best dad ever”, he tells me, briefly swelling my heart before deflating it again by saying, “And the worst one I’ve ever had, since you’re the only dad I’ll ever have”. Well yes, Older. Thank you. I speak to my girlfriend on the phone. She’s has a busy day, and her throat doesn’t sound any better.
Midnight: I creep upstairs and check their bedrooms. Both sound asleep. I grab the candy canes, put my coat on, and head for the garden, planting the canes in roughly the places that they buried their Tictacs seeds earlier this evening. None of them topple over, and none of them break. (In case you were wondering, I have been asked about the plastic film covering them before, and my answer of, “Well, bananas have skins, don’t they?”, was enough to deflect attention.)
12.30am: Time for bed. Big day, tomorrow.
Christmas Day
7.30am: I’m awoken by an angelic face poking around my bedroom door. “When can we open our presents?”, Older beams.
8.00am: Present opening. I don’t have that many house rules on Christmas Day, but one of them is that no-one is opening a single present until father has a cup of coffee in one hand and a bin bag in the other. It’s the most “dad” thing I do, hovering behind the children at these moments, ready to swoop in with the bin bag in order to maintain some semblance of normality alive, even if inside my head only.
The kids are, of course, delighted with everything. They’ve lived their entire lives in a house that is rich in love but poor in money, and while those around them are all doing their best by them, I know they don’t get a lot of what the kids of wealthier parents do. But they’re happy, happy with what they’ve got, happy with who they’re with, and very happy to be able to eat yet more advent calendar chocolate before ten in the morning.
8.30am: Time to collect their candy cane harvest from yesterday evening. It turns out that six candy cane seeds—ain’t no-one got time for them planting twelve of those things in the dark, in the cold, at the end of December; that’s a lesson I learned the first year—produce twelve canes, exactly the number that come in a box.
“I’ll never understand how they make their own plastic covers”, says Older. “Nature works in mysterious ways”, I reply. There have been more questions than normal about this, this year, to a point at which I’m starting to feel slightly guilty about the increasing number of lies that I’m having to tell in order to keep this all going. But for so long as I can get away with it I’ll persist, because I really do still believe in this sort of magic, in a way.
9.10am: The kids’ mother, her girlfriend and mother-in-law-to-be arrive with more presents, and it’s very quickly evident that it is absolutely pointless trying to maintain my bin bag hawkery of an hour earlier. They’re off again 45 minutes later, leaving me facing another small mountain of recyclables. I check the council website for the bin collection dates. Recycling on Friday. All I have to do now is work out which day Friday is.
9.55am: Speak to my girlfriend on the phone. She’s 60-odd miles away and still nursing an extremely sore throat and bad cough. She’ll be surrounded by people who love her and who will take care of her today, and that fills me with gladness. We’re not even exchanging Christmas presents until the start of next week. Nervous? Moi? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
10.30am: We settle down to watch The Santa Clause on Disney. I don’t know why I love this film so much. Tim Allen is a berk, there are obvious, gaping plot holes—something which Older spends most of the film loudly pointing out until I eventually shush him into submission—and it does seem to be the case that this Santa Claus may only serve the USA , with little indication of him going anywhere else. But it’s got a heart. It asks you to suspend your disbelief, and to set aside the seen-it-all-before cynicism of adulthood in favour of something altogether more innocent. It’s as dated as you’d expect a thirty-plus year-old movie to be, but it’s charming.
And there is one sense in which it does land differently to recent years. A large amount of the sub-plot concerns divorce and fatherhood, and cutting off parental access because of mental health concerns. And while that is a relative irrelevance in comparison with the fact that this guy is turning into Father Goddam Christmas and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, the moment at which I started to well up still came when he and his child were separated when they didn’t want to be.
12.00pm: Time for the kids to get some more playing time in, while I prepare their lunch. Pitta breads and hummus, cheese, tomatoes and olives. We’re having our full Christmas meal early in the evening this year.
1.30pm: It feels as though it will do the kids a world of good to get out of the house, so that’s exactly what we do. We live about a seven minute walk from the seafront, and this may even be the last Christmas that we live this close to it, so it feels like the right decision to take them down there and let them blow off a little steam.
We walk down to the coast road and cross, onto the beach and down to where it laps against the shore. The roads are deserted. There are a tiny number of dog walkers out, but largely speaking everybody’s in the warm with the people they love around them.
Older is, as ever, primarily interested in what interesting stones and shells he might find. Younger is throwing rocks into the water. I sit on one of the wooden groynes and watch them play. We pose for photographs together. These childhood Christmases won’t last forever. This is the last one in single figures for Older. We have to capture every moment before they’re grunting at us and wishing they were somewhere else all day.
3.00pm: “Fancy watching The King’s Speech?”, I ask Older as we step back through the front door. He has no idea what I’m talking about, and perhaps even less still after I’ve explained it to him. “Why would we want to do that? Actually, why does he do that? What does he talk about?”, comes a volley of replies. I don’t really have a complete answer to any of those three questions, so I silence him with Quality Street instead.
He’d rather play with his toys. Indeed, for half an hour they both decide they’d like some alone time and wander off upstairs to their respective bedrooms. I spend the time cleaning the kitchen ahead of getting dinner on, and taking a flamethrower to the living room because honestly, at this stage what is even the point?
4.00pm: I’m not happy with the way in which I’ve ordered today. The kids, I reckoned to myself, have had enough flux in their lives and like routine. They always have their big meal of the day in the evenings, so I’ve arranged it for the time they’re used to.
But then I think back to previous years, and Christmas Dinner was always eaten in daylight. My mind flicks back to memories of years of days now long passed, of things that might have been but never were, of years wasted.
While I prepare that dinner, I’m consumed by sadness, a feeling so profound that it feels as though it could eat me alive. It’s nobody’s fault but mine, any of this this. When I was a kid, Christmas was about the people we were with. My aunt and uncle, my cousins, our pets, my grandparents, my sister, and of course my own parents. It was always special. It was always slightly different. And it was always a big event.
And for about ten or fifteen minutes I’m gripped by this overwhelming feeling of loss, something which ties my stomach into a knot and sends me back into something that feels almost like a child-like state. It’s not fair, I silently pout to myself. This year, there’s just us three, and it feels in this particular moment as though everyone in the world has someone to be with but me.
It’s all circumstantial. I know that. My girlfriend is too far away. I didn’t contact my family. And yes, I am really lucky to have two beautiful, kind children who love me to the moon and back and who want to spend this day with me more than anyone else in the world. But in this one moment I feel it almost overwhelmingly as though all the happier times I’ve ever had at this time of year happened to a different person, and as though I’ve just been ploughing on through this last few years in order to forget that.
6.00pm: Younger is no longer vegan or vegetarian, but older remains vegetarian. Younger will, therefore, be having turkey breast with stuffing and pigs in blankets. Older has separate stuffing which hasn’t spent the last couple of hours basting in chicken liquid and bao buns in the shape of snowmen.
We have Christmas crackers, the other half of the pack that I bought last year. We put on paper hats and tell bad jokes. There’s millionaire’s shortbread cheesecake for dessert. I bought some alcohol—just four cans of beer—from the corner shop on the way home from the beach earlier, but I don’t have any with dinner. I turn out not to drink any all day.
7.00pm: Food successfully completed, I decide that I’m done with any attempts to keep this house in order for the rest of today. The kids are listlessly watching cartoons when I emerge from having stacked the washing up Jenga-style next to the kitchen sink.
They’ve had, essentially, a bit too much of everything today. A bit too much sugar. A few too many toys. Much too much food. But they’re good kids. They both want to tell me that this has been the “best Christmas ever”. They tell me this every year, but I know what it means. It means they love their dad, and that they do see what I do for them.
7.30pm: Hot chocolate all round, and the first ever episode of The Simpsons to finish off the day. It’s the one which tells the story of how the titular family come by their dog, Santa’s Little Helper, so it’s Christmas-themed, and although the kids don’t get half the references in it—this is the essentially the equivalent to me watching a Little Rascals film on BBC2 during the holidays when I was a kid—they do laugh at points and they do enjoy it, because essentially they enjoy pretty much everything.
8.00pm: Bedtime. Younger had been ill in the days before Christmas, and I rather suspect he saved up everything he had for this one particular day. Certainly, the following morning he looks like he’s had the spirit sucked out of him when we start walking up the road to morning kick-off Boxing Day football. We walk for five minutes only before turning around and going home again. Older is just out of… everything. They’re both fast asleep by 8.15pm.
8.30pm: I’ve had it stuck in my head that I wanted to watch Sleepless in Seattle for the last couple of days, so I settle down to watch it while the rest of the world watches Wallace & Gromit. I’ve always been a sucker for romantic comedies, the cornier the better, and the fairytale ending of this one speaks to a different world, one in which there was something which felt like hope rather than the nihilism of today. Perhaps it’s the escapism I need this evening.
When Tom Hanks’ character finds his kid at the top of the Empire State Building near the end and is consumed by relief, clutching onto him and saying, “You’re all I’ve got”, it strikes me to the bones. Hanks has got a house that’s also a boat, and another boat, and he’s a good-looking architect with a beautiful son, but he’s alone, just as I am this evening. I know my good fortune. I have two beautiful kids. I have people who love me. But this room echoes tonight, and as the adrenaline levels I’ve sustained all day start to drop, they’re replaced with a feeling of just… running out of battery.
11.30pm: My girlfriend calls. Her cough is worse. She sounds as though she may have accidentally swallowed a cheese grater while washing up earlier. “You sound as though you’re running out of bandwidth, darling”, she croaks after about ten minutes of my monosyllabic grunting.
A little later, she drops me a quick message to let me know that she knows I’m not feeling great, that she could hear it in my voice, and that she can feel the same at this time of year. She knows, as I do, that the kids have had a great day and that that’s what really counts, but to go to bed knowing that this one person is thinking of me and caring about me is enough. I should be grateful for what I do have, rather than missing what I don’t. And we’ll be together again soon enough.
But ultimately, my overriding feeling is that I’ve got through it. My Christmases have been like this for years, and it’s only really been this year that I’ve noticed that it’s not really what I want. Even when my ex-wife still lived here, it was a lonely day, two different people living different lives but still under the same roof for entirely practical reasons alone. But this year I’ve caught myself thinking, “You yourself should be enjoying this on your own terms more than you are”, and perhaps it’s that realisation that is the one that I’lll take away from this year more than anything else.
Next year, I’ve already promised myself, will be different.