Merry Christmas and all the jazz

This year I feel a bit funny about Christmas. Or at least, I'm not particularly excited. Yes ok, I am 26, so the hysteria over the fact that Father Christmas drank every last drop the sherry we left out for him by the fireplace, but only ate half of his mince pie subsided quite a long time ago. But, I feel a little bit cynical about Christmas (I didn't want to say that but there you go).

Last year was the first year I spent Christmas apart from my family. I was on a beach in Goa with my best friend Carla, our new but already dear Keralan friend Manu, and two lovely Swedish girls Lou and Emelie. On Christmas Eve we all went to a party on the beach. We had met Manu (22 years old) in a small village called Thazhappu in Kerala. After much deliberation and talking his Mother round, Manu had decided to travel with us to Goa. It was the first time he had ever travelled outside his state in India. He was Christian and had never spent Christmas apart from his family either so this was a new experience for all of us. Christmas Eve was great. We watched fireworks on the beach and then went to the party. Lou and Emelie went to bed after an hour or so. Carla, Manu and I carried on drinking and dancing like fools until the early hours. Manu could not stop grinning. When we asked him what was so funny he said it was our dancing. Fair enough, we do dance like idiots. But, without trying to sound too cheesy, his grin was the best thing about that night and that Christmas maybe even. He had never been to a party like that and had never danced with girls (In India boys and girls don't really mix until they are married and girls don't usually hang out in social groups in public).

When we first arrived in Goa I don't think Manu felt comfortable. He was genuine and friendly to everyone but some people gave him frosty receptions and eyed him suspiciously. It was news to Carla and me. In our three weeks travelling around the South of India we had been received with beautiful heartfelt friendliness everywhere we went. Maybe our western wallets did have something to do with it but I like to think that wasn't all. We had heard of the caste system, sure, but we had never experienced the hostility of it in action. In fact, I rather naively thought it was old skool and was not really inherent anymore. In one hotel on our way to Goa, Carla and I were given a room with no further questions (payment to be made when we checked out), whilst Manu was treated coldly and had to pay for his room upfront. When we questioned why our friend had to pay now and us later, Manu looked embarassed and asked us to leave it.

On Christmas Day I was not with my family and I received an interesting and alternative gift in the form of 'delhi belly'.  In between being sick I managed to also get make-up remover in my eye. It would not stop stinging and I could not see properly so Carla, Manu and I got a tuk-tuk to the Pharmacy. The Pharmacy was full of skin-bleaching products. It struck me how strange people are. Always striving for the opposite of what we have. Indian ladies followed the Bollywood poster craze for Asian females so pale that they looked like strangers to their own side of the sun, where Brits and other Westerners lay on the beach covered in tanning oil, singing their skin to get rid of their pale winter-pallour. What was so good about the other side?

Anyhow, this year I am at home in London and Christmas seems different. A very good family friend died recently. It was totally unexpected. This year my friends are dreading Christmas, the first Christmas without their Mum.  My friend said to me that she wished she could just skip Christmas altogether.

I love the festive cheer and good spirits that seize most people at Christmas. I also love the idea of cherishing our loved ones and rejoicing in the family. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't in it for the food too. I love the food. Perhaps I should mention religion too, being the original and sole purpose of Christmas and all. But I am not religious (apart from feeling a bit jolly singing Christmas carols at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve - the one time a year that I attend church). Christmas has become more of a festival for all these days, it cannot escape anyone's attention in England, religious or not. We can all choose how to spend our Christmas and I am re-thinking mine.

Knowing that my close friends will be having a shit Christmas, illuminating the hole in their family, I feel a little different about eating a massive dinner and then vegetating languidly on the sofa watching Christmas film re-runs and passing the Cadbury's Roses tin between my sisters and parents on the sofa. I will still do my fair share of this. Not much has changed really. But I will cherish my family all the more, and my friends and all my loved ones. I think we should cast a wider lens on our sense of community at Christmas, rather than just embracing our immediate family leaving our homes wide open for no-one else but an estranged commercial coca-cola Father Christmas. The need to pump our money into buying lavish amounts of food and excessive gifts for each other just highlights the greed that seems to increase year by year.

Yes Christmas is about sharing and giving, so shouldn't we be doing that on a wider basis? I know lots of people do, so maybe I am really talking to myself. It's loosely linked to what I experienced in India. Why do we all lust after what we haven't got? What's so good about that? When we have all that we need right here. Consumption does not satisfy. Changing our skin colour does not satisfy. We lust after being better. None of us feel good enough. We buy each other and ourselves gifts and pamper ourselves with gourmet food to try and satiate a need. The desire is never-ending and ultimately void of meaning. Maybe if we realised that many of us do not need these things and used our money and resources to turn around and face the community we would meet that need. Things are not arranged, there is no plan. People die unexpectedly, people lose their homes, people fall into pits of depression and forget how to be excited about life and how to connect. We all experience some kind of despair. Why not share our communal experiences more often. Stop hiding them and competing to appear the best.

A short piece of fiction, by Simon Hendricks (aka Me)

If anybody happens to read this and can give me quick advice about how to post up documents as PDF/ Word please do! I have just written a short piece and am going to copy and paste the text in here, but I think it is going to look messy...so if anyone can help out this technological idiot please do?!

Thanks.

My Life So Far, by Simon Hendricks

If I went missing would I get my picture printed on the side of a milk carton? That would be so cool. I could be famous. Probably not though, as they don’t do that in England. Once when I was looking through all the cartons in the shop Mum asked what I was doing. When I told her I was looking for the missing person info she laughed and said they only do that in America. But if I lived in America and went missing, I would probably become a celebrity. It would be great to walk into a shop and see my face on the side of all the milk cartons lined up on the fridge shelves. It would have my name ‘Simon Hendricks’ in big print underneath and say where I was last seen. Everybody would see my face as they ate their cornflakes in the morning, and every time they poured milk into their tea. The police and milk carton people would ask Mum for the photo. I bet I know which one she’d pick too – she keeps it in a wooden frame on the bookshelf above her bed. It’s a picture of me on my 8^th birthday wearing a blue and green striped party hat. She always says I look grown up and handsome in it. I prefer the picture of me in my batman suit personally, but I suppose if they used that for my milk picture I would have to wear my batman suit the whole time I was missing so they could recognise me.

 I don’t want to go missing though. Well I don’t want to be kidnapped, that is. If I packed the red suitcase under my bed, and cut the sombrero off from Goulash’s head and set off for Mexico on an adventure then maybe.

Goulash is my Mexican frog toy by the way. He always sleeps in bed with me and wears a straw sombrero and a multicoloured poncho. He also has a black curly moustache like Salvador Dali. Not many people my age know about Salvador Dali but we have one of his paintings on the back of our toilet door at home. I have spent ages staring at it when I’m on the loo. In the background of the painting there is a giraffe on fire. The picture really scared me when I was little. I used to close my eyes on the toilet so I didn’t have to see the giraffe. Or even better, if it was just me and Mum in the house I would leave the toilet door wide open so I couldn’t see the picture. Mum took me to London Zoo when I was five and I was nervous the whole time until we got to the giraffe cage and I could relax because none of them were on fire. I don’t mind looking at the painting now though because I Googled Salvador Dali and found out about him. He is a ‘Surrealist’ painter which means he paints silly things that aren’t real.  

I wanted to dress up as a Mexican to surprise Mum once when she was having a sad day. I tried to copy Goulash’s outfit. I made a fake moustache out of brown wool from Mum’s old wool collection in the loft. I cut a hole in my old duvet cover with the tropical fruit all over it. It had bananas, oranges, kiwis, pineapple and something Mum told me is a dragon fruit. I asked Mum if humans could eat dragon fruit and she laughed and said “of course Simon, that’s what they’re for.” But I’m not sure myself, really. If it’s meant for dragons I wouldn’t want to eat one in case the dragon can smell it on my breath or see it in my belly. Then he might come into our house to get his fruit back!

What was I talking about before? Oh yeah, so I had my Mexican costume ready, except for the most important bit. But when I tried to take off Goulash’s hat, I realised it was stuck to his head! Somebody had sewn it on!

I still surprised Mum anyway. I crept to her room, making sure not to step on the squeaky floorboard between my room and hers. I opened her bedroom door really quietly. She was lying on the bed in her pyjamas, even though it was 2.30pm in the afternoon. Her hair was all stuck together and looked shiny and wet. The duvet was covering her legs so she sort of looked like a mermaid in pyjamas. The room smelt funny, not a good smell, like old socks a bit. I jumped into the room and did a sideways dance like a crab. While I danced, I shook invisible maracas in the air and sang “la cucaracha, la cucaracha la la la la la la laaa”. I even sang in a Mexican accent. Mum looked up at me but she didn’t smile. She stared at me for a while. My throat suddenly felt heavy, like it was full of the lumpiest custard. I dropped my invisible maracas and let my hands fall to my sides. I carried on singing, even though my Mexican accent had worn off by accident. I didn’t like it when Mum looked at me like that. Her eyes were glassy like a fishbowl and they just stared at me. Her mouth was limp like a dead fish that had fallen out of the bottom of the bowl. Then her eyebrows crumpled up and she seemed angry. “You cut a hole in your duvet cover. I can’t afford to buy you another one Simon. We could still have used that. Why did you cut it up? I’m going to have to sew a patch over that hole. Go and take it off.”

Anyway, I don’t really like remembering that time. It makes me feel stupid. Maybe if I had actually cut the sombrero off Goulash’s head and worn it, Mum might have laughed. Maybe I didn’t look Mexican enough without it? Well, that was ages and ages ago, probably about a year. I’m older now and I don’t try and cheer Mum up anymore when she’s sad. I’m scared to see her so I just leave her alone until she feels better.

Mum never did sew up the duvet cover. I went to my room after she told me to take it off and hid it right at the back of my wardrobe at the bottom, under all the shoes. I threw the wool moustache and ball of wool in there too, even though I quite liked stroking my wool moustache. It reminded me of Dad. He had a thick moustache in all of the early pictures, before he got ill. But I didn’t want to look at the wool anymore. The bit I had cut out of the duvet was the picture of the dragon fruit (and a little bit of a banana too). I tiptoed outside and threw this bit of the cover in the grey wheelie bin. I didn’t want any dragons to see it in the bin in my room. We live in flats so there is a row of four wheelie bins outside that all look the same. I knew which bin was ours though because Mum had painted number 23 on the side of it in white paint. She had drawn a little flower underneath too.  

Me and Mum have lived at number 23, Gordons Avenue for 5.6 years. I’m quite good at maths so I worked out the exact number by doing a sum with all of the days. There were more numbers after the decimal place but I rounded it up to make it easier for other people who are not good at maths to understand. Mrs Phillips said we are going to have a maths test at school on Monday. Most people groaned when she said it. I didn’t though. I think I will probably be the best. I like stuff like that.

I only ever remember it being like this, just Mum and me. When I was a baby Dad and Grandpa lived with us too but I was too small to have a memory. When does memory start? I wander about this sometimes. I look at pictures of Mum and Dad, and Mum, Dad and Grandpa, and me and Dad, and all of us together and try really hard to think of the times when they were taken. I look at all of the details in the pictures. The colour and pattern of the cream and brown rug on the living room floor. Mum said she threw it away because I spilt Ribena on it and the stain was too much in the middle of the rug to cover up. She said she tried putting tables and chairs over it but they were just plonked in the middle of the room so it looked strange. I don’t feel bad about spilling the Ribena because I was little and don’t remember it. Plus the rug is really ugly anyway so I am glad she threw it away. I just wish she had kept it in the loft so I could look at it sometimes, if I wanted to. Maybe it smells like Dad and Grandpa. They walked on it so many times when it was in our living room, it must smell of them or have something of them left on it. A clue, like the Ribena stain I left. I hear people say that smells can remind you of things. Maybe I would remember them if I smelt the rug, or one of Dad’s t-shirts or Grandpa’s old slippers with a hole in the big toe on one foot. But we don’t have any of their things left. Grandpa died three days before Dad did, which is weird because Grandpa was 26.8 years older than Dad. And Dad only got to live for three more days than Grandpa, even though he was much younger and should have got to live for more time really. I was 2.43 years old when Grandpa died and 2.44 years old when Dad died. I put one more decimal place on my age because if I didn’t, you wouldn’t notice I was any older and it would look like I was just the same age, or it happened on the same day.

Grandpa was Mum’s Dad so she was really sad when he had a heart attack. She said it came out of nowhere. He was quite old, but he had been healthy and Mum says he still had all of his marbles. I don’t really know why that would mean he was healthy, just because he collected marbles, but I don’t want to ask Mum so I nod and agree that it is strange.

When Dad died it was less of a surprise. He was ill for a long time. I sometimes go up to the loft on my own and take out a picture of me and Dad when I was born and another one of me and Dad on my second birthday. I put them on the floor next to each other and count the differences in how Dad looks in the pictures. I always spot over 10 things. It’s a really easy game as he looks like two different people. In the first picture he is holding me at the hospital. Mum is in the hospital bed in the background looking really sleepy. Dad is wide awake and smiling at me. He has big curly brown hair and a big brown moustache. In the picture on my second birthday, he has no hair. None at all. He looks really skinny and tired. There are big bags under his eyes and his smile looks different too.