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If you had visited our little flat in South London yesterday, you would have wondered where Christmas had come to.
We have a greenery spot and a handful of lights. But there’s no bird in the fridge stalking every meal; no clamoring relatives to be entertained or present nibbles to appease; little wrapping paper to recycle; not a single Quality Street wrapper in sight; and no, I repeat, no, annual anguish.
Instead, Terence and I spend our not-so-important day doing very little, observing the handful of traditions we’ve forged over eight years together. We eat Terence’s now famous roasted pecans. I’m a vegetarian, but lore has it that he cooks to make up for millennia of patriarchal oppression (and because I do more during the year).
There was Claridge’s Christmas pudding and wonderful Epoisses cheese. We ate like kings, but without that madness that leaves everyone bloated, drunk and furious. Since we both dislike excess, our gifts are always small, thoughtful offerings rather than crazed splurges.
If you had visited our little flat in south London yesterday, you would have wondered where Christmas had come to (pictured: Hannah Betts, right)
Earlier this year, she planted bulbs to sprout on Christmas Day, made beautiful breakfast bowls, and secured my favorite panforte.
I treated him to vintage books and wares from Anya Hindmarch’s pop-up stationery shop, and sported his late mother’s wedding brooch.
In the current interlude between Boxing Day and New Years there will be more established rituals: winter walks with dogs, museum visits in search of ancient relics, visits to art galleries, excursions to the opera, reading novels and tea by the fire. Festive, yes, but in a contained, traditional way only for me, my partner and our greyhound, and it is pure and unmitigated happiness.
Still, for me, 51, this is about as full as the celebrations can get.
Since childhood, he had always been ambivalent about Christmas, aware of its stressful lows almost as much as its brilliant high points. Anxious and with sunken eyes, it is not for nothing that she always presented herself to me as a restless Mary in Christmas plays.
Since childhood, she had always been ambivalent about Christmas, aware of its stressful lows almost as much as its brilliant ups and downs (Pictured: Hannah Betts on December 22)
Later, for almost two decades, I gave up on the festive season entirely.
I loved my mother and she was an excellent mother in many ways. Yet Christmas was an annual ordeal that began with his first questions about our future whereabouts on the August bank holiday and ended with recriminations that lasted until spring. The food was excellent; passive aggression—and aggression itself—likewise.
We lost track of the wild arguments and snipers disguised as gifts. Christmas desserts set the curtains on fire, dogs toppled Christmas trees and epic showdowns began.
It was ‘a lot’, as millennials say, too much. As the eldest of five siblings, people always tell me how wonderful it must be to be part of a big family. Seriously, he looked like a Game Of Thrones in his pajamas.
There are happy memories, but even these now feel buried under a great snow of stress. I can’t stand adults who blame their parents for all their ills; but when it comes to Christmas, my anxiety is still visceral.
In my early 30s, even more drama ensued, and my mother banned me from the house for the best part of a decade, read the worst, for a transgression I hadn’t committed. The rest of my family did Christmas. . .just without me.
It was lonely, excruciating. So I made a virtue of necessity and got rid of Yule altogether. Frankly, it was a relief: the only upside to an otherwise torture-ridden situation.
I might come out about my Christmas phobia. No turkey, no tantrums, no trauma. My truck with the holiday attack was finished, and have a good trip.
And then I fell in love with a guy who adored everything I found most troublesome: family and partying, all those endless days of forced fun. If Betts Christmases were full of fights, my beloved sound like it was straight out of Central Casting: a traditional British Yule, performed in the requisite country mansion.
Terence boarded since he was eight years old. His mother died when he was 22, making Christmas something wonderful and poignantly longing for, from which he felt prematurely torn away.
To add to the irony, Terence and I met at a Christmas party. He was 43 years old and newly sober; he, 40, a tall, dark, textbook handsome stranger.
We both returned to our parents’ house that vacation, in my case for the first time in over a decade. It would be the last. On Christmas Eve, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer; On New Year’s Eve, her father died of a heart attack. Our family Christmases were over. It was time to make our own traditions.
For a while, Terence indulged my longing to get away from it all, and we ran away at the end of December. That first year, we flew to Sicily to pretend the Yule thing wasn’t happening.
Twelve months later, my father was also dead. Distraught, we find refuge in an elegant Parisian Airbnb, for a non-Christmas of art, mini pastry shops and opera. Another year, we headed to Berlin. And so, we invented new shared rituals.
Four years after we met, we moved in together. Three months later, we made the (for me) radical decision to stay home for the holidays, our home, with our new pup, Pimlico.
It was my first leak free Christmas Xmas in 17 years and I needed to take baby steps.
Trinket-phobic, I erected a decidedly pagan small tree, adorned with a string of silver bells. Terence went to the other extreme and created giant snowscapes out of garlands and tinsel. As the day drew closer, he calmed my nerves with the wood-smoke candle he had brought with us to Sicily, Paris, and Berlin: the scent of our mutual Yule.
We see a strange friend, but I have yet to feel like the drinking party that gregarious Terence craves. His sister Beth, who clearly hosts a sparkling Yule, is also extremely generous in indulging my phobia. We meet sooner or later, but not during, when I have to disappear, the same with my own brothers.
Today Terence is going to read me something that we both love. Or we will watch a movie (not Christmas) under a blanket with the dog. One of us could bake something, or we’ll walk around Chinatown.
We take the calm and nothingness that others indulge in this Twixmas period between Boxing Day and New Years, and create an exquisite void out of it all. I wouldn’t say I’ve learned to love Christmas: my anxiety around it runs too deep. But, I love our Christmas, and that’s all that matters. Thanks to Terence, this is now a period I look forward to instead of dreading.
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