Christmas Eve

Oh dear. Everything is ready, the presents are all wrapped. I stayed up late enough for it to be the start of Christmas Eve. It's 1:50am. At 9am I wake up/will be forcibly awoken, and then at noon, we travel.
My aunty's house for Christmas this year. She's been phoning us with regular updates about the preparation for 6 months. For the last 2 months, these have been daily calls. Everything will be perfectly prepared, with only the best, most perfect foods and decorations. Everybody must be on their best behaviour. And this being my aunty, if anything goes wrong, at all, then the whole meticulously planned edifice of Christmas Day will come crashed down, ruining the entire year. So yes. I will try and refrain from smoking and swearing. Even I am starting to be shocked by the filthy gutter language that comes out of my mouth. And indeed, I will try to be sociable. I seem to conveniently have hit a patch of low mood, just in time for the festivities.

I hate Christmas. Apart from the obvious and oft-repeated reasons of tackiness and expense, I have my own unhappy associations with this event. During Christmas dinner, hosted by this same aunty two years ago, we got a phonecall saying that my grandad was ill. This turned out to be the stroke which devastated his life so totally. A year later, he was mute and paralysed in a nursing home. Two weeks after that, he died. You know life has dealt a harsh hand, when you are glad that somebody you love has finally gone.

However, I do know that he would want us all to have a bloody great Christmas.