Ghosts Of Christmas Past

Christmas1992 was the first Christmas after my mother died. She had always been the one who gathered it all together on Christmas Day: The white table cloth, the wreath on the door, the gold-sprayed pine cones, the green and red serviettes. The champagne, the turkey. And us, the straggling branches and broken twigs of the family tree.

Over the years she welcomed my Jewish grandfather and his third wife and her poodle, and my father’s overbearing older sister and her diplomat husband.  There were also various boyfriends of Mum’s, (in the time between my father’s death and her final re-partnering). And their adult children and their assorted girlfriends and  boyfriends and dogs. I remember someone's tattooed bloke who turned up one year wearing a ripped t-shirt . I saw him from the bathroom window  smoking a joint in the back yard.

Plus there were the occasional neighbours and orphans. One Christmas day someone brought a  big black mongrel that tried to hump the diamante-collared poodle.  My mother just kept passing out mince pies and pouring more champagne. She created the hearth where we all gathered for warmth, to exchange gifts and stories, to eat and get drunk and laugh and squabble and watch  t.v. 

I don’t think I realised until she was gone that it was her will that created these Christmas Day events. Her desire for family, for tribe. It was her determination to forge community, no matter how fleeting, from out of whatever material was at hand. I never particularly appreciated Christmas Day, went under sufferance as often as not.

Then on Christmas Day 1992 she was gone. She had been gone for three months by that strange, empty  December. I suppose there were outposts of the family and step-family where I could have spent the day. Instead, my friend J. and I got into my van and drove from Melbourne to Queensland. J. was on the run for reasons of her own, some romantic disaster.

She still refers to that Christmas day in slightly shocked tones as “ The Christmas Day We Ate Boiled Eggs For Lunch”. I have a vague memory of us picnicking outside an old fashioned road house - the sort that have now all been replaced by identical cavernous fluro-lit  BPs.

It was in some sun bleached place on the Newell Highway, a fibro dining room festooned with fairy lights and faded Fanta advertisements. I remember being cross with J. for smoking cigarettes, saying ,”You promised you wouldn’t smoke on this trip” and her shrugging as she lit up another rollie.

And I remember when we finally got to the beach house in Queensland and met up with our other friends, I was still grumpy about some petty thing, and J. said, “ It’s okay, you are still grieving for your mother”