We don't do Christmas. We are Jewish. It's all about Chanukah for us, candles and doughnuts and potato pancakes and dreidls, chocolate coins, naff singing about miracles and oil and the like, exchange of presents and hilarious Chanukah decorations featuring menorahs and dreidls hanging lopsidedly from our kitchen ceiling. Generally Chanukah comes a few weeks before Christmas so it's usually a time when I feel at my most smug. I get to snuggle up on the sofa with my hot chocolate, feet on the pouffe, reading whatever spurious chick mag I have decided to indulge in, while my non Jewish mates huff and puff their way round Oxford Street on a manic round of last minute frenzied Christmas shopping, all the stress of Christmas cooking and Christmas family get togethers ahead of them. Not me. I spend the Christmas period sleeping late, cycling on the canal way with my kids, luxuriating in the joy of doing nothing, or frequenting the Jewish or Muslim owned shops in the area that remain obdurately open for business. But this year is different. This year is different because I have lost my elder sister, who died of cancer in October. And with the approach of Christmas it has become horribly clear that the impression I have been under for pretty much all of my life that my religious heritage gave me an automatic opt-out, has been misguided. You cannot help but be sucked in to the preparations around you but even if you shut your eyes to the Christmas trees and the pervading smell of cinnamon wafting through the entrance of your local Tesco, you contend with the realities that school is out, and for two weeks it is all about Family Time. I have been approaching the month of December with minor dread, as have the rest of my bereaved family. Most of us have taken the practical decision to simply decamp and get the hell away from it all. Those of us who either can't afford that option, or couldn't get it together to organise a getaway, or need to keep working through this time, have done some serious thinking about how you do this family thing when, every time you come together as a family, it reinforces the massive, crater sized gap that the departure of someone you love so much has left, particularly the untimeliness of that person's death. We have come together as a family a few times since my sister died and I will tell you this. It's bloody hard. Even coming together for a joyous occasion is, in these early days, almost impossible to do without being overwhelmed by the sense of loss, the sense of incompleteness, the feeling of being cheated, robbed of a key person in the family circle. So. This Christmas period, though we don't do the tree or the gifts or the turkey, we are experimenting with coming together in bits of family. We are all acutely aware of the importance, and the desire, to stick together. But in these early days, rebuilding the family as a whole, feels too hard. So we convene in little groups, where the gap feels a bit less obvious. And we do things slightly differently, so as not to be reminded by our usual family rituals of what we have lost. No playing the usual family games, a concerted effort to reorganise our food, convening at other family homes, as a way of rebuilding family in a different context. You'll have to confront it sometime, says a mate of mine.Well, yes. It is still very early days after all. But I would argue that we are confronting it. Families have different responses to a bereavement, but I would have thought that however you rebuild, you would have to rebuild differently. That is what we have started doing this December. So. Christmas Day will find me helping out at a homeless shelter in North London, cycling across the heath with the kids, if I can force them out of bed early enough, in the afternoon, and indulging in some pasta and pulses based arts and crafts in the evening with my niece and nephews. If I don't end up getting capitulating and getting pissed on advocaat, which would be a first in itself as I LOATHE the stuff.
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