volume one hundred and twenty-five

last christmas

📍Written from the sticky humidity that fills Poppy’s old room and brings a smell that is no real scent, and at the same time is the nostalgia of an Australian Christmas approaching.

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🎤 Upcoming Shows:

• Funny Coast Comedy at Solbar, Maroochydore - January 16th

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Laughter fills the small yard. I look at the perfectly manicured grass and wonder if it is thinking “What’s that sound?”.

The seemingly empty sky above is expansive and appears to never end. No tall, grey buildings, no triple-level homes, no mere centimetres between you and your neighbour like my home. The tall trees that tower over the edge of the golf course are the only things taller than the large houses that have sprung up over the years. Bigger as they may be, they still offer room to breathe, to move, to wave to your neighbour without overhearing them shower or cook or talk or have sex. Privacy and intimacy. A real neighbourhood. In those same years, as people have come and gone and grown and developed property, this home has remained just one level, just one block, just one couple to live in it.

Ball after ball is knocked down and pin after pin is reset. We take turns resetting. Everyone gets their go at knocking them over. Everyone gets their go at resetting them for the next person. Everyone that is but Poppy. We all automatically reset the pins for him, with no discussion about it. There is no rhyme or reason. We all silently agree: “If you’re the closest person, you jump in”. 

We can kid ourselves that it is us returning the generosity of him sharing what is, after all, his Christmas gift for the benefit of all our enjoyment. But it is because we do not have the patience to wait for him to set them up, after we explain to him again which way they go. One less thing to do for him is one more bit of energy we have to spare. Order is established, fairness is at play and no one seems to be thinking just of themselves today. Except maybe in the sense that they hope to win — the one thing we without any shadow of a doubt have in common.

Our tummies are full as we move around, making sure we do not fall asleep from the relentless heat or from a food coma. There are no fans and no air conditioning because they belong to the other homes in the cul-de-sac. There are, however, spray bottles of water that we generously provide to our faces and necks and onto the budgies in the bird cage. There is a gentle breeze making its way from the ocean.

Sure, we don’t want to fall asleep, but would that really be such a bad thing? What we are really and honestly hoping is that being up and about will increase the speed at which we will get hungry again, and therefore ready for another unnecessary but divine feast.

Nan doubles over in laughter, then throws her arms up in victory. She’s pretty good at this and quickly, too. No surprises there — playing three games of golf a week for as long as I have been alive, and then some — her hand-eye coordination is something to be envied. Dad doesn’t even seem to be jealous, in fact, he doesn’t even seem to be trying to beat her. Her joy in being a winner round and round again is shown all over her face where some of those muscles say “Woah, for a minute I thought you forgot about me”.

Poppy bowls three times, giggling away at all of his misses and one or two pins fallen at most. He is joyful no matter what happens at the other end of the footpath, even if that means the ball ends up in the grass. After his three rounds, of which we allowed him to stand closer to the pins than us, his back says “No more bending!” and we cheer him on for the solid effort.

This feels different to past years.

It is different from the one before when I raced here as soon as legally possible only to spend up until Christmas Eve isolating awaiting my fate.

It is different from the many years before that, when I was overseas, as far away from family as possible, carving my own way and making damn sure they knew it. Before the reality of mortality hit me.

It is different from the many years I spent with the other side of my family, usually after a shift at work, exchanging a quick phone call and “Merry Christmas!” wishes to tipsy receivers on the other end who whooped and cheered and laughed both with us and at us and mostly at themselves. The funniest people in the world if you ever asked them.

It feels different from the many years spent devouring toy after toy, refusing to share with my sisters and them with me. Then Boxing Day would come and Nan and Pop would take us for a week of the beach, of allocated quiet time, of corn on the cob and of public water parks.

It feels different and that is because what is different is that I am making an effort.

This is quality time. No sitting around drinking (or, in more recent years, watching others drink) until the day is done. No angry conversations or snarky comments are made because there is no time for them and there is, finally, no point in me feeding them.

I am feeding the space with something else, instead.

This is playing. Letting go. Forgetting our worries, of which we all carry so many — some in common, some our own — for an uninterrupted hour, losing ourselves in the game. This is us enjoying the shade the house provides over the one-half of the yard we have set up the gift I bought Poppy in.

This is what, I guess, I always longed for family time to be — the stuff of movies and sitcoms as that is where I saw it most — families enjoying activities, laughing, not in competition or fights or splitting up to do things in separate rooms, waiting for the other to apologise. 

On this summer afternoon, I experienced it. I stopped waiting for everyone else to change. The thing that changed was me and then everything changed because that was all that was needed.

Lovely reader, head into the comments and tell me about holidays past — whatever it is you do or do not celebrate, whether you go all out or ignore it all completely — I would love to hear from you.

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here are three things I struggled with this week:

⚖️ Nan told me it is her first Christmas in sixty-four years without Pop and then, in slight jest, that she wants to cancel it all. I told her we can do whatever she likes, of course. I cannot imagine how hard it is for her when I know how hard it is for me.

✨ Knowing it is okay to book solo things over the holidays when I need breaks or breathing or meditation or creativity or community or fellowship or a nap or nature.

🎄Only so many days to squeeze in every Christmas movie, every Christmas episode of my favourite shows and every minute of my Christmas playlist.

here are three blessings from this week:

🚒 Thirty minutes after Nan contemplates cancelling Christmas, sirens ring as I sit to write. “Lauren! Lauren! Quick!” I jump up in a hurry expecting an emergency, only to find Santa waving from a fire truck headed down the street and a smiling, beaming Nan watching on. Christmas might be hard, heck it might not happen as it has in previous years or at all, but Santa made her smile and that made me smile and that is all I need.

🐇 A stroll at dusk with Nan’s neighbour, who unknowingly unlocked childhood Christmas holiday lost memories with the route she chose. Bunnies hopped. This neighbourhood used to be full of bunnies when I was little. I thought they were all gone. I think we entered a childhood portal by walking where my Dad used to take us for after dinner walks.

🎁 My Christmas playlist, while gift wrapping.

here are three goals for the coming week:

🌽 A lot of the foods I have been told recently I am maybe allergic to require the process of elimination and reintroduction for certainty. So here is to testing, once and for all, the “am I allergic to corn?” theory by visiting The Corn Shack I went to every summer of my childhood and if we go out, we go out with a bang of nostalgia.

🥸 Picking the last of the four silly pairs of Christmas glasses and four fun arts and crafts packs that I purchased for our visit to see Poppy on Christmas morning. There are no bad options, and the joy will be in my family getting to choose how (not if!) they want to play that day.

🏖️ Dip my toes in the sand and swim in the ocean. If I can lick my fingers after eating salt and vinegar chips only to realise it was sand not salt on my fingers, I might just be able to feel seven years old again in one more way this week before more months and months of travels ahead.

pics or it didn’t happen:

freo <3

I love you. Now I am off to await my annual watch of A Muppets Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, as I have done every year since its release when I received the VHS as a gift from Santa.

If you cannot handle me at my ‘Quotes Every Word of A Muppets Christmas Carol’ then you do not deserve me at any other time. (Or you can just leave the room that is actually totally fine.)

-That’s the quote that is always misattributed to Marilyn Monroe, right?

🧡, LD (lauren deborah | she/they)