5 hours ago
3
We called it “diffmas”, because it was going to be a different kind of Christmas. Our son was five, so we were trying to package it appealingly for him. But we might have done that anyway, given the kind of year we’d had – and by “we” I don’t just mean my family, I mean the world.
It was 2020. When the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, had announced, in March, that we “must stay at home”, it left my mum, who had lived on her own since my dad died in 2012, completely alone, like many people, for months on end. Her work had involved travelling all over the country, having meetings, organising events, networking. Then, in lockdown, everything stopped. She was Zooming with the best of them, but it was clearly extremely difficult.
By December, the rules for our area or tier, or whatever they were calling it then, prohibited mixing unless you were in a “bubble” – but we didn’t want to risk giving my mum Covid now, after managing to keep her safe for so long. Yet the idea of letting her endure a solo Christmas was also too much to bear. So, we came up with diffmas.
We would have a jolly lunch, safely sitting as far apart as was possible in our small front garden – and protect ourselves from the freezing December temperatures and potential rain by hiring a gazebo and outdoor heaters. We would wear woolly hats instead of paper crowns, and have hot-water bottles inside our coats. It would be fun, I insisted, through gritted teeth. Diffmas!
In reality, it was like an episode of a particularly cheesy sitcom. The temperature was arctic, the gazebo so wobbly it kept threatening to topple over and we had to take turns holding it steady and eating with one hand. It was also quite tricky to manoeuvre cutlery in gloves. The outdoor heaters we’d hired were pathetic, failing to keep anyone warm unless they were literally sitting on them, and even then only mildly. Running with plates of food from our kitchen, at the back of our house, to the front garden, led to spills, which created a precariously slippy hallway obstacle course, and somewhere between the turkey and the Christmas pudding my husband twisted his ankle.
The silver lining should have been that at least we were together, but in reality we were freezing and miserable. The unexpected bright side was that, once it was over, we were thrilled to go back inside, with walls, and a ceiling, and stay at home once more. We never took lovely warm FaceTime for granted again. And while of course I’m grateful that I got to see my mum that Christmas, particularly as so many others were separated from their loved ones, it was a huge relief when things finally returned to normal and to a boring same-old-same-old-mas, as we have never even dreamt of calling it.
