5 December 2024

At “Mini Christmas” with my friends I will measure my life against theirs

Like tides, we go out and come back again. But our annual gathering has become part of the rhythm of our friendship.

Every winter for the past 16 or so years, my schoolfriends and I – nine of us in total, all women – have gathered to celebrate Christmas together. What began as a few hours for teenagers to sit around the tree and exchange Secret Santa gifts (pink velvet piggybank in the shape of Jesus, anyone?) has grown into a fully fledged Christmas Day, complete with country – OK, park; we live in London – walk, games, an elaborately laid table, dinner with every trimming imaginable and the exchanging of gifts. In my time-rich, Pinterest-drunk early twenties, I crafted individual place settings, painted candles, even made my own crackers. We call it “Mini Christmas”, though it is bigger in every respect than my own family Christmas. Every autumn, the poll to choose a date goes out, and every year the attempt to reach a compromise grows more involved, now accommodating in-laws and babies. Still, we prevail. This year (well, technically next; the compromise was a date in January), all nine of us will attend for the first time in my admittedly quite limited memory.

There was no explicit link between my parents’ separation when I was 15 and the emergence of Mini Christmas, nor with the divorce of my best friend E—’s parents the following year. But it seems unlikely that the two were not, somehow, connected: if I can’t have the big, noisy, traditional family Christmas other people have, I will create my own. It is in part this, I think, that leads me to care fervently about Mini Christmas, even as for others (and here I am projecting) it might seem a little sillier, a little less of a priority, every time.

As I reflect on the passing of another year, I cannot help but think, too, of my oldest friends – of what has changed this year for them, for us. I can never entirely separate myself in my mind from these friends I have known for more than two decades; these friends who forged me, against whom I defined myself, and with whom I shared all adolescence’s most formative moments. I cannot help but compare, too. For me, this year’s most life-altering event was moving in with M—, though in all its quotidian normalcy it seems not a big change at all, but gently inevitable. For the group, this year we have welcomed three new babies, and eagerly anticipate the arrival of the fourth.

There is joy, of course – so much joy – in the changes: in the mortgages and marriages and births. But there is pain, too; pain that seems increasingly to do with my uncertainty over whether I want to have children, and my knowledge that even if I did want to, I cannot afford them. I find myself at once drawn to motherhood and repelled by it, jealous of my friends who have children and smug that I do not, desperate to preserve my independence and yet lonely in it. (I might experience all these feelings in the course of a day, even an hour; being a 30-something woman is, for me, almost as internally torturous as being a teenager was.) As I watch my brilliant friends become brilliant mothers, I am aware that they have been forever changed by it, and that I remain the same. It is as though they have passed through to another dimension: one where I can see them, speak to them, touch them, even – but where I cannot travel without myself going through that transformative experience.

Part of the reason I remain so immovably attached to Mini Christmas is that I do not want to let go of the years before my family created families of their own. But it is also because it has become part of the rhythm of our friendship: like the tides, we go out, and we come back in again. Another year passes; we grow apart, we grow together. We settle down over heaving plates of Christmas dinner once again and say: how are you, sister? No, really, don’t rush away. Tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine.

Thank you, friends and readers, for sticking with me through another year. I wish you all a peaceful and joyous Christmas, whether you spend it with the family you were born to or the one you chose.

[See also: The return of the boozy, leisurely lunch]