I used to like Christmas when I was a child, I used to get all excited as soon as the cards and decorations went in the shops, but then I realised that it’s just a huge anti-climax, you get excited about it for weeks in advance, you think it’ll be the best day of the year with everything as perfect as it could be. But what you get is rubbish TV, a long wait for food and a pile of presents, most of which will end up in the cupboard never to be seen again. For the past few years I’ve dreaded Christmas and because of that, I’ve got more and more annoyed about all the crap, the overpriced rubbish that’s sold, the way that people who don’t speak to each other all year suddenly become best friends etc. So anyway, it normally works that if I dread something it’s sometimes not as bad as I thought it was going to be. This Christmas day was a bit like that, I had dreaded it because of all the crap leading up to it and because stupid Steve was coming, but it ended up not being too bad at all. Part of that was because Mum and Steve both seemed a bit hung over and embarrassed about being hung over on Christmas Day. They bustled about waiting on us all hand and foot, Steve was still trying to be the best of boyfriends and kept telling Mum that she could sit down while he basted the turkey and sorted out the veg. He had bought a bottle of champagne and insisted that we had it at breakfast, which is not normally something that we’d do. This year the presents were much better than usual, I don’t mean more money was spent, I mean that people seemed to choose the right thing for the right people, I’d bought Andrew a CD which he was really pleased with, he acted as if it was more likely that an alien would land in the back garden than that I’d get him something he wanted. Claire was the same as well, I’d bought her a top – at least Imogen had chosen it and Andrew’s CD come to that and Claire went on and on about it, you’d think she’d never been bought a top before. Unbelievably, Mum had bought me a DVD player for my room so I was really pleased with that.
Uncle Angus came over at eleven, he was in a good mood and was throwing waspish comments at people and then chortling to himself. I suddenly realised just how quiet and distracted he’d been lately and what a difference it was when he was on form. He told Steve that he hoped he would still be this helpful when he really had his feet under the table. Uncle Angus used his politest voice, so it was ages before Steve realised that he had been insulted, Uncle Angus raised his eyebrows at me and grinned. He had bought me a really nice wall hanging from Hong Kong and a book on the history of feminism, it was something Aunt Evelyn would have been proud of. We sat and watched some TV and had the meal, it was of course a big roast but it was nice. The only person who was totally crap was Dad – in fact he was so bad that Claire said she knew that he’d left Lindsey to do the shopping and it looked like she’d just randomly picked stuff off the shelves.