My ever shrinking Christmas

When I imagine the perfect Christmas lunch, I think of the end of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge turns up unexpectedly at his nephew’s house and discovers a warm family gathering: “Nothing could be heartier… Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!”

Back in my youth, the Christmas lunches hosted by my father, while not exactly hearty, were opportunities to get together with my extended family — my three half-siblings, my mother and sister, my grandmother Edith, an old friend of my father’s called Vincent. Now all those people are dead, save for my sister, Sophie, and one remaining half-sibling, Christopher. Indeed, the Grim Reaper has been particularly busy these past few years. I lost my half-sister Kasia in 2018, then my half-sister Gaia last year, the product of my father’s third marriage. This year I lost my half-brother David. I’m still having a Christmas lunch with Sophie and Christopher in Devon, but having lost three siblings in the past five years I imagine we’ll all be thinking the same thing: who’s next?

Caroline also has a lot of half-siblings and mercifully they’re all still alive. But the days when they would meet up on Christmas Day, and bring their children, are behind us. It’s not that anyone has quarreled, more just they’re deciding to do their own thing. This drifting apart of extended families seems to happen organically, with the effort required to get everyone together increasing exponentially each year. It’s partly that cooking large Christmas lunches is such a chore, particularly as the children grow up and eat more, and, since that usually falls to the matriarchs, it’s not surprising that they become less inclined to arrange these things.

But this social entropy even seems to kick in when the plan involves going to a restaurant. For about thirty-five years, I’ve organized an annual Christmas lunch with five close male friends. We usually go somewhere fancy like the Fat Duck or the Waterside Inn and have the tasting menu accompanied by several bottles of wine. Over the course of three or four hours, we take turns to tell each other about the high points and low points of our year, and often end up arguing about politics. Such discussions can get pretty heated — Brexit was a particularly sticky subject — but we’ve known each other for so long, we always parted on good terms.

Until last year, that is. One of the regulars — let’s call him Gerald — was a no-show. He can be a bit of a curmudgeon and often had to be coaxed into coming, but in 2021 he point-blank refused and he is doing the same this year. Turned out he profoundly disagrees with me about lockdowns. He’d been reading the website I’d set up to campaign against the policy — Lockdown Sceptics — and became convinced it was being funded by dark Russian money. He didn’t feel he could in good conscience have lunch with someone who was being bribed by a foreign power to spread misinformation about a public health crisis.

I was astonished. He’s a Guardian-reading liberal, and therefore prone to left-wing conspiracy theories, but even allowing for that it seemed bizarre that he would believe such a thing about one of his oldest friends. I may be a bit of a rogue, but surely he knew me well enough to know I’d never accept money from Vladimir Putin to finance my website? To my mind it made no sense, because, even allowing for my low morals, I was convinced the lockdown policy was causing catastrophic harm to Britain’s economy. If any Russian money was being handed out, it would have been to pro-lockdown websites, not anti, surely? He saw it differently. I tried to persuade him on our Christmas lunch WhatsApp group that it was just an honest disagreement, with no roubles involved, but he wasn’t having it. After one robust exchange, I saw the words “Gerald has left the group” and feared he would never return.

Meanwhile, at the height of Covid, tragedy struck. Another of the lunch companions — Richard Edwards — died suddenly of a stroke aged fifty-four in January 2021, making it all the sadder that we’d been prevented from meeting for lunch that Christmas because of the restrictions. He was the most convivial and good-humored member of our group and often played the peace-maker when arguments got too lively, particularly between Gerald and me. His death may have been one reason Gerald refused to attend last year. We invited Richard’s wife and son to come in his place, but couldn’t make the dates work. It felt odd to be just four. We did our best to keep our spirits up, but that sense of being a band of brothers, laughing together in the face of misfortune, was gone. There was always something a bit theatrical about our lunches and I would think of us as characters in a play. That hadn’t changed, but the author of the script had. Alan Ayckbourn had been replaced by Samuel Beckett.

We’re planning on meeting again this year and I’ve booked it for five, hoping I can persuade Gerald to come. I would offer to pay, but he’d probably take that the wrong way.

On Christmas Day itself I will be going to my mother-in-law’s with Caroline and our four children. No siblings on either side — invitations have been extended and declined — so it will just be the seven of us. At least that will make the cooking more manageable. It’s been that way for the past few years and it’s always a lovely day, but I still hanker for the rambunctiousness of a much larger family gathering. Perhaps when my children acquire partners and have kids of their own, Christmas with the grandparents might turn into something more Godfather-like, although that may be wishful thinking. More probably, they’ll want to spend Christmas with their other in-laws, or on their own.

Perhaps a couple of them will pop over on Christmas morning on the way to lunch somewhere else for a quick exchange of presents. But it will just be Caroline and me after that, pulling a cracker over a ready meal. I can picture myself as an old man, having been parked in front of the telly to watch the King’s speech, wearing a Christmas hat, as Caroline creeps out to go to the neighbors’ drinks.

Is this the fate that awaits us all or is it just me? Whenever I’ve written before about the shedding of friends as I get older, I get teased and told it’s because I’m such an old misery-guts. No doubt there’s some truth in that. But like Scrooge, I want to be welcomed by my loved ones at Christmas. I think the moral of the story is I should try to become a bit more generous-spirited. God bless us every one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.