The last Christmas I spent at my Grandmother’s farm I was eighteen years old, selfish and miserable. Recently of age, I had resolved to drink the day away until my distant relatives became white noise and I could end the evening watching old videotapes from the 1930s on the VCR, in my grandfather’s beautiful, leathered old lounge chair.
I used to love everything about Christmas. The awareness of this, perhaps, made me all the more miserable as I grew older. I was the child who squealed over the washed-out singers on Carols by Candlelight with my cousins, and who wrote long, demanding letters to Santa, even leaving him a bottle of Victoria Bitter on the dining room table. I would fall asleep waiting for the sound of reindeer, waking at 6am to rip apart stockings while my mother made champagne and orange juice in the anticipation of sweltering heat.
At what point do we lose that part of ourselves? When is it no longer socially acceptable to love a tradition so openly? The last Christmas I spent at my grandmother’s farm started with a particularly ugly packet of socks and a discounted Bob Marley ‘One Love’ t-shirt from my estranged aunt and uncle.
After presents, I floated in pointless circles on a large flotation lounge in the swimming pool, drinking a stubby of beer. By midday, I was drunk, burnt and sending long, rambling messages to my stoner boyfriend.
It was approaching 3pm, when my family finally sat down to lunch, joined by a well-meaning old religious couple whose names I could never remember but who were nevertheless there every year. Instead of giving me presents, they would give me cards which gave donations to charity, like ‘Congratulations, these 20 dollars gave water to starving children’, etc.
By now, my glass was brimming. We were onto our fourth bottle of wine for the day. Before eating, the religious woman launched into a long, meandering prayer about giving thanks to Jesus for what we were about to receive. I laughed drunkenly, which turned into a splutter and then a firm head bow as I felt my mother’s hot glare from across the table.
I ate irresponsibly quickly and then, drunk enough to do things without explanation, got up, promptly left the table, and snuck one of Mum’s cigarettes by the hay shed. The light was everywhere and beautiful and yellow, and I wanted to cry. Instead, I fell asleep for two hours in a hammock by a tree.
The night before, we had bobbed my aunty’s old ute down the driveway for Christmas drinks at the neighbours’ house. My aunty had bipolar, which I never noticed or understood when I was a kid. Back then, when she was still making pottery, she would show me how to make clay pots on her spinning wheel in her studio. I used to cheekily announce to Mum that I wished my aunty was my mother because she was so much more fun. But by the time I was eighteen, her condition stopped her from making pottery, and I felt far away from her.
We arrived at the party to salmon canapés and farmers in reflective clothing. I drank a lot of champagne and befriended a girl from Northern England with whom I snuck cigarettes by the side of the house. After a couple of drinks, I was electric with it all.
‘This aubergine dip is incredible, Janet,’ I gushed to the host, ‘you must give me the recipe.’
By Boxing Day, Dad had started his aggressive barbecuing, supplemented by large glasses of white wine. At lunch, the onions were blackened bits of charcoal. I went for a walk to the paddocks to get some peace and quiet and a sheep ran away from me, screaming.
That night, I hastily leapt from the table at 8.30pm.
‘Right, thanks for dinner, I’m off to bed,’ I announced.
‘Are you tired?’ Mum pressed, tight-lipped.
‘No, I’m just going to bed.’
She came in to my room ten minutes later, seething. ‘Thanks for offering to wash up,’ she hissed, shooting a loathing gaze. I said nothing, mostly because I didn’t want to apologise, yet felt acute guilt on all accounts.
She walked out, furious, while I lay there, wanting her to stay but too proud to call out for her.
That night, I listened to Grandma’s radio play down the hallway, a sound that had always comforted me when I was younger. A tribal singer called out into the night, in a long, low moan, and Grandma snored on, oblivious.
After contemplating the singers screams, I tiptoed down the darkened hallway and stole another cigarette from Mum’s bag. The fairy lights flickered on the fence of the swimming pool. It was a full moon and the light shone by the Australian flag in the driveway and the old oak tree I had climbed when I was a kid.
A pang of nostalgia and guilt hit me and I sat there feeling lonely and miserable, the magic sucked from the tree.
I watched the satellites in outer space and ashed distractedly onto the pebbles.
I am essentially a bad person, I thought.
Back inside awhile later, I heard my Grandma talking to Wags in the bathroom, the family dog, who continues to live without her. “You don’t want to get old, Wags,” she muttered, “you don’t want to get old.”
I jumped into bed, letting my aunty’s snores lull me to a dreamless sleep. She was deaf in one ear and could sleep through anything.
How was I to know that a year later I would fly home from overseas to bury my aunty, and then my grandmother, only a few months apart? That I would write, heartbroken,
‘I wish there was a heaven,
so that when people died,
they knew how much you had cried
over them’
in poetry class, puffed up with shame and self-loathing?
It was so hot before my aunty’s funeral that the bushes died. Mum tried to save them, but there were so many things to do. The Australian flag was still flying at half-mast when I drove up.
In my aunty’s pottery studio, we found half-finished clay figurines growing dust and spiderwebs, and a diary with dates now past, deadlines she had not met.
In the corner of one of the last pages she had written ‘Caity’s flight home’. My return trip back to Australia, the date that she suddenly died.
*
We spend Christmas at the coast these days, just the three of us now: my mum, my dad and me. Mum still makes champagne and orange juice in the morning, and fills a stocking for me, though I don’t wake up so early anymore, and I’m nearly twenty-four. We eat late and toast everyone we miss and love, and we think of the special times we shared at a farm I haven’t returned to in years.
Maybe holding on to tradition is a way to hold onto them, but I still can’t help but feel my grandma and my aunty’s presence strongly down the coast. They loved it there; my aunty regularly spent hours sitting by the water with her paintbrush, crafting water colours of the sea. I sit on the rocks and I look out at the water and I feel them there, somewhere. It might not be the old Christmas magic, but it’s something. It’s all we’ve got.
Caitlin Cassidy is a freelance writer and Masters student in Global Media at the University of Melbourne. She works at Readings.