Our family is now not known for our Christmas spirit, in fact, most of us are emphatically, absolutely anti-Christmas. Now. It wasn’t always that way. Growing up, the lead up to Christmas was filled with anticipation, hope and joy. That was until we woke up Christmas morning.
I know it’s not good to get kids everything they want for Christmas, but when you really really want a boogie board and end up with a “foam rider” or really would like a bike and end up with an almost life-size doll at the age of 15. Let’s just say disappointment becomes your friend.
When Mum told me to shut-up on the “Santa’s not real” front, or I get no presents. I was VERY tempted to spill the beans.
I get that my parents didn’t have loads of cash, we grew up on the poor side of Parramatta. However, I don’t think it was really too much asking for one good present instead of 15 smaller (read: cheaper), less significant ones. Christmas meant perpetual disappointment as well as a chance to polish up on my acting skills. “Wow thanks Santa, I always wanted a 3 piece suit with shoulder pads in lime green and pink. How did you know?”
The other part of Christmas that was, hmmm, not so inspiring was the food. As far as I know, we are the only family who could actually lose weight at Christmas due to our yearly consumption of turkey salmonella and mouldy bread rolls (usually purchased the week before the actual day to ‘beat the rush’). The ‘jelly turkey’ is a huge turkey cooked for the same amount of time as a standard (and much smaller) chicken. One Christmas the turkey was still cold in the centre even after having come straight out of the oven. Mum always got really offended when we had to get up in the middle of our meal and ‘nuke’ the turkey in the microwave. We all have an ‘iron gut’ from Mum’s cooking. Forget kombucha, kefir and kimchi we had our yearly injection of jelly turkey salmonella…..yum!
The other anxiety-induced part of Christmas was the pudding. My grandmother would bake a traditional plum pudding that included having sixpences throughout. So you would have to try to mush it up with your teeth to ensure you didn’t actually swallow coinage. Of course, being incredibly anxious I ALWAYS thought I’d swallowed one and would end up trawling through the World Book Encyclopedia looking up “copper poisoning” or “nickel poisoning”. Siri? Do you poo out coins if you swallow them?
Christmas normally ended in with us in tears after Mum yelled at us about how ungrateful we were and how there were starving kids in Africa that don’t even get turkey, let alone jelly turkey. P.S. Please don’t tell my Mum I wrote this….. She still scares me!
Merry Christmas! Bah Humbug! Hope you all have an awesome day! As always, thanks for reading!
