Last Christmas I felt like the Grinch, which was a shame as apart from birthdays, Christmas is the only event I usually get into. My kids have no lived experience of Easter or Guy Fawkes Day or Hallowe’en as I am against the rampant commercialisation involved in those days. All restraints are thrown away for Christmas. Last year I just could not find the Christmas spirit at all. “Bah Humbug,” had become my anthem for 2023, due to various reasons.

Christmas has always been a family time for us and last year it made me think about all the people we had lost over the past 15 years. Christmas was the time when we would gather and share a whole day together. As we became older we had further to travel to make it back home, and we didn’t always make it back. Christmas had become a four generations event, and then too quickly it had become three generations again. That’s life, you live, you die. Life goes on, but it’s different, and that’s okay.

Filial piety wouldn’t allow me not to drag my family south for Christmas for a four day trip. At the end of the journey we were all relieved to be back in our own home again, even the dog. There is no place like home but home changes over time. Our lives are like movies, not snapshots. Nothing is frozen in place forever, things keep on changing, for better or worse, till death do us part.