Spinning Spheres

Dear Thomas,

The tree hasn't quite forgiven me, I think.
It sits there, glowering - if a tree can sit and glower - and I'm sure it sulks. Wishing, no doubt, it was in some brighter, grander place, surrounded by twinkly things and candlelight and merriment...and people who might actually love it a bit.

Poor thing. It didn't deserve this. Hauled home half-heartedly in a pull-along shopping trolley where it remained for days in the hall before I could muster the effort to bring it into daylight again.

There's nothing on it yet. The baubles need threading, and lights..we need to buy lights. At some point.

Worryingly I found myself talking to it. 'Hi tree,' I said. 'I'm sorry. I'm not much good at this. I used to be good at it, I used to be good at making the effort to be good at it. But this year...' and then I run out of things to say. A new level this! Talking to a Christmas tree, resenting it, because it doesn't know you, because it has nothing to do with you. As I say, poor thing.

I'm aware this is a tad bleak for Christmas, but it's how it is. I'll always tell you how it is. And how is it? Too quiet. The more noise the world makes preparing for Christmas the quieter it feels in here. Not lonely, just quiet.

The radiators creak and the woman in the flat upstairs has started playing music: 'As Time Goes By' from Casablanca. 'Now there's an irony,' I say to the tree, realising this must look a bit like Shirley Valentine talking to her wall (only my accent's a Yorkshire one). 'You must remember this....except you don't, do you? You don't remember any of it. How could you?'

Boxes spilling over with shiny sparkly things, cardboard tearing as we strain to cram them through the tiny door leading from the eaves, trying not to inhale dust and dead spiders or cut our fingers on bits of wood broken off from the door frame. Teetering down the stairs and bursting into the lounge, arms overflowing: 'Look Thomas! Christmas!'

You bang the boxes with the flat of your hands, shake the jingle bells and snatch at the tinsel we put on your head. You get glitter on the tip of your nose and it twinkles as you move. We play your special Christmas videos and sing 'the wind goes whoo in the middle of the night' or ' here we go round the Christmas tree allll daaaay long!' and give you your favourite toy while we begin the construction job on the tree, usually with a glass of fizzy stuff or make-it-from-a-sachet mulled wine.

The memory is a shimmering vision - blurred at the edges - noisy and bright, a shining ghost of Christmas past.

The smell of a real Christmas tree seems to fill the room. You can almost hear it greedily sucking water from our old gaudy crepe paper-covered pot that's somewhere in a storage unit in Derbyshire..along with all our other Christmas bits and pieces. Boxed up, put away.

This artificial one knows it is a poor second best.

Oh, despite the music upstairs it is still too quiet. Classic FM should do it, but the DJs are simpering and saccharine and listeners phone in requests, recounting scenes of jollity: 'ooh, we're so excited....all in the car travelling south to see our six grandchildren! Can you play Oh Come All Ye Faithful?!'. 'Oh sod off', I say to them, to the tree.

But I don't switch off. There's 'Oh Holy Night' and 'Away in a Manger', and as they play I sink where I stood for a moment, on to the hard parquet floor in this far away flat and I give in for a while, give into the music. 

And I know I'm not alone in this, in remembering a past life, an overwhelming moment when the loss is too great. There are so many like us. It's my comfort, that...not being alone. 


But let's not pretend our Christmases were ever everything we'd imagined they'd be Thomas. It was never easy. So many things defined your difference.

I would feed with envious eyes on the stories of 'normal' children. The letters to Santa, the hand-written cards, the imagination, the excitement, the advent calendar, the magic, the mystery, a filled pillowcase, frantic, excited: 'He's been! He's been!'...my own memories of it.

Christmas Day made you grumpy. Fancy...A child who doesn't like opening presents! But it's true. All the excitement, the noise, the flying paper, all those bright shiny new things to cope with all at once, picking up one thing, dropping it in a hurry to look at the next.

Too much for you.

 And sometimes one of us would have to take you away and read you a favourite book - The Gruffalo, Bold Little Tiger, Guess How Much I Love You (to the moon and back again, by the way, in case you were wondering) while everyone else got on with trying to make it all...normal.

We racked our brains over ways of making the days special to you. No point in talking about Santa; if he ever popped round - a school party, a 'Santa steam special' - he'd be surrounded by children with shining eyes, and then there would be you, my angel, giving him an unimpressed, cursory glance. Who knows what you thought, but there was no wonder in your eyes. You saw right through him.

We'd pretend it was different, of course. 'Look Thomas, look, it's SANTA!' and we'd hold out your hand for him to shake and you ignored him, found something more interesting to look at, turned your wandering gaze to the flashing lights of a little boy's hi-tech trainers instead. Santa feeling a wee bit awkward, we could tell, not quite sure what to do. Us having to explain. The toy always something hugely inapproprite for you.

And the concerts and the nativities?  The little ones, those who knew what they were doing, saying their lines; the towel-headed innkeeper, concentrating on his role, pointing angrily at Mary and Joseph: 'There is no oooom!'. The angels with wobbly coat-hanger halos; Mary, holding a Tiny Tears baby Jesus by the hair. And you, purple velour cape hanging off one shoulder, a teacher holding your hand to stop you huffily pulling off your crown (you never would keep a hat on), and holding on to your gold, frankincense, myrrh or whatever because you kept dropping it. You were a king, they said. But you didn't know it.

It broke my heart. There. I said it. Year after year after year...my little square peg in a Christmas-shaped hole............them, us, all of us, pretending.

The music upstairs has stopped. It's getting dark and the Christmas tree looks grumpier than ever. Outside, above the chimney pots and tiled rooftops, above the flat, grey concrete summits of office buildings, the eastern sky is a sharp, clear, piercing, bitter blue. There is one bright shining star.

It's barely gone four but the birds are roosting. Flocks of gulls and pigeons rise, fall, twist and about-turn. The white bellies of the gulls flying west are a dusky pink, reflecting the setting sun.

I hear shouts, look down, and on the street below a man and three children are lugging a huge net-swathed Christmas tree. The children, who must all be under 10 are plump, like little roly-polys in their puffer anoraks, bobble hats, wide scarves and too-big gloves. Their breath comes in sharp whispy blasts.

It's a large tree. Must be for a large room with a high ceiling, I think. Cornices, chandeliers, maybe a huge roaring fireplace swathed in holly where they'll be roasting chestnuts; there'll be halls decked and a piano in the corner around which they'll gather and sing carols. Maybe not. Dickens has a lot to answer for.

Had I forgotten how much you loved a Christmas tree? You would look and look at the lights. And you'd potter over..and plonk on to the floor, crossed legs, amid the already falling needles, right where the branches were thickest and longest.

 I hang the heaviest, biggest, brightest baubles there. And you catch them between thumb and fingers..and twist them one way and then flick them back and spin them and spin them..and watch as they spin first this way, then that way, catching the light. Faster, faster; the glittery ones sprinkling a dust of gold or silver around you..and then slower and slower until you spin them again.

And if you a bit get too exuberant, and we move you away, you sit on the settee. And you gaze at the tree, taking it all in. 

What are you thinking, Thomas? Those impenetrable nut-brown eyes with a glint of something that seem knowledgeable, wise, humouring. What do you know that we don't?

I must remember this Thomas - that your Christmas was special; filled with  music, twinkly lights....and spinning spheres. That it was candlelight, snuggling up with a book, a party hat that never stayed on, a seat at the head of the table, the first plate to be cleared and always room for more. That on the night before Christmas I crept into your room as you slept and I would sit, watching you, and I would think about how, just at that moment, you were like any other child and I like any other mum.

Classic FM plays 'In the Bleak Mid Winter'.....to the proper tune, on a trumpet. It would be easy to sit here as night falls, and do nothing....wait until the tree in the corner becomes a dark, unhappy smudge.

But I think of you. How your joy was in the smallest, simplest things; how you were amazed by the shining baubles turning, turning.... 

There's a small, bright, gold, twirly-patterned star in a brown paper bag next to me, bought several days ago from heaving, chaotic, bursting at the seams Maison Du Monde. As I lift it out it drops glitter into my lap.

In the twilight I hold the bare branches of the unloved tree and, as the music switches to the gentle piano melody that is the beginning of 'Walking in the Air', I perch it on top.

A star for a star.

We can do this, I say.

xxxxx