My Ghosts of Christmas Past

Cherishing loved ones who left our Christmas table too soon

Trigger warning: teenage death, car accident

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Anyone who has lost someone close to them knows that this is the time of year when our memories of them are most vivid. Christmas, with its repeating patterns and traditions, has a way of drawing them to the forefront of our consciousness, like ghosts being pulled from the periphery into the centre of our festivities.

The role they played in the unique family performance that is Christmas is no more: the little jobs they would always do, the way they wrapped their presents, the food they liked (or disliked), the way they reacted to others in the family. When they die, they become a missing actor: their place is empty at the dinner table, their bad jokes are unspoken, their favourite chocolate uneaten from the tin of Quality Street (although to be fair, only the Hazelnut cracknell would be left in our tin).

My family has, tragically, had Christmas ‘ghosts’ for longer than most families. I’ve grown used to their absence over the years. But this year, with my mother’s health declining so much recently, I seem to be more keenly aware of their absence, or rather, their legacy. I feel the fragility of life and the rapaciousness of death more keenly.

My sister was the first ‘ghost’ at our Christmas table. She tragically died in September 1985 at the tender age of 17, after my father had blacked out inexplicably at the wheel of the family car on the motorway driving home from a family wedding. He went into a coma and emerged 6 weeks later with a personality-altering brain injury. My mother suffered multiple serious physical injuries, my older brother minor ones. My twin brother escaped with no physical injuries but emotional scars for life. I wasn’t in the car.

A quiet teenager who blended into the background of our noisy family, my sister Kate had barely had time to carve out her unique role at Christmas. Being the eldest daughter with an artistic eye, Mum had delegated to her the task of hanging the Christmas cards on red ribbons down our walls, trusting her to curate them beautifully. I would lay the Christmas dinner table with her, taking care to make it as beautiful as we could. She had started to drink champagne, go out on Christmas Eve (to my father’s disapproval), and hang out with the adults.

My sister Kate, 16, summer 1984

For me, Kate’s ghost at Christmas is forever sitting quietly at the dinner table to the right of my mum, wearing a stylish waistcoat over a long tight black skirt, blue mascara on her eye lashes, pale pink lipstick on her lips. I would remember her as I laid the table and took on her job of hanging up those cards on red ribbons, usually trying to squash the memory for fear of tears falling on the serviettes.

The fact that my father was the one who had crashed the car that caused her death lay heavily over us on the first Christmas, stifling any mention of her name for fear of upsetting him in his confused, brain injured state. None of us blamed him (he was the safest driver we knew), but the pain was too great to whisper her name. And so whilst my sister’s ghost was felt most keenly, she went unacknowledged.

I realise now that this was the first moment in my life that I started caring for one of my parents. I was 15. Keeping quiet about her at the Christmas table (or at any table if I’m honest) was a kindness to my father in the early years.

Our way of coping then was to focus on the wonderful traditions of Christmas that we’d built up over the years: tree up on Christmas eve, Carols from Kings on the radio, morning Mass, champagne around the fire as we opened presents, and not listening to the Queen’s Speech - despite protestations from my royalist Granny. After lunch we would play fast-paced card games and, at all costs, avoid spilling red wine on the 100 year old, damask white Victorian tablecloth used only at Christmas. The jolly, distinctive notes of Sleigh Ride by the Boston Pops Orchestra would rise from the record player keeping our spirits up, as would the presence of my wonderful Irish Godparents whose fun and kindness kept us emotionally afloat every year.

Most of these traditions came from my father who was the creative director of our Christmas performance (my mother was the producer!). His love of good food and wine, parties, classical music and Victorian parlour games equipped him perfectly for the role, whilst his Catholic faith meant he took the celebration of Christmas seriously. He clearly had loved Christmas. Despite the early hour, he’d happily let all four of us children clamber onto their bed on Christmas morning, my mother wiping the sleep from her weary eyes, having no doubt not long finished wrapping presents. His excitement would chime with ours, feigning ignorance at what could be in our stockings ‘A plastic curling fish!’ ‘A giant slinky!’.

And so the pain was that much sharper when my father became the second ghost at our Christmas table - before he had even died.

With a confused and lost look in his eye, my father would sit in his usual place at the table, wearing the same pin-striped suit, his Eric-Morecambe style glasses sliding down his nose, a paper hat propped on his thinning, mouse-grey hair. His body was there, physically unharmed by the car crash, but it wasn’t him. The gregarious, cultured and opinionated man he once was had been replaced with a shrunken, shadow of a man, clasping a glass of Orangina instead of champagne, watching The Two Ronnies whilst we cleared up.

My father at our Christmas dinner table, 1986

Photographs of those early Christmases reveal sadness in my overly made-up eyes, false jollity in my mother’s, kindness in those of my godparents. The play that was our family Christmas had gone from sitcom to tragedy.

It wasn’t until my father had actually died, twenty years later in 2005, that I appreciated how much of his personality was infused into this season. Having just become a parent myself, I started to consciously recreate Christmases in the way my father had done - stockings opened on our bed, champagne with presents before lunch, Sleigh Ride playing through our smart speakers and, yes, not listening to the Queens’ speech - with no protestations from my Australian husband I might add.

It was then that I realised how my father was at his best at Christmas (before 1985), without the strains of raising four children, including twins. How fitting that he was called Noel, born on this day, 20 December, 98 years ago.

Keeping these Christmas traditions is a way of honouring the memory of my father, to cherish him at his best, as well as that of my older sister, who only knew those happy, fun pre-accident Christmases. It also cherishes the memory of my larger-than-life Granny who brought fun and hilarity to the occasion, both pre and post Accident. Like the ‘character’ leading lady in a Gilbert & Sullivan play, she would make faces at the camera, laugh at my godfather’s jokes, beat everyone at Racing Demon, and make a drama about the mess. Proclaiming every year that ‘This might be my last Christmas!’ she lived until 1995, leaving a gaping hole behind her.

Me pulling faces with my Granny, Christmas 1987

Peeling the potatoes whilst listening to Carols from Kings on the radio is one of those traditions. Granny is there knocking back a sherry and fussing over the sprouts. Kate is getting the cutlery drawer out, my Dad instructing my brothers to lay the fire, just back from his usual last minute Christmas shopping (to my mother’s annual annoyance). The merest strains of A Sussex Carol brings a pang to my chest and I find myself fighting back tears as the piercingly pure voice of a choir boy starts O Little Town of Bethlehem. Music’s power to draw out the undercurrents of grief in me is at its strongest at Christmas.

Since my father died, we now intentionally talk about our missing beloved family members at Christmas. It is an act of remembrance, of allowing their ghosts to come alongside us, to be with us. With so much sadness - and indeed joy - in our family history, it is a way of retaining the happy memories, the many years of love and celebration that were real and formative for me.

And so, this year, with my frail mother and two brothers, we will raise a glass to my father, sister and Granny, tears in our eyes as we wish each other another bittersweet ‘Happy Christmas’.

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