It started, our lifetime of lonely exiled Christmases, with a fight. But it didn't really start then. It started in pre-history, or pre-my-history, in ancient bitternesses, deaths and sins unforgiven from before I was even born.
By the time the fight happened, my mother and grandmother were the sole survivors of a small, intense and insular family, and I was almost grown up. A father and husband had died, a brother and uncle had died, a powerful grandfather had died, a two-year-old son had died, making my mother an only child. Things were said, their partial estrangement began, and increased, and our many years of bad Christmases began.
At first it was got through pleasantly enough on the surface, but at great emotional cost to my mother. Then it became an annual awkwardness, the problem of somehow dealing with Christmas in a way that kept my mother and grandmother apart — or at least, bubble-wrapped, like two delicate presents sent together through the mail.
My grandmother was a compulsive talker, and she would corner my mother after lunch and go over and over the past. And her complaints about the present. My mother would often say that after a conversation with my grandmother she felt like shooting herself.
Then the strategies began. For several years we would rent the Godfather films — yes, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films — and watch one or other of those immediately after lunch, effectively to prevent conversation. I don't exactly know why those films were chosen but perhaps (to quote The Song of Bernadette) for those who have faith no explanation is necessary.
When that wore out my father and sister and I would take my grandmother out, leaving my mother at home, having taken to her bed. (For my mother was always mysteriously ill at Christmas.)
Later still, as the years passed, my father, sister and I would visit my grandmother, who lived two hours away, with a packed lunch (my grandmother strongly objected to hostessing duties) and my mother (having packed the lunch) would rather nobly ring and talk to her while we were on our way there. And then take to her bed.
But things only got worse. Eventually, on 1 December