One of the traditions in our family is to take the children, and anyone else staying with us, to dinner at a hotel on Christmas Eve.
We started this when Anna and Daniel were quite small because it cunningly prevents over-anxious children from palely loitering around the house, beadily hoping for early glimpses of Santa Claus. By the time we all arrive back home everyone is tired enough to sleep right round to an hour not too blearily close to the crack of dawn.
In this way we grown-ups have a pleasant break from all our own traditional culinary preparations and we avoid one stark moment of truth most parents have to face – that of being awakened at around 3am on Christmas morning by tiny excited voices piping: ‘Cor, look at this train set!’
‘Dad, how do these bits fit?’
‘Can I use my pastry set, Mummy?’
‘What’s in this big tin – gosh toffees!’
Swiftly followed by: ‘Mu-um, I feel a bit sick!’
And again later at 4am by: Crash. ‘It wasn’t me, Dad! Honestly, it just fell.’
Thud, scuffle, twang: ‘Ha, ha, serves you right. I said we weren’t supposed to ride bicycles on the stairs.’
So one of our pleasantest traditions has sprung up and we are now awakened at a slightly more civilized hour by fairly acceptable thuds, twangs and whispers and – because Grandma spends Christmas with us – by a nice, big early morning cup of lavishly sweetened tea. I have frequently explained to my mother that I take saccharine.
‘It’s all right, dear – I remembered this time, she says, cheerfully lobbing in a sweetener plus two heaped spoonsful of sugar.
Then she goes downstairs for a helpful pre-breakfast potter in the kitchen, keenly drying-up any odds and ends left lying around and stacking them away in unlikely cupboards.
‘I really like having Grandma to stay,’ chuckles Anna, a little later, as we put the finishing touches to the mince pies. ‘She’s so funny and sort of different.’
‘In what way?’ I ask, anxious to file away any tips on ideal grandmotherhood for when my time comes.
‘Well, she enjoys Christmas so much and she’s super with animals, especially that time she tried to give the kiss of life to my rabbit.’
It is true that Grandma has a soft spot for animals. Who else, we ask ourselves, would feed their cat three-course banquets off a lace mat? Or arrange its box (comfortably draped, opera-type) at just the right angle for watching television? Or leave the radio on while she is out, to cheer up an elderly canary? Or give successful artificial respiration to a goldfish?
Her attachment to assorted pets apparently started during her childhood when her mother (bravely) allowed her to have two rabbits – a delightful story which it is also one of our Christmas traditions to hear.
‘Tell us about when you were a girl and you brought home two baby rabbits on the bus …’ urges Dan.
‘Well …’ says Grandma, and we all settle down to hear the familiar story which always ends with the same sentence: ‘That day I was the Happiest Little Girl in the Whole World.’
The children love it – indeed, we all do – and clamour for more tales from the past.
So then David joins in and says he had a pet rabbit when he was a boy.
‘What was it called, Dad?’ we ask, falling about with mirth because we already know the answer.
‘Binny Habit,’ he replies.
Oh, I can just see David and me as grandparents one of these days, starting a whole new batch of family anecdotes. Already I have my own favourite vignette to tell. It occurred when we took Grandma and the children for their special Christmas Eve hotel visit last year and settled them down for a pre-dinner drink.
‘What are you going to have, Daniel?’ we asked, as Dan strove to look as if boozing in bars was all part of his daily life style. And I must say he rose to the challenge magnificently.
‘I’ll have a shandy bolognaise,’ he said with all the sophisticated nonchalance that an eight year old boy can muster.
But for now it is my mother’s stories the children want to hear. The tale of Mackie, for instance, the cat who was evacuated during the war. Grandma is a good storyteller, and with many a dramatic flourish we hear how poor Mackie was so upset by the move that he ran away and lived wild for six months, as a sort of early drop-out.
‘Then one day, just as your Uncle Victor was coming from school, he saw these two little green eyes glinting from a haystack. We were watching out down the hill and suddenly there was his distant figure stumbling up the lane towards us carrying something black and white under his arm, shouting to us breathlessly: “I’ve found him – Mackie’s come home!”’
Every phrase, every sentence, remains the same from year to year and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Grandma’s stories are a tradition and that – along with all the mince pies, the sweet tea and the shiny new train sets, is what good family Christmasses are made of.