Festive much?

While I was growing up, my family did not put up the Christmas tree for five consecutive years. I’d like to say that we were progressive non-traditionalists who scoffed at commercialised pagan rituals, but in truth we were simply lazy. My mother, especially, believed that if something would only require undoing in the near future, there was no real point in doing it in the first place. (I suspect that this, along with being overweight, is the reason all her pants had elasticised waistbands.) I’m now wenty-two years old and I still have no idea how to make a bed. When I was a child, my mother furnished my bedroom with a mattress, a pillow and a doona. During summer, she would simply remove the doona and leave me with its cover. It never presented an issue until I began sleeping over at friends’ houses. Then I would secretly pack a sleeping bag and lie inside it on top of the bed, terrified of wrinkling the sheets. “Oh sweetheart,” my friend’s mother would say as she poured me an orange juice the next morning, “You didn’t have to make the bed!” Unbeknownst to her, I never unmade the damn thing.

My family has never really been into festivities. Last week I had a birthday, which was largely ignored apart from the household making the effort to eat a meal together. As a present, my parents agreed not to force me to pay for my own car insurance and registration for another twelve months. Two days later, I came home from work to find a book sitting on my bedside table. My brother had stuck a post-it note on the front reading: “Dear Annik. Happy thingy. Chris.”

As far as Christmas is concerned, over the years we all gradually began copying Chris’s method of purchasing gifts, tying the top of the plastic bags in which they were packed by frazzled sales assistants, and writing the intended recipient’s name on the front using a permanent marker. Then we stacked them in a messy pile underneath the coffee table and prayed that the cat would not urinate on top of it.

A month before my 18th Christmas, my father came home one day with a fibre-optic tree. “There!” he said, propping it up in the corner of the lounge room and plugging it into a power point, “Now is anybody feeling enthusiastic enough to flick a goddamn switch?”

The sad thing is we weren’t.