To be a child over Christmas is to have a peak experience combining anxiety and ecstasy, culminating at the moment when a big, generous, kind-hearted man comes and showers us with his bounty while we are tucked up in bed. Offering us cast-iron proof (and proof is always needed) that we’ve been good little boys and girls.

It is this magic which makes Christmas bearable for us adults, for the story of little baby Jesus being born far away has ceased to have relevance in this society, no matter how many of the pious pack the churches on the day. When the decorations go up in the streets and shops, when pretty little fairy lights glitter and sparkle everywhere you look, we don’t think of the Christian myth. We think of Santa. And our excitement when we were children.

The show goes on, year after year, getting more and more extravagant, and we tut-tut the commercialisation and the schmaltz of it all, the first sighting of Santa in October for Chrissake, the incessant child-oriented advertisements on TV offering mega-strato-hyper-entertainment for a mere few hundred pounds. Business people promote Christmas not to make money that wouldn’t be otherwise around, but to get in on the act, because we like to let our hair down and have a bit of craic at one particular time of the year.

And we choose now, December, partly because there has always been a celebration of the winter solstice, partly because otherwise winter would be unutterably gloomy, and partly because there’s no point in changing it. But the reason it survives at all is because of children, and their love of magic. And our own yearning for that time when magic and reality were interchangeable.

Latest Fling

One December evening, when I was a child, I was listening to a radio programme of the “does the panel think?” kind in the kitchen, as my mother was cooking. A smug little know-it-all shit of about eleven or twelve asked the panel whether children should be told that there is no Father Christmas. I stared into the middle distance, shocked, and my mother started humming and banging around the pots and pans with gusto, to drown out the broadcast.

I said nothing, and left the room, the brave little man, feigning unspoilt innocence. The pain of that loss haunts me still. As it does us all, for why else do we put on such a show for the children, if not to make reparations for destroying that magic?

Now I am not the sort of queer who would marry a woman he wasn’t attracted to in order to have children, as so many do, sadly. I am also not sure (yet?) whether I would be happy to come to an arrangement with a friendly lesbian and do a gravy-baster job – there’s the real problem of allocation of responsibilities when two parents are not in a loving intimate relationship, and who are perhaps not living together. There’s also the question of Mummy’s friend and Daddy’s friend – what if Him Beside didn’t get on with Mummy’s latest fling?

I am not naïve enough to propose that four adults living together with a child could provide any more emotionally secure a background for a child than the traditional nuclear or the much-maligned lone parent – although I am convinced that with more people around when a child is growing up, the more chance that they will be attracted to, and get attached to, adults whom they like. And whatever the domestic set-up or the intentions, the likelihood is that the little sprog will still manage to grow up just as fucked up as the rest of us.

Important Day

For those without children in their lives, or without a genuine belief in the symbolic value of celebrating the 1,993 birthday of a Jewish radical from the Middle East, the rí-rá of Christmas loses its point. It is then, if we’re not careful, that the Ancient Burden of Family Responsibilities takes over.

It is especially vexing for dykes and queers, who, naturally, are mostly childless. It is the one time of year when the conflict between family obligations and asserting one’s independence is guaranteed to become an issue. It is so often the time when we allow the tyranny of pleasing our parents override our own fragile sense of rightness that we should spend an “important” day with the person we care most about.

And if we do that, we undermine our own appreciation of the value of our own feelings. For if we as gay and lesbian people – and, indeed, as adult human beings – remain forever bewitched by the belief that Family overrides everything at this time of year, including our own emotional lives, then we are colluding in the assumption that heterosexual relationships are more valid, more important, than homosexual.

We, without children, must create our own Family for Christmas, whether that is with a lover, a friend, or a group of friends and lovers – and we must begin to find the words and the courage to define and defend them as a family. If we don’t honour the love of our companions and friends at this time of year, and attempt some realistic, honest, negotiated compromise between the pull back to parents and siblings and the pull towards our own loved ones in our adult lives, then by that negation of love we devalue ourselves, and the lives we lead. We do that at our peril.

I wish you, and all your families, a peaceful time.