Kissmas

"Can we line up all the people with Prader-Willi?” my daughter asked, tugging at my sleeve.

“Line them up?” I visualised a Usual Suspects police mugshot-type scenario. “Do you mean take a group photo?”

“Yeah.”

So we did. The lining up consisted more of a coralling them into a haphazard, higgledy piggledy crowd, with Santa at the centre. It may or may not have been the real Father Christmas. 

Today’s party was a festive get-together organised by parents and the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association, held in a Mormon Church Hall. The church has kindly hosted the event for the past couple of years. The same white-haired Mormon elder as last year did a Clark Kent and vanished shortly before an American-accented Santa appeared. The kids didn’t seem to twig that he only came from the North Pole if the North Pole is ever so slightly north of the centre of Salt Lake City. ‘Santa’ also put his big black wellies in it, when he said to a young lad with PWS who was wearing a roast turkey hat: “You're going to make us all hungry, looking at that!” It was a PWS party. You know, the syndrome where people never physically feel full up. Trust me, Santa, buddy, they don't need a hat to make them feel hungry.

There was a cartoon character theme to today’s do. Most people dug out Spiderman T-shirts, or Frozen dresses. Spectacularly, one mum and daughter came as The Queen of Hearts and Alice In Wonderland. There were a few onesies, and a snowman. We had couple of tantrums, some umming and yumming over the tasty, healthy lunch, loads of sticking and glueing on the Make Your Own Christmas Cards table, and various levels of dancing, from half-hearted to seriously wild.

I love these get-togethers.

The icing on the cake, or rather the pineapple on top of the sugar-free jelly, was a special goodbye from a gorgeous little red-haired girl.

Solemnly shy when she’d arrived, she’d lost her initial bashfullness and latched on to my daughter. My teenager had happily mothered her, allowing her to sit on her lap, holding on to her tiny hand as they stood swaying on the dance floor. I’d watched them, grinning, remembering my daughter cuddling her as a baby, just a couple of summers ago. Here they were again, two beautiful girls, with the same missing slither of a tiny chromosome. One tiny, one 4ft 10 and a half inches tall. Happy to buddy up.

And now, my daughter’s rediscovered friend had pottered over to me on her own as I was gathering together our coats and bags. She took my hand, and started to chat, excitedly. I had to crouch down to hear her, ignoring the strains of Let It Go coming out of the disco speakers. (I also ignored my son, in my periphery vision, bending down and miming farts in a daring reinterpretation of the song’s lyrics. At least I hope he was miming).

She told me she’d just kissed my daughter on the cheek. And then she beamed and did the same to me. It was a little smacker I'll treasure.

Song is The Autumn Stones - New Kiss

Repeats

My daughter still believes. She did look a little sceptical that Santa had adjudged her brother to have been “nice” and not “naughty” in his personalised internet video message from the North Pole, but she wasn’t too bothered, as she’d just received the same verdict.

They went off to sleep last night when tiredness overtook their excitement, both squeezing their eyes shut and promising not to peep. My 15-year-old daughter and my five-year-old boy. 

And now, our family has grown. We have been joined by an annoying Gremlin-like creature called a Furby. As far as I can fathom, there’s no off-switch, so when we wanted a bit of peace we had to put it in another room to send it to sleep, as our daughter told us we weren’t allowed to take the batteries out, because “that would be killing her”. The unhinged muppet is called Fiona, apparently. Interestingly, as attached as my daughter is to her new evil incubus, her favourite present today seems to have been a jar of giant gherkins.

I’m slightly bruised from having to lie on the floor while my son tested the ‘off-road’ capabilities of his new remote control car by driving it over the top of me. I’ve been having some funny conversations with him using his new walkie-talkies: “Over it. Get over it, Mummy,” was his idea of how you signal to the other person you’ve finished talking. But his favourite present is a tiny Lego Batman figure. He’s lost the mini Dark Knight’s mask three times today (each loss marked by escalating degrees of panic starting off at Red Alert and finishing with Cuban Missile Crisis level).

They say there’s a lot of repeats at Christmas. They weren’t kidding. I said they weren’t kidding. And I'm not just talking about the Brussels sprouts fumes emanating from my husband's rear portions. Our daughter, whose peseveration* levels were sky high (*where she asks the same questions or says the same sentence repeatedly) was at one end of the table; next to her was my dad, now home after six weeks in hospital, who is currently stuck in a time loop world where his brain thinks everything is happening over and over again; and next to him was my mum-in-law, whose dementia causes conversations to roll right round baby right round, like a record baby, right round...

But it worked. It worked out. We snapped our crackers, gave eachother gifts, and laughed at my Yorkshire Puddings, which my daughter defended on my behalf. Repeatedly. 

So, I’ve got a truckload of turkey left, and we’re going have the same personnel for a Boxing Day re-run. We’re going to have to go down the park tomorrow to get some fresh air and burn off some calories. We’ll be taking the walkie-talkies, and the Furby, but probably not the gherkins.

It’s been a long, kind of wonderful, kind of heartbreaking day. Over and out.

Video is LCD Soundsystem - On Repeat