Baster

Coffee and toast in the pub with the family always generates some belly laughs, especially if my daughter gets extra talkative after her special Saturday treat of half a pint of cloudy cider.

We were discussing Christmas presents, and how I’m a stingy aunty who cuts off her nieces and nephews at the age of 21. Seeing the horrified look on my girl’s face, I realise she thinks the 21-year-old rule might apply to her from next year. 

“No, just nieces and nephews, sweetheart - you’ll still get presents! And also, remember that some of your cousins have babies and now it’s the turn of the babies to get the presents.”

My daughter contemplates this information.

“Will you buy presents for my babies if I get married?”

“Yes, sweetheart, but remember you can’t have babies because you have Prader-Willi Syndrome.”

“But I could marry someone with babies.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“I could marry a lady who’s pregnant.”

“That’s also true, although you’d have to have a very specific dating profile.”

More contemplation. My girl turns to her cousin Kate, sitting next to her.

“Kate, will you have babies?”

Kate grins and says that she hopes she will, ‘one day’.

Pause. And then a declaration from my girl that is loud enough to be heard over the piped sounds of All I Want For Christmas Is You:

“OK. What you need is...some sperm.”

Addendum:

“Yeah, you need to go to one of those places where you get your sperm from.”

Merry Christmas. And remember to baste your turkey.

Video is Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings performing some songs from their Christmas Album, which I've been playing while posting this. The final song [at 9:12], Big Bulbs (lyrics: 'Baby, you've got them big bulbs, baby you've got them big bulbs,") has sparked a whole other conversation...

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

Peelings

Christmas peaked quite early.

On Sunday, various members of our family popped round to Mum and Dad’s house to drop off a few pressies and consume excess food (the latter as part of the pre-Christmas overeating training regime). Mum asked me if I had any footage of that “Gang-bang” thing my daughter did in the school show. My three nieces’ astonished double takes were a joy to behold. “Gangnam, Mum, GANG-NAM Style, for God’s sake!” I told her, before asking if she may possibly have used that expression whilst telling her friends what her granddaughter had been up to recently, and if so, had she heard of a social services SWAT team turning up at the school gates?

Christmas Eve (always my favourite part of the festive season) saw our two children attend the church nativity service, followed by us taking our daughter out for the now traditional “Night Before Christmas Curry”. The smallest, wriggliest offspring was packed off to Nanna and Grandad’s for an hour while our girl sat with us in the Indian restaurant and ploughed her way through a chicken tikka (and a spoonful of her dad’s spicy dhansak sauce). She was brilliantly, sparklingly, happy: chatting away at full speed and jumping from subject to subject in huge, random, leaps. I couldn’t stop beaming at her, catching my husband’s eye and exchanging grins with him.

We headed home, picking up our over-excited boy on the way, who had apparently been let loose on Nanna’s electric bath chair seat. If she ever gets a Stannah stair lift, I think he might actually demand to move in. And then, before we knew it, it was time to put out a mince pie and carrot for Santa and Rudolph, and wrangle the kids to bed.

Christmas Day was always going to be a little more effort. My husband’s four days on/four days off shifts happened to fall slap bang on Christmas this year, so he had to head off for work in the early hours. I managed to supervise the opening of presents without the kids coming to blows, and was going great guns with the turkey, when we had a slight hiccup. I turned on the waste disposal in the kitchen sink, it made a burping sound to better any human Brussels sprouts-fuelled effort later in the day, and water and potato peelings began to fire upwards from the plughole.  Having picked them out of my hair and eyebrows, I opened the cupboard door under the sink to discover water pouring out of a pipe. We had a leak, a back-up and possibly a blockage. 

I plonked the kids in front of the TV and switched on a recording of The Snowman to keep them out of the way for half an hour, returned to the fray, got out a stack of teatowels and got on my hands and knees to reach in and mop up the giant puddle of mucky water. When Mum & Dad arrived, at around the time I was due to be putting on the roasties, they were greeted by the site of me half-in/half out of the cupboard, with my big fat behind waggling in the air (topped off by a plunging portion of builder’s bum). The soundtrack to this was the angelic strains of “Walking In The Air”, accompanied by Muttley-style incoherent growlings and mutterings echoing out from under the sink. This is a festive image they can never unsee.

But it takes more than being peppered with high velocity peelings to put me off my stride. The calming influence of my unflappable mother kept me on an even keel, (as did the life-saving existence of a working sink in our utility room), and a perfectly acceptable Christmas dinner was served up a mere 30 minutes late. What’s more, my daughter, the one with an insatiable appetite, didn’t go off the deep end at the delay, probably because she was nose-deep in distracting presents.

I’m now drinking a large Snowball. I’ve got my feet up. My husband is home and has been chased round the house by a small boy wearing a Sonic The Hedgehog woolly hat. My daughter has only just gone to bed, after dancing for more than an hour to Christmas songs played on her new Hello Kitty CD player. There’s a placcy bag over the kitchen taps to remind us not to turn them on and flood the floor again - and at some point I must call the plumber.

It's been a great day. Not perfect, obviously, but that would be far too dull, wouldn't it? Hope yours was imperfectly happy, too.

Song is The Pogues - Sally Maclennane (The...ahem...Peel session version)

Forgiven

So I take it all back. Everything I’ve ever said about Justin Bieber.

The auto-tuned automaton has an entirely disproportionate ability to annoy me. This, I’m sure, is part of the reason why my daughter had decided to be ‘into’ him. 

My only consolation this year has been the fact that the monstrous Mariah Carey has managed to trap the egomaniacal, little, mop-topped marionette in a department store (according to their appalling All I Want For Christmas duet video) and may well by now have smothered him to death with her enormous fake breasts.

But this Christmas, Justin Bieber, in the form of a Bieber Fever Alarm Clock, was able to put this expression on my girl’s face. 

For this, he is forgiven.

Oh, and please don’t feel you actually have to watch the video. I don’t want to ruin your Christmas.

Video is Mariah Carey & Justin Bieber - All I Want For Christmas. It's 'Super Festive!' apparently. That is if your idea of something festive is a 41-year-old woman in an Ann Summers' sexy Mrs Santa outfit rubbing herself up and down a wall and presenting her bottom to the camera, like a baboon on heat. 

Gatherings

Nanna, Grandad, and a girl licking her lips at the prospect of more sprouts

Food is at the epicentre of all our family gatherings.

Whether it's a wedding, christening, funeral, birthday, or parole party, our clan is big on eating. Literally. We are definitely big, and it’s definitely down to eating.

Christmas, of course, is no exception.

It can be a challenge with a child with Prader-Willi Syndrome, who is always hungry (as opposed to the rest of us, who just continue to eat, despite being utterly stuffed).

My daughter doesn't know what it feels like to be full. Her brain doesn't tell her this. My brain, and the buttons popping off my straining clothes tell me, but then I'm just an idiot who doesn't listen.

However, there are methods to avoid the madness at Christmas and keep our daughter happy on the food front:

• First of all, there’s none of this waiting until after the Queen’s Speech to tuck into your scran. No, no, no. My daughter’s dinner-time is usually 12 noon on the dot. On Christmas Day we stretch this out until 1pm, then get stuck in.
  
• She has boiled potatoes and just one roastie, instead of a heap of the crispy fat-coated spuds.
  
• Veggies are piled sky high, including sprouts, which could accurately be described as throwing caution to the...er...‘wind’.
  
• A small portion of Weight-Watchers recipe Christmas pud is allowed.
  
• Breadsticks, raisins, and other assorted low-fat snacks and no-sugar sweets are rationed out throughout the day when the choccies and biscuits are passed round.

Now usually this all happens at my mum & dad’s house. When I say usually, I actually mean that this is what has happened for the past 40 years. That’s a lot of turkey and cranberry sauce under the bridge.

But this year, having moved back to my home town, I’m doing the festive fare.

I’m pretty chilled about it though. I’ve been working out all the timings and I’ve got it sorted: two and a half hours. Plus 20 minutes. That isn’t for the turkey - that’s how long before dinner I plan to start drinking. Well, I don’t want to be under-done.

I'll see you all the other side of Christmas. I'll still be picking the glitter out of the carpet (Santa's little elves and reindeers leave a dusting of it, didn't you know this?). My daughter will be writing her thankyou notes. My toddler will have broken every single toy he's been given.

I love Christmas. Have a great one.

Video is The Ronettes - Sleigh Ride

Discovery

Like some evil plantation owner I’ve been keeping the present-picking slave labour busy at the Amazon warehouse this week.

Several interesting packages have winged their way to us, been parcelled up, and are now stashed in the back of my wardrobe, ready to give the kids on Christmas morning.

But I cocked up. I left one delivery on my desk by mistake. And while I was on the loo, my daughter spotted it, and had a quick rifle through.

When I walked back into the room, she looked distinctly miffed.

“Mummy, I’ve seen The Parent Trap DVD. It’s in that packet.”

‘Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ I thought to myself. ‘How am I going to get out of this one?’.  This gift, you see, was one from her actual Santa List, not one she’d asked me or any other relatives to buy. 

After ticking her off for going through my post (but really, who could blame her?), I muttered something about Father Christmas asking me to get this present for her.

She looked at me oddly, and trudged upstairs to her room. 

Later she presented me with the card pictured at the top of the page. In case the sentence structure confuses you, I'll rearrange it for you:

Dear Father Christmas, can you not get parent trap DVV
because my mum is going to get it for christmas

Also squashed in on the right is the sentence:

but you can get animal crossing wii game.

And there was me thinking I'd finished all my Christmas shopping.

She was adamant that she needed to send the card to The North Pole immediately, but I managed to persuade her that - as it was dark - it was best I posted it for her.

When I tucked her into bed, I found a pile of her earlier drafts (pictured below).

She takes this Santa stuff seriously.

Video is The Electric Light Orchestra - Don't Bring Me Down (from the album Discovery).

Believe

“I believe in Father Christmas.”

The certainty in my teenage daughter’s voice was impressive.

The emphasis was firmly on the ‘I’. The statement was obviously aimed at classmates, or older, more worldly children who had tried to tell her otherwise. 

We’d been listening to some Aretha Franklin, which had caused her to plead, in an impossibly grown-up voice: “Mummy, can we turn off the old music now, and have something modern?”. 

Deciding not to push my luck with the new Tom Waits album, I let my girl loose with the hi-fi controller. Feeling festive, she put on The Best Christmas Album In The Word...Ever, and out of the speakers came the sounds of ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’ by Greg Lake. 

First, let’s get two inconvenient facts out of the way:

1. The song was released in 1974, which, by any stretch of the imagination, is not ‘modern’.
2. Greg Lake claims the song is a protest at the commercialisation of Christmas, and lyricist Peter Sinfield says it deals with a loss of innocence and childhood belief. 

Neither of these facts can change my daughter’s pure, simple, and joyful enjoyment of the track. Because it says “I believe in Father Christmas’. And she does.

“People say that Father Christmas isn’t real, Mummy,” she announced, halfway through the song, her eyes wide and serious.

“But I know he is, because his presents have a label on, saying they’re from Santa.”

You have to hand it to her. It’s a credible argument.

I am mum to a girl with special needs, which means she has a special approach to Christmas, compared to the average 13-year-old. Look at her face in the photo above, taken when she was six. All you need to know is now, seven years on, when you mention the C-word, she still makes the same face.

Sometimes her needs make life hard. Sometimes they make it nice. This Christmas stuff - it’s right up there at the top of the nice charts.

So I’m proud to stand up, state my name, put my hand on my heart, stare unblinkingly into the middle distance, and declare the following:

I believe in Father Christmas, too.

Video is Greg Lake. You know which song.