Nusye McComish – SouthSeaEyes

The problem with your husband being the Christmas core of the family, is that when he dies, you inherit the Turkey Problem.

Bear with me. This – this – is a hard one to write.

Greg, my dearest husband, the love of my life, was the warmth of Christmas. It is – was –  his annual campaign to wow me, and it worked – every single time.

I fell for him over Christmas dinner when I was a first-year economics student (I switched to Finance the following year, but that’s another story). He invited three women to his house – two pretty blondes with blue eyes … and me. And this early twentysomething young man cooked us a full Christmas Dinner. On his own. The full shebang:  roast turkey, incredible roast potatoes, steamed vegetables, tasty gravy, the lot. I watched him manage that complicated dance of timing, temperature and basting, completely in command. And I thought: Crumbs, but this man has skills. By the end of that evening I was falling – hard. Not having that experience before, I had no clue. But he had already caught me. Fully.

Then he spent the next 32 years perfecting the Christmas Roast Dinner.  Every Christmas his turkey roast gets better; more moist, more flavoursome. His roast potatoes with goose fat became legendary. The full works. He was showing me, every year, “I can still wow you”.

And I was. Every single time.

When he died in May, Christmas wasn’t even a thought – there was only deep grief; the vast, ruinous country of it.

Then, November arrived. Three weeks ago, I noticed the adverts started. Supermarket aisles suddenly polluted with baubles and chocolates and Christmas paraphernalia everywhere I looked. I tried to suppress it – looked away from the decorations. Avoided large turkey roasting trays like landmines. But suppression only made it worse – more nebulous, less manageable. The weight of pretending it wasn’t bearing down on me. Not really …

Until yesterday. 

A dear, dear friend – the one who drove me to his workplace that day, who was there in those first impossible hours – gifted me a bauble. Bespoke. Double-sided. At its centre, a photograph of my darling Greg, a picture from our travels in Europe. He looks so handsome, so relaxed. So completely him.

And something shifted. I could commit to Christmas.

Not exactly to “joy”, per se. Not truly. Not also to celebration. This is too impossible at the moment. But instead, to doing – doing – Christmas. To the practical reality of it.

I asked our eldest to get the tree down from the attic for when she comes home next week. This was Greg’s task, always his job each time – now hers. The tree going up and being prepped is now later than our usual first weekend in December.  But it’ll have to do this year.

I am even contemplating whether the budget may stretch to a smaller tree from the Christmas tree market somewhere nearby. I’m not tall, a small version will do, maybe. Though the living room needs rearranging and sorting first. These are the practical inheritances of widowhood: calculations that used to be automatic now require actual thought. Christmas budget. Tree height. Energy. What I can actually manage given all these perimeters.

So here I am in the supermarket aisles with a tight shopping list. Turkey (not fancying crowns, so maybe a small turkey? maybe pre-made?). Potatoes. Goose fat. Brussels sprouts. My heart is not in it. The grief is physical – it wrenches through the back of the sinuses and the throat, and the gut, and the heart.  Horrifyingly, my face crumpled in the frozen food aisle. Ack. Stop. Keep breathing. Keep moving. A thousand tears over a shopping trolley. Where’s the ruddy tissue?

I had to leave. Eventually going online to click and collect from a local supermarket – it’s too late to book a delivery slot, even thouugh it’s only the first week of December. So I bought a pre-made turkey online. Because this is what resilience looks like. We cry. We buy a form of turkey. Both things are true, and both things just have to happen this year.