I'm Fine: A White Christmas Lie

It's the day after the day after Boxing day. We have now eaten so much I can barely make out the keys with my pudgy fingers as I type. We ate beef, Dauphinoise potatoes, stuffing made with sage, chestnuts and all manner of pig products, Yorkshire pudding and more. We had our blinis garnished with sour cream, lump fish caviar and smoked salmon with Champagne, ate Yule log, mince pies, pannetone, and more. And the only exercise was not mine - Mat ran the Park Run locally.

Probably a good job that I didn't try this given that I'm unable to move my back properly due to the rather large steel rod in my back, accompanied by its screws, and in my elbow several exceptionally irritating wires. Just quiet - this year we wanted to make sure that this Christmas was especially quiet, no one else than us invited and very minimal communications with others by text or online.

There are two 'spirits' of Christmas prevalent in my life's version of A Christmas Carol (non alcoholic ones I mean, though more on that later!): the ghost of depression and the ghost of anxiety. These two terrible twins love to get at me before Christmas and after it. This whole year I've spent time and money fighting these twins, who are perpetually in the 'terrible twos' phase, exploring and exploiting what they can do and causing nothing but trouble.

It was only earlier this year that I started to realise that I had anxiety as well as depression. Although I've always described myself as someone who couldn't relax at all and whose only hope of an afternoon of not fidgeting madly was to sit in front of the television with my phone to play a game on, a film to watch, and quite possible an enormous amount of leg fidgeting while all of this went on. I literally could not sit still, worrying and worrying about the things to come over and over again, mind reading, fortune telling, forecasting and predicting every possible outcome I could think of.

Now I connect this anxiety I recognise with childhood memories of a familiar sense of unease I now know they represent. I can remember as a child feeling a tremendous discomfort in my stomach, a sense of dread that at three years old I had no vocabulary to articulate. I used to pull in my stomach to try to make the feeling go away. Now it overcomes every part of me and I can finally sense it - I know that I'm anxious - whereas before it was so much a part of me; so stressed and over-sensitised was I at all times, even in sleep, that I didn't even notice it anymore. It's worse at family functions or holidays, work situations or places where I have to see people. So yes, generally quite bad when I get out of the house. Sometimes not even that.

And then we have depression, which is my more familiar of the terrible two. Depression has lived with me a long time and pops up to say hello too often. I think it's when I see the happiness of Christmas that sometimes I feel that that completely unrealistic world - whichever one I'm watching - will be completely out of reach. And let's not even talk about what was going on inside my brain. A whirring of at the very least a trio or quartet of thoughts would un-file themselves from the copious cabinets that somehow found the space to be stored within my brain. The thoughts would be picked at random from the past and begin to circulate slowly at first inside my head.

While White Christmas plays cheerfully in the background (well, okay, Die Hard, but that's hardly realistic in its happy ending amid the lovely bloodshed and broken glass) the after effects of Christmas kick in: excessive sugar, fat, additives, alcohol and the rest that equal a Christmas meal come out to play havoc with my synapses and my digestive system simultaneously.

As I lost my sense of smell almost entirely after the accident, and it hasn't come back yet, I'm finding it hard to taste things as well as I used to. What I can taste and smell are rarities I do really appreciate. I can just about smell Poême, my favourite perfume, and I can taste most of the flavours of the delicious stuffing Mat made for our Christmas dinner.

Even so, I've indulged as above with Christmas eats and Champagne etc. The come down from all of this unhealthy list might mean a higher than normal purchase rate on Pepto Bismol for some; for me it usually means that depression can kick in. I've noticed that if I drink only small amounts and allow plenty of space between days, the depression can hold off. But add to this sugary food, fatty snacks with all their additives? I may as well eat a triple super-sized Big Mac meal. So Christmas is not going to go 100% well since I allow myself to be put under food (and less so drink) assault.

I've changed my eating and my drinking - cutting down massively on the latter in particular (I never really overeat that much). In fact the only time I've drunk every day for a while this year was on a holiday I took earlier this year. Gone the excess, gone the quite often daily glass of wine; remaining the anxiety and depression when they come with only the prescribed medication and the sense that they will probably pass even if it doesn't feel that way, and eating as healthily as I can (apart from the odd sugary snack or crisp. Hey, I'm only human!) I'm now below the Government's weekly health recommendation for alcohol consumption. Now I just need to work on my addiction to crisps.

So there are my ghosts or spirits. They came back right after Christmas day as I came down from all the foods listed at the top of this page, added to which were a couple of glasses of Champagne and a nice glass of red. I noticed on Twitter my fellow sufferers from mental illness getting ill or antsy right after Christmas - or even on Christmas afternoon itself. We made it to Christmas Eve; then we needed to make it to Boxing day and beyond.

Beyond...yes. What is beyond? It's New Year's bloody eve. The least favourite night of the year for many; the most stressful for others, possibly because six nights after stuffing your face with all those blinis, turkey, stuffing (stuffing on stuffing) the television is telling you that the greatest night of your life is coming up and you'd better find some way to stuff yourself into your best dress and heels. I'm restricted to flats thank goodness, and with my restricted movement I think that I may also need to wear a tent to hide my Christmas pudding tummy. I'm not inviting Depression and Anxiety to come with me because I'm going to go to a party and try to have a good time - fewer drinks, less food and who knows, maybe they won't even come back the next day.

Tis the season to be...whatever you wish. Make your Christmas happy. Your way.

En route to a Christmas Party, with a smile. See, I'm not all Scrooge.

I've been a bit miserable about the Christmas season recently, I've realised, mostly because I do find lots of things about this time of year very hard and getting through it is a challenge. It's not easy being depressed and feeling like you have to go out and about whilst miserable in the presence of everyone else being jolly. However, although it's true that I'm hardly a saintly Tiny Tim about the whole affair, nor am I a curmudgeonly Scrooge pulling down his nightgown and ignoring the fact that the stairs sound as if they're in the midst of a marathon steel band session.

Tiny Tim teaches us all a lesson about accepting people and seeing the good in them

Actually there are lots of things I love about Christmas, especially now that we've got into the ironic spirit (pun intended) of the thing properly. Sincerity is strictly reserved for good will to all men: the part about loving one another and "God (or the higher power of your choice) bless us every one" is the only part I really get on board with from that perspective. In my view Christmas is what you want to make of it. And in my view that's spending time with ones I love. And irony. And food.

This would be fine, except clearly this woman is taking the whole thing DEADLY SERIOUSLY

When I lived in America I spent a memorable Halloween in Southfield, Michigan, where I was working at the time. I was amazed as I went to my beloved (and much missed) local Chipotle to see cars pulling up as usual, but emerging from them not the casually dressed office workers I usually saw in line ahead of me, but instead, a pirate, a teddy bear and some sort of fairy princess. Yes, Halloween in America is a Whole Other Proposition. We've all seen the films of adorable little darlings parading the streets in their cute miniature spaceman or cowboy outfits, a sort of Toy Story Comes To Life parody; but adults? I could hardly believe what I was seeing.

Home Alone Lives in Ironic Christmas Jumpers. LOVE

Of course, this is a country which loves its candy, so I don't know why I was as surprised as all that, but I was quite shocked by the lengths to which people would go to dress up and embrace the 'holiday' which carries such little weight in the UK and elsewhere. We find sincerity of this type quite the challenge in the UK. But last Friday in Britain, we had a holiday we as a nation can all, just about, with all our 'I'd like to but really it's terribly embarrassing and I couldn't possibly' reserve, get on board with: Christmas Jumper Day. Or, as I like to think of it, dress-like-your-mum-and-dad-would-have-in-the-seventies,-except-without-a-hint-of-irony day. I have to admit that this title does not quite have the same ring to it.

Lampooning. Irony. Except that in reality families like these really exist in a suburb near you

I spent Christmas in the USA with a great friend in 2003. As we went to buy our Christmas feast we marvelled at the lack of irony of the earnest shoppers all around us in their not quite ridiculous enough 'seasonal sweaters'. I'm talking about the single coloured-jobby with the white patterned reindeer dancing across the front. Or with big stars covering bigger bellies. Surely these people realised that they looked like extras from Home Alone? Apparently not. And Britain being Britain, we couldn't possibly engage in a jolly jape like Christmas jumper day without it being obvious that we're doing the whole thing for a proper giggle, and aren't taking ourselves seriously in the slightest.

Pigs in blankets. Nomnomnomnomnom.

So, back to what I love about Christmas. Food, obviously. And specific types of food at specific times. These have become a tradition with me. Crazy meatballs for Christmas eve dinner, slow cooked pork meatballs with cranberry sauce, brown sugar and sauerkraut mixed up and made into a sttick sauce, baked in the oven while my husband races around the nearest high streets frantically panic buying despite the fact that he's probably already bought better presents than I have anyway; Smoked salmon and (lumpfish, I'm not a millionaire!) caviar on tiny blinis with sour cream and a deliciously cold glass of Champagne to start Christmas day. Some sort of meat for Christmas dinner - I'm not at fussy about this actually, as long as it's not turkey, but with stuffing, port and cranberry-sauce braised red cabbage and as many little sausages with bacon as can be bought in a single trip to Marks and Spencer. And probably pommes Dauphinoise. Cream + potatoes = winning formula.

Mulled wine. Christmas dessert and hot water bottle in one

We sometimes go to a local pub for a Christmas drink on the day. This is one of my favourite times to go out in public, as I love to watch other people enjoying their day and one another's company. This seems like a special way to mark the day, and the neutral ground helps. The weekend before Christmas, my extended family and I come together for a Christmas feast and sharing of silly presents and jokes. Everyone dresses up and we enjoy a catch up and seeing the younger members of the family having fun on the day.

As mentioned in a comment in my previous blog, I don't hold that you have to spend Christmas with your family to be happy. In fact for many that would be a recipe for unhappiness, where resentments long-harboured, traditions which are upheld in the absence of any civil tongues, or where presents are shared with expectations of larger and more expensive offerings to make up for any real warmth or love in the room. That is a traditional Christmas for many, and I don't like it one bit.

One's onesie

My latest Christmas love is the onesie. Ah, the onesie, unattractive in most ways, but warm, snug and comfortable to wear. This is my perfect Christmas outfit. I also love the fact that I don't have to leave the house. I used to wear a variety of Christmas jumpers and pyjamas (and probably a hat too) that Mat will proclaim adorable despite the fact that I wouldn't even be allowed on Jeremy Kyle in such an ensemble. Now I can climb into my onesie and I'm done for the day. Just add woolly socks and my Ugg boots and I'm ready for the Christmas film marathon, sitting in front of our real Christmas tree decorated with tiny white lights and white card stars, shimmering with their gold and silver glitter in the soft lights.

 The films are probably worth a blog post to themselves, so I'll think about that over the next few days. In the meantime I'll take my Christmas radio times, bought once a year, and start circling my Christmas viewing timetable. Home Alone will definitely be on at some point, I bet.