The first Christmas…

Since my mum passed away, we’ve been living through the year of firsts. The first birthday without mum. The first Christmas without mum. My family and I have been adamant about not celebrating Christmas, to the point of almost not meeting up at all. But we settled for having a family gathering, just without the usual festive food and gifting. I prepared prawn noodles for dinner (a very un-Christmassy meal) and have even planned what to cook for the upcoming Chinese New Year (fish and chips, in case you were wondering) to make sure I don’t give rise to any celebratory mood. The kids enjoyed themselves of course, and so did we.

But it was still tough. After everyone left, before the door even had time to fully shut, I sobbed into Ed’s wide shoulders. In my head, I kept thinking - she was taken from us so suddenly. It isn’t fair. It still feels so unreal that she is no longer around. I still half expect her to pop out from a room calling one of the grandkids’ names.

My memories of Christmas with my mum when I was younger involved lots of toy shopping for the gazillion cousins I have. We’d write the list to make sure we didn’t leave anyone out, and she’d make me write the names on each Christmas package. When I got older, my aunts and uncles phased out gifting (I suppose it got too expensive for everyone and the kids were getting too old for toys). It happened around the time that I was starting to explore my way around baking. So we baked carrot cake - one tray for each family. It had lots of grated carrot, raisins, brown sugar, eggs and flour. It was a whole day affair involving buying all the ingredients and finding the biggest bowl we had to mix the batter. I enjoyed cracking the eggs. My mum measured out the ingredients and made sure every ingredient was in its place. Even my dad was put to work hand-grating the carrots (we did not have a food processor). We even bought cake boards and boxes so that they would be professionally packaged and gifted. We did this for a couple of years before we moved onto something else.

To honour my mum, I decided that little C and I would bake gifts for my in-laws this year. C chose giant chocolate chip cookies and they turned out really good. We spent the afternoon decorating construction paper to use as wrapping paper. Each family had a different design. The names were handwritten by C.

Will this be our new tradition, inspired by my mum? Perhaps.

For now, it is just my way of coping with the holidays in a way that allows me to still feel close to her.