Yours

December 25th

Dear Sophia,

I love you.

It’s nice to think this will be our last Christmas not together. I’ll never wake up on Christmas morning on my own again. I suppose eventually we’ll start getting woken up by our kids all excited really early Christmas morning. I won’t mind that though.

Still I’m looking forward to our first couple of Christmases together where it’s just us and we can spend the morning in bed and give each other presents and do whatever we want.

When I was a kid my mum used to do my stocking for me. I think from pretty early on I knew santa wasn’t real. I just couldn’t work out why the story about him existed if he didn’t.

I remember one year trying to stay awake all night and seeing my mum come into my room with my stocking. When I woke up in the morning my mum asked me if I’d seen her come in and I said yes. She told me that santa gives the stockings to the mum of each house to save him time. She said that way he doesn’t have to go round every room in every house. After that my mum started leaving the stocking outside my bedroom door so she didn’t wake me up. I could never sleep well as a kid anyway so I always heard. I won’t feel good about lying to our kids but I definitely want them to believe magical things happen at Christmas.

It’s good I got to use this year as a kind of practice for next year when we’re together. I tried dinner this afternoon. I don’t really know what time people have dinner at Christmas. I’ve never watched the Queen’s speech but I guess people eat just before or just after that. Dinner wasn’t great but it could’ve gone worse.

I cut up some potatoes and managed to kind of roast them ok. I got some chicken out of the freezer and used that instead of turkey. It was all edible at least. I found some gravy powder stuff in one of the cupboards which made it all seem a bit nicer. I hadn’t really thought to buy turkey ahead of time but I figure it’s pretty much the same as chicken anyway. I don’t know what else was missing but something definitely was. It didn’t quite feel like Christmas dinner.

When I was little we used to have crackers out on the table. My mum used to buy a twelve pack of them. After my dad left it meant we would only use two on Christmas day and we kept having to find excuses to have them out at dinner for the next week or two. It always felt kind of sad.

The way we used to do dinner was we would sit down at the table and then my mum would say a prayer before we ate. I’m not sure why. I never thought to ask. Then we’d pull the crackers and start eating.

We can do all the traditions you like next year and have new ones too for when we have kids. We don’t even have to have turkey really. I didn’t miss it much. I don’t know what else people have though. We could find something unusual to have so the kids can tell everyone else at school how great their Christmas was.

I hope you had a wonderful day. It’s your last Christmas morning without me. I’ll make sure I can do dinner perfectly for next Christmas. It’ll all be perfect.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew