Forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us

After lunch on Christmas Day my father always stood at the sink in his apron and yellow Marigolds and did the washing-up. Rolling up his shirtsleeves the gentleman’s way, as he claimed it was, with two turns maximum to just below the elbow, he couldn’t wait to get started. I can see him now, paper hat, suds up his arms. However, the underlying and perhaps most pressing reason for his doing the washing-up all afternoon was that he was a furtive drinker. When my father courted my mother, he led her to believe that he was a non-smoking, teetotalling Christian believer, when in truth he was the exact opposite of those three ideals; and though a long one, their marriage essentially foundered on the rocks of those discrepancies. Locking himself in the kitchen and doing the washing-up while everyone else opened their presents in the sitting room was the one time in the year he could have a good drink indoors and more or less get away with it. He drank himself to death nearly 20 years ago, in the end quite openly and calmly, but when I think of him today, I always see him in his pinny, and his tie (always that tie) neatly tucked in at the top, accepting another tray of dirty glasses from me with a red face and a fatuous and slightly guilty squint.

Reeling back the years still further, to when I was a child, I also have fond memories of the Boxing Day party that my Auntie Pat and Uncle Eric, relatives on my recidivist father’s side, threw every year. Auntie Pat was a great beauty. She lived with my Uncle Eric in an arrangement that is best described by that educative French phrase ménage à trois, with Marvin, a massively built, small-time card-game enforcer who oozed aplomb and gentlemanly good manners.