Every year I try to make Christmas perfect. Maybe it’s time I give up

There are two ways you can look at my relationship with Christmas. You could say that it brings out the giddy child within, reconnecting me to a simpler time, one before mortgage and relationship stress, and the stress of stressing about being too stressed. Or, you could say a rigid attachment to childish ideals of Christmas magic brings out the unlovable, uncompromising psychotic in me, putting a backlight to the faults and fissures of my adult personality. My family would probably choose the latter.

I love Christmas, even the parts that drive other people nuts: the panicked frenzy that descends as December 25 approaches, the endless rotation of jingle-bell jingles in shops, the corny movies, the total inescapability of the season. Even the sprawling shopping malls – anathema to my sensibilities 10 months of the year – transform into wonderlands of festive magic and possibility. My 11-year-old has the good sense to complain when the decorations appear in early October while I rejoice at the opportunity to stretch the season to its tautest limits of plausibility. I love Christmas so much, in fact, that I find it very difficult to enjoy.

A family should be functional, if not thriving, for the festivity to register below surface level.

Bunny Bunyai

Despite being too old to blame my mum, I blame my mum. Having endured a spartan, lonely upbringing herself, she went all out at Christmas for my brother and me. Every December, our lounge room was given over to a towering pine tree covered in delicate Polish glass baubles and fine German tinsel. She baked mince pies, strung the halls with garlands of cards, took us to view the Myer Christmas windows and for Santa photos at David Jones – going to great efforts to maintain the beautiful Santa lie (I was menstruating before I finally stopped believing). Every Christmas morning, I’d wake to an abundance of presents under the tree, wrapped with the care and expertise of a workshop elf.

All this is to say, the bar was set high for me when I had my own children. When my daughters were little, I would borrow bags full of Christmas books from the library in late October, displaying them on every available surface, and inviting, or perhaps goading, my girls to acquaint themselves with the festive fantasies that I would never be able to fully realise for them. Because in trying to recreate the memories of my childhood, I often overlooked a few important facts. And to really enjoy Christmas as an adult, a few ducks need to be in a row. A family should be functional, if not thriving, for the festivity to register below surface-level. Bank accounts need to be robust, to prevent an eruption of irritable bowel syndrome every time your children mention their wish lists. And intimate relationships must be harmonious – nothing wilts the spirit more than a late-December frost in relations.

These threads have rarely all come together at the same time for me. Life is a tightrope walk of expectation management, and it’s not a skill I would put on my CV. Every year, the same self-mandated Christmas rituals play out, and every year, they fall flat on their arse. Of course they do; I expect too much of them, and of the people participating.

Visits to Christmas-light displays are punctuated by my yelps of “HOW MAGICAL IS THIS, GIRLS? CAN YOU FEEL THE MAGIC? ARE YOU ENJOYING THE MAGIC?” Any reaction less than extravagant wonder sends my spirits crashing. My insistence on a non-stop TV diet of Christmas movies is met with resistance, if not outright opprobrium. My youngest daughter is unable to brook any suggestion of onscreen sadness or tension. This rules out most Christmas films, in which there’s always an issue threatening to derail the festive joy. She is also allergic to pine needles. “Just keep your distance,” I advise, when the tree enters the house (during the second week of November), adopting the casual disregard for kids’ safety that characterised my 1980s childhood.

But after the desultory experience of Christmas 2021, during which one relative doubled down on extreme right-wing conspiracies, political arguments dominated the lunchtime discourse (and not in the fun, lively way of my fantasy Bohemian family), and my youngest child finished the day with a 38.8-degree fever, I decided, while forking a midnight slice of fruit cake into my downturned mouth, that maybe this would be a good time to start adjusting my expectations.