Those who remember being separated from loved ones over the festive season can remind us of what is truly important
Being as I am a child of divorce, I watched all the media discussion of Christmas and what was to be done about it with detached bemusement. I have come to view Christmas as something of a movable feast, which at times had been downright unconventional. I realised that it mattered hugely to other people, of course, but I’d be fine, I thought – relieved, even, not to be on a crammed train, the windows misting up with everyone’s virus-y breath.
But I was a fool. When the gutpunch came, it was swift and unexpected: Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, chosen out of a desire for something festive, and jazzy, and cheerful. Clearly I had never listened to the lyrics before, which are about having had a terrible year (“Next year all our troubles will be out of sight”) and not being able to see your loved ones (“Faithful friends who are dear to us / Will be near to us once more”). The line that turned me into a little heap of cranberry jelly on the floor, though, was this: “Someday soon, we all will be together / If the fates allow / Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow”. There’s something so clumsily human about “muddling through” – it is coping, but not coping, a state of being familiar to so many of us this year.
