I’m dreaming of a black Christmas

This article was originally published in Briefing #230, December 1998—but if you transpose the ages of Tony's children then onto his grandchildren now, this Christmas may be almost the same...

Christmas 
leaves me in no doubt that I have ceased being a child. The chief indication of this sad fact is that what I look forward to more than anything else—more than the excitement of Christmas Eve, more than the joyful opening of gifts, more even than the delights of Christmas lunch—is the well-earned nap in the armchair on Christmas afternoon.

And so it is 2:30 pm on Christmas day. And having reached the age where torpor is preferable to toys, I settle down to enjoy my reward, snuggling into a corner of the window seat. The chaotic lounge-room scene is the last thing my tired eyes behold, the floor strewn with wrapping paper, the tree now looking a little lonely and sad under its weight of tinsel, its job done, the green now beginning to fade just a little from its spiky foliage.

I sink and drift... and fall... I float to the surface and find myself swimming in a sea of wrapping paper. It crackles and creases as I lazily breast-stroke across it. I come to an island which turns out to be the kitchen and see my two pre-school boys at play in one corner. I tread paper and observe them with fatherly complacence. The toys they had so eagerly opened hours earlier are discarded in a pile. They are at their favourite place in the kitchen, the tins cupboard, and have begun to construct an elaborate metropolis entirely from cans of baked beans, inhabited by a race of plastic cows and dinosaurs, who are being taught by their human masters how to fight the bad guys.

I hear someone crying, and swim a little further to find one of my daughters surrounded by a tribe of life-size Barbies. The Barbies are dressing her up in clothes that are too tight and pulling at her hair and making her stand in awkward postures. She is crying and looks at me for rescue, but before I can do anything a strong current carries me away.

I float on past a promontory that on closer inspection is a giant bed with all my relatives fast asleep in it, and come again to the lounge-room, which is bare of furniture except for the sad little Christmas tree, which has pulled out its roots and is sitting on the floor trying to pick the tinsel and baubles from its own branches. A thousand needly fingers pry and pull, but every time a piece of glitter or a twist of tinsel comes off, some of the tree’s own foliage comes with it. The little tree perseveres, twitching as if in pain with each bauble that is removed.

Time passes as it does in the world of dreams, and before I realize it, the Christmas tree has freed itself at last from the great weight of decorations that bedecked it—but in doing so, it has also stripped itself bare of leaves. It stands there quite naked. Just a trunk with a single horizontal branch. There are nail holes and dried blood. There is a tag tied by a piece of string around the base. With a sense of horror, I kneel and read the four lines that are written there:

Beneath the wrapping lies the gift
For those who have the eyes to see;
He gave us life, he healed the rift,
By hanging dead upon this tree.

I am filled with the awful dread one gets in dreams when something Very Significant has just happened, or is about to happen.

Then something is tugging at me, pulling me down. I am drowning in wrapping paper, going down, spinning down...

I wake up with my three-year-old tugging at my arm, “Daddy, can we have Christmas again tomorrow?”.

I look again at the Christmas tree in the corner. “No, mate, I think once was enough”.