The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Katja and Socialist Santa in East Germany, 24 December 1988.

I had a strange Christmas this year. I appreciate that ‘tis the season of nostalgia, but past and present blurred further into each other for me this year than usual.

Normally, my Christmas memories all overlap and are pretty indistinguishable as a result. Like many people, I usually spend Christmas with the same people, eating and doing the same things. But this year everything was different which threw what has changed and what has stayed the same into sharp relief.

It was the first Christmas I spent without my father and my grandmother. Both featured in my Christmases for as long as I can remember. My father died at Christmas last year, so the memory of my last evening with him will probably become a feature of all the Christmases to come.

My grandmother died a few months ago, but her flat had not been emptied yet and I was asked to take a look through her things to see if there was anything I wanted to keep. This was a strange thing to do. Every year, I visited her in this place at Christmas. She would sit in her armchair and we would chat about life, the universe and everything. Her sharp mind never dulled even as her body began to deteriorate.

This year, the armchair was still in its place but it was empty. If my grandmother had sat there, I wouldn’t have dreamed of opening her cupboards and drawers, of running my fingers over the backs of her books, of picking up framed photographs from her shelves, of turning little glass figurines in my hand to see if I might like to take them home to England.