Single bells

Jane Brooke, a 75-year-old singleton, will be lonely this Christmas

Christmas is a time for families.

Yet families can come with complications – if they come at all. Children have to go to their in-laws, or prefer to celebrate their new babies in their own little nuclear families. Fused families often don’t fuse because they have different traditions and resent the loss of their own. In-laws might not get on.

But Christmas is most difficult for single people. As you grow older, you find yourself wondering whether it really was the right decision not to have children – as that also means no grandchildren.

A friend of mine, though, says the sight of other people’s grandchildren running riot, high on Christmas pudding, is enough to remind her precisely why she prefers being on her own. Her answer to Christmas is to stay at home with a pile of books and switch her phone off. She says, ‘I don’t want to know nobody is phoning me because I might start feeling sorry for myself.’ For her, lockdown was almost a relief, with everyone isolated.

Nor does she want others feeling sorry for her. ‘I daren’t go for a walk on my own on Christmas Day in case I meet anybody and they think, “What a sad old bag.” ’

She’s right. I remember in my twenties driving past a café where a woman was eating on her own. I cried all the way to my Christmas lunch with friends, not only because I was sorry for her, but because I had a vision of that being me in 50 years.

Instead of recognising that some families like to have a few outsiders around the table – to widen the conversation, or to justify all the cooking – I find myself asking whether I could be the equivalent of the old aunt, brought out with the Christmas decorations, whom the young dread sitting next to.

I’ve had some wonderful, relaxed Christmases around other people’s tables. They were free of the accrued emotional baggage and simmering sibling tensons that can go with your own family gatherings.

I am certainly not saying you shouldn’t ask your single friends to join you; just recognise that they may have their own reasons for declining.

Each family has its own way of doing things. I once found myself standing up for grace, without realising that everybody thought I wasn’t happy with the seating plan.

Family rows, with origins in Christmases past, can be part of the rich fabric of a traditional Christmas but, to an outsider, they can be mystifying.

Don’t, whatever happens, allow yourself to be a buttress between warring in-laws. And avoid asking young grown-ups what happened to that nice person they brought last year. That can end in tears.

The big dividing line is whether they play games. These are anathema to me.

My own brother, having acquired an extended family late in life, loves competitive singing and the kind of games that involve transferring balloons between intimate parts of the body.

I can see they are good for bringing the generations together, but they are not my thing. I know I must seem very curmudgeonly when I decline his invitation. But there is only so long you can spend in the loo.

An alternative to going to friends is to help with a lunch for the less fortunate. But in some places, such events have been so overrun with helpers, reluctant to admit that most antisocial of conditions – loneliness – that they’ve practically had to go out into the streets to track down people to serve lunch to.

This year, though, there may be far more takers as families struggle with the costs of Christmas.

Beware of what you ask for: a friend rang up St Martin-in-the-Fields to offer to help. He was told to turn up at 2.30 in the morning to peel spuds.

The next year, he invited half a dozen Chinese students to Christmas lunch.

‘They loved the food but couldn’t understand a word I said, however loud I spoke,’ he said.

This year, he’s inviting Ukrainians.

There are specially designed Christmas breaks abroad for older single travellers. These are not matchmaking holidays but opportunities to do things with other people if you want, without paying a single-room premium.

Riviera Travel offers Kraków, among other cities. And there’s Friendship Travel for Turkish holidays. Google ‘Christmas holidays singles’ and you’ll find lots. Read carefully and you can avoid any seasonal bonking fests – unless that’s what you want.

One year, I went to a lovely hotel in the mountains of Morocco with a colleague who loathed the whole idea of Christmas. But when the day came, the hotel had gone to great lengths to prepare a traditional English Christmas lunch, complete with piped carol music. She was furious, and demanded a tagine.

Happy Christmas!

Christmas: no fun for one

The author and friends have requested that she use a pseudonym in case she’s never asked out again