On being a single woman without kids at Christmas

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Christmas - and the days around - it is a time when people’s ‘situations’ come to the fore. The festive period might might mean celebrating with your blended, extended family, travelling to different parts of the country to visit in-laws, spending some time alone, or solo or co-parenting. Or, like me, it might mean returning to your childhood home to hang out with your mum.

It’s just the two of us for a few days, and for this I am extremely grateful. Over the past 36 hours it has involved a visit from my nephews for homemade mince pies, going to church, an impromptu gathering for mulled wine, three supermarket trips and a few Christmas card delivery errands.

Tonight, like last night, we will eat fish pie for supper and perhaps see what’s on the telly (yesterday it was Channel 5’s royal Christmas special, lucky us). Tomorrow, I will go to the supermarket - again - and in the evening we will go to a neighbour’s home for festive drinks. On Christmas Day, my sister, brother-in-law and little nephews will come over.

I didn’t always feel this joyful as a single, childfree woman at Christmas. There have been times when I avoided any sort of community event for fear of being asked whether I have children, or for the shame I felt about being single, and the jokes I felt I needed to make about it (I nearly did it today when one of my mum’s mulled wine friends mentioned inviting bachelors to her Christmas drinks many years ago, but stopped myself).

If you’re reading this thinking ‘yes, that’s me,’ then I get it. You might feel like you have to put on a little bit of armour to be ready for comments or questions from neighbours or family, or have an explanation prepared for when someone asks where your other half is or when you’re going to procreate, or whether you have children/grandchildren. (And if you do have a partner I know you might also get questions about when you’ll get married/have kids/have another kid etc etc.)

Even up until last year I felt a little embarrassment about being single/not having kids (I sometimes feel childfree, other times childless – read about that here) and wasn’t sure about going to a party local to my mum, but then I had a word with myself: I am proud of exactly who I am. I am a whole human, I am loved, I am loving, I am safe and healthy, and what else really matters?

And actually, most people who ask the above types of questions are often simply trying to make conversation, with no unkind intent, just a little nosiness. So I went to the gathering, focused on talking to people about themselves (and hopefully in not too nosy a way) - and I stopped worrying about who thought what about me. And guess what, I had a great time.

This isn’t to say Christmas doesn’t bring out feeeeelings. Walking through a Westfield shopping centre a few weeks ago, festive love songs tinkled over the sound system and happy couples with fancy coats and excellent woollen accessories frolicked on a beach with a dog/baby/child in shop window displays. I had a slightly sad, reflective feeling, where I had the sense of something missing, a sort of sense of isolation I ought to have written about while I was right in the middle of it because now it’s hard to recall.

But it’s a feeling that hits me temporarily each Christmas, a kind of nostalgia for the Christmases of my childhood, where I was fortunate enough not to really have a care in the world, where I mostly received what was on my Christmas list (apart from the year I got a dark-haired Sindy instead of a blonde Barbie!) and stay up late on Christmas night thinking ‘has he been?!, has he been!’ about Father Christmas, before my grandparents would arrive in the morning, and later on my grandfather would sit with a pair of scissors and delight in painstakingly saving all the used wrapping paper, cutting off the ripped bits and folding it neatly for next year.

And I think the Westfield feeling was also about a sense that, while those childhood Christmases were wonderful, I wasn’t old enough to be aware of the passing of time, of making sure I appreciated them and the people who were there – my grandparents and my father - and who have now sadly gone.

Now, as a grown-up, it’s kind of flipped - I’m now acutely aware of mortality, of wanting to be grateful for every moment I have with my family, and I want to remember how my nephews are and were, how the older one (seven) kept looking for the Christmas tree at my mum’s house long after the season was over as a two-year-old, and how his memory has now developed enough to remember Christmases past, and how the younger one (five) was Joseph in his school’s nativity play the other week, which I hope he’ll be able to recall and be proud of in years to come.

So, now that I’ve written these things down, as much as those feelings in the shopping centre were unwanted then, it’s actually helped me reflect in a positive way. At the time, I tried to unpick my mood, thinking that perhaps if I had the dog and the scarf and the man in the shop window I would suddenly be ‘cured’ of the Christmas blues, and I thought that perhaps being single was causing my sadness. But actually, the feeling was a kind of longing, and the acute sense of life being made up of a series of tiny moments, very few of which you can predict and many of which you wish you could hold on to forever when you look back on them.

I hope that when I’m not single I’ll still have that nostalgic feeling for Christmases past, the loneliness that I feel without my dad and grandparents being physically here now, because it means that I will never forget those people and I will remember the joy they brought to me.

I know that many of you will have these feelings too, for people who are no longer here, for times that maybe felt happier than now, and I hope that, even as we look towards a new year, we can also look back and reflect on those times with gratitude and joy.

Tonight after our fish pie and crap telly, I will be chatting to my mum about her life and tape it, so that we have a record of all the stories she’s told us over the years, so we know that her first job was working for Miss Vincent in a clothes shop in Oxford and that my dad bought her a giant, brown, corduroy teddy bear for Christmas early in their relationship that she had to schlep home to her parents (and which she makes a face about now – as then), and about how she sewed a tiny wedding dress and a little gold ballgown for my Sindy doll, and how, when she was in hospital about to give birth to my sister (a Christmastime baby), she made peg doll Christmas decorations by hand for the school fair, one of which is on her tree right now.

Whatever kind of Christmas you have, and whatever and however you celebrate, I wish you a happy and festive time. Next Sunday, I will be in deepest Somerset on a retreat and I won’t be writing to you, so I wish you a very happy new year. I hope 2025 is a healthy one for us all.