It started, our lifetime of lonely exiled Christmases, with a fight. But it didn't really start then. It started in pre-history, or pre-my-history, in ancient bitternesses, deaths and sins unforgiven from before I was even born.
By the time the fight happened, my mother and grandmother were the sole survivors of a small, intense and insular family, and I was almost grown up. A father and husband had died, a brother and uncle had died, a powerful grandfather had died, a two-year-old son had died, making my mother an only child. Things were said, their partial estrangement began, and increased, and our many years of bad Christmases began.
At first it was got through pleasantly enough on the surface, but at great emotional cost to my mother. Then it became an annual awkwardness, the problem of somehow dealing with Christmas in a way that kept my mother and grandmother apart — or at least, bubble-wrapped, like two delicate presents sent together through the mail.
My grandmother was a compulsive talker, and she would corner my mother after lunch and go over and over the past. And her complaints about the present. My mother would often say that after a conversation with my grandmother she felt like shooting herself.
Then the strategies began. For several years we would rent the Godfather films — yes, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films — and watch one or other of those immediately after lunch, effectively to prevent conversation. I don't exactly know why those films were chosen but perhaps (to quote The Song of Bernadette) for those who have faith no explanation is necessary.
When that wore out my father and sister and I would take my grandmother out, leaving my mother at home, having taken to her bed. (For my mother was always mysteriously ill at Christmas.)
Later still, as the years passed, my father, sister and I would visit my grandmother, who lived two hours away, with a packed lunch (my grandmother strongly objected to hostessing duties) and my mother (having packed the lunch) would rather nobly ring and talk to her while we were on our way there. And then take to her bed.
But things only got worse. Eventually, on 1 December every year — her birthday — a black pall of depression would descend on my mother which lasted for months and made even a semblance of Christmas impossible.
So my family ceased to celebrate Christmas and my Christmases became an annual desolation. The weird truth was, my mother couldn't be happy at Christmas because her mother was unhappy, and I couldn't be happy at Christmas because my mother was unhappy. I think they call that enmeshment.
The thing about Christmas is that you can't say, well, after all, it's just another day. I've tried that. No matter how difficult it is for you, you cannot simply abstain. The cup must be drunk. It's like death or taxes. Like grief.
And what makes Christmas unique, I think, is the way in which what you might call The Ideal has its nose rubbed in the Real. The ideal and the real are shoved up hard against one another, and something's got to give. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that, 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That's Christmas.
Or maybe Christmas is the Pavlovian dog, trained to do two separate and mutually exclusive actions in obedience to two different triggers, who goes insane when the two triggers are sounded at the same time.
I have spent Christmas as an orphan/waif/stray, kindly included in the family christmas celebrations of a friend. I have spent Christmas visiting a children's hospital. I have spent Christmas singing in church choirs. The most memorable Christmas of my adult life was spent wandering around the city with my sister, unexpectedly forbidden from returning home until nightfall by a deeply depressed mother and with nowhere to go.
I can't pretend to look back on my lifetime of empty Christmases with mysterious joy. And yet ...
I am deeply suspicious of our preoccupation, deification, even, of success, and of our narrow definitions of it. I feel with every fibre of my being that what is of most worth, our real treasure, is somehow to be found in our experiences of poverty, of desolation. Often it is love's absence that defines love most sharply. What is of most value is what is not there — and therefore, truly, it is there. It is present because it is absent.
And how is it that Christmas has become about plenty, about feasting, celebration and success? Christmas is not about triumphalism. Christmas is about poverty, vulnerability, the embracing of powerlessness by the one at the very heart of reality, the one who is supposed to be all-powerful, and about how, in some mysterious way, that is where true power lies. It's about being left out. It's about there being no room. It's about the little door.
'This too will pass', people say — and, finally, it has. Both my mother and my grandmother are still alive, but my grandmother is 102 and something of a spent force, and my mother? Her Alzheimer's has meant that she has forgotten much of what used to upset her so deeply. Both have become immured in the here and now, and two women who were once obsessed with one another hardly think about each other any more.
And me? I had been single all my life, but two Christmases ago, to my astonishment, I spent the afternoon speaking, for three hours, on the phone to a man I had met a couple of months before in Melbourne, newly separated from a marriage in which he had endured many long years of lonely Christmases. He was alone on Christmas Day, and we both had nothing to do, and nothing we wanted to do more than speak to each other.
Now all our Christmases will be spent together, as two refugees from Christmas. But perhaps after all, perversely, allusively, that is where Christmas is at.
Cassandra Golds is a Melbourne-based author of children's fiction. Her most recent book is The Three Loves of Persimmon.