And then it was exactly a month ago I was facing my first night without Sandra. Here in the Netherlands fortunately the Christmas insanity starts late, as we have to deal with Sinterklaas first, but it has started now. At work the Christmas trees are being put up, the shops have traded in the Sinterklaas tat for Santa tat; worse the X-Mas adverts are back on telly. Awful as they are though, with the incredibly annoying yet very very earwurmable Sky Radio jingle being the worst, none of them can match the horrors of this particular example from the UK, as Charlie Brooks shows:

The rest of the lyrics are worse still. It’s a terribly sad song. So sad Leonard Cohen should be singing it. “Mum” appears to have purchased an entire nervous breakdown’s worth of cold branded goods in a pathetic bid to win the affections of her own family. Her desperate offerings include a top-of-the-range MacBook for Grandad, “an HTC for Uncle Ken”, a “Fuji camera for Jen”, and a “D&G” for Dad. In case you’re wondering what a “D&G” is, the advert makes clear it’s a truly disgusting designer watch even Jordan might balk at. In the mad Littlewoods universe “Dad” seems inexplicably delighted by the sudden appearance of this ghastly bling tumour on his wrist, instead of screaming and trying to kill it with a shoe, like any sensible human would.

Everybody involved with this ad should’ve topped themselves rather than kill their souls this way. Christmas has always been a festival of commercial greed of course, but I’ve not seen it as blatant as this yet. It’s as if the naked lust for more stuff has burst out from behind the veneer of asperation it was made slightly more respectable by.

For Sandra Christmas never was about presents, though she did like the ritual of buying each other slightly more expensive gifts than we could afford, the one time of year we could legitimately spoil ourselves. She loved the rituals of Christmas, the food: mince pies, turkey or another sort of roast, even brussel sprouts, but especially Christmas cake. She made them each year, even in 2009 while we were preparing to go to hospital for the kidney transplant operation she made two, one of which is still on the top shelf of one of the kitchen cupboards. Last year she was in hospital, so I brought Christmas to her, getting all sorts of nice little treats that could be eaten cold or heated up in the ward’s microwave. It wasn’t perfect, but it was Christmas.

This year I’m going back to my family, the first without her and also the first I will be spending entirely with my family since I first met her; it’s like going back to my childhood, not entirely pleasant even had the circumstances been different. It’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful, but it’s going back from having your family, no matter how small, to being part again of the family; the dynamics of Christmas are altered. It’s only a small complaint in the scheme of things, but I’m still dreading going home a bit, especially with the sentimentality surrounding these holidays.

Never mind, at least I’ll get to enjoy my father’s oliebollen again, which nobody does better…