My Memories

Our first Christmas as expats was spent back in the UK. Our second was spent with our best friends who came to Thailand. The third, last year, the children went home and I went on a Skyros holiday in Koh Chang. Husband came out to join me on Christmas Eve.

So I’m sitting here, on my fourth Christmas, overlooking the Andaman Sea. (Don’t hate me: it’s raining and yes, I do know how lucky I am.) I’m writing this on my laptop on the 25 December and questioning the irreverence of such behaviour. I won’t post it on my blog today because I know you are all having Christmas… I will post it sometime when you are back. (Are you back yet?)

I look back at my childhood Christmases and I only remember one house: the house that my parents are still living in now. We moved there 9 days before Christmas in 1972. I was six. There’s a story in that move, but not for now.

Every Christmas morning we would wake to stockings on our bed. Downstairs would be the Christmas Creatures: they were started in this house and I believe the first one was a snow man. After breakfast we would, as a family, climb into the car and drive … not to church … no. We would drive to the West Kent Hospital in Maidstone which was one of the hospitals in which my Dad was a doctor. The West Kent was a stunning building. As you walked in the front door two huge staircases would sweep up in a curve on either side of the hallway and meet in the middle as a balcony. I’m sure it was desperately ill-suited to being a modern hospital, but I still mourn its demise*.

First we would visit the wards in which Dad had patients. I guess he was here as a doctor, but as a child I hardly noticed this because my sister and I would be fed crisps, nuts, chocolates or biscuits and given fizzy drinks by nurses decorated with tinsel. We would wander through the ward saying happy Christmas to the patients and their visiting families. After we’d done Dad’s wards, we’d have two vital places left to visit. The first one was the maternity unit to see if there were any Christmas babies – this really was the highlight of our morning and I hated it if there were none. I always worried if there were two as well; what about the baby that came second?

The second crucial visit was the children’s ward. Sister T, a wizened little woman with a severe grey bun, dressed in navy blue with a big silver buckle on her belt, ruled. She had a mighty personality: loving and strict. She welcomed us with open arms. Father Christmas would visit – mostly we’d be in time for this – after all, this is what my sister and I were here for! If we missed him, he would still have left a present for us. (In 1976 my sister spent about six weeks in Sister T’s care in this very ward. She had a broken femur – thigh – in traction.)

All over the hospital we’d bump into Dad’s colleagues and their children. On the drive home we’d stop at Linton Hospital, a geriatric hospital, in which Dad often had patients, though I was less enamoured of this place. I’m not sure if it was the old people that frightened me or the lack of Christmas babies or Father Christmas.

*Later on a new Maidstone Hospital was built at Barming, where it is now and the old West Kent was knocked down. A mixture of my age and change perhaps, but the magic began to fade for me then, despite the fact that Father Christmas would arrive at the new place in a helicopter.

I loved these hospital visits: They were my Christmas traditions. In the old days, my two grandmothers would be cooking while we were out and we’d come home to our turkey lunch. (Present giving took place in the afternoon.)

So I’m sitting here by the window, Husband’s doing his Thai on the balcony and I’m wondering what I’m doing to my children by encouraging this flexible and nomadic behaviour. Will they ever come ‘home’ for Christmas when they are adults? Will they always come ‘home’, or will they search out something else?