Tim Minchin's Perspective on Christmas: One Year Later

“Jen, can you play my song?”

We were driving home from my sister’s after a long day of Christmas baking. It was one of the best days we’d had in awhile—just hanging out, baking, drinking, and reminiscing about past holidays with my sisters. But maybe we stayed a bit too long; it was an hour past our son’s usual bedtime and he had been screaming bloody murder since we strapped him into his car seat. My husband was in the backseat, trying to calm him down for our twenty-minute drive home and I was driving. His screams didn’t help my nerves; I was sitting right up against the steering wheel, praying that a stray deer didn’t dash onto my path (my sister liked to remind me to be careful of that exact thing every time we left her house). So my husband’s request was a welcomed one. I actually had it queued up on Spotify, knowing he’d probably make this suggestion on our drive home.

It’s the only Christmas song he requests every year. And because we hadn’t left our house together in a few weeks, we hadn’t the opportunity to listen to it.

I pressed the play icon on my car’s dashboard and the moment the first verse started, my son—I kid you not—went silent.

My attention was split between the road and watching my husband and son in the rearview mirror. He was leaning back in his seat, big smile on his face and singing his favorite song to our son. I smiled to myself, remembering when we listened to this song last year—the inspiration for my blog of the same name. Last year, we had envisioned this exact moment together—that one year from that day, we’d be driving home from a Christmas festivity with our baby, listening to Tim Minchin sing about his objections—and love—for the holiday. It was a beautiful moment, one that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

But this year, the song hit me for a very different reason.

One that I think every single person on planet Earth can relate to, because of Covid-19.

Christmas 2020 is going to be like none other—let’s be honest, 2020 was a year like none other. Many of us will be stuck at home and unable to see our family—either due to the inability to travel, sickness, state/country regulations, or out of an abundance of caution. Instead of coming together to celebrate this joyous holiday, we will be stuck in our homes and staying a safe, 6-feet apart. For many, December 25th will be like any other day ; a “Groundhog Day”, that the year 2020 has become on a global scale. The merriment of the season has been masked (literally) in a paranoid dread.

I’m incredibly lucky. My family has kept a pretty tight bubble throughout the pandemic and we’ve continued seeing each other. Our holiday, though smaller, will very much mirror the years previous. I am beyond grateful that my son will get to celebrate Christmas the way I have for 34 years.

But, as we listened to Minchin’s song on the way home from one-such holiday tradition, what hit me—like a sucker punch to the gut—was the last fifteen seconds:

And you, my baby girl
My jetlagged infant daughter
You'll be handed round the room
Like a puppy at a primary school
And you won't understand
But you will learn yourself one day
That wherever you are and whatever you face
These are the people who'll make you feel safe in this world
My sweet blue-eyed girl

And if, my baby girl
When you're twenty-one or thirty-one
And Christmas comes around
And you find yourself nine thousand miles from home
You'll know what ever comes

Your brother and sister and me and your mum
Will be waiting for you in the sun
When Christmas comes
Your brothers and sisters, your aunts and your uncles
Your grandparents, cousins and me and your mum
We'll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Darling whenever you come
We'll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Waiting for you in the sun
Darling, when Christmas comes
We'll be waiting for you in the sun

See, now I fully understand my husband’s emotion from the year before; I understand the homesickness he feels for the people he rarely gets to see. Because I miss them—my family overseas—too. I’m sad for myself, but more importantly for my 8-month old son, who still has not met half of his family. My son, who has racked up major Zoom/Facetime hours but has had very few hours of physical interaction with people outside of my direct household. It was never our plan to go back to the UK for Christmas this year, but most of our family had plans to visit after Wyatt was born. Something that obviously didn’t happen. And it sucks. It really sucks. All I wanted was for Wyatt to be passed around the room like that puppy in Minchin’s song. And the reality is that even with the vaccine being distributed and administered around the world, it could still be over a year before he gets an actual hug from his paternal grandparents. That the cousin who was born one month after him will still only know him via a smartphone screen. That his aunts, uncles and older cousins will still only hear stories about him, and not create their own memories. And his great grandparents won’t experience his little, boyish giggle in person. Wyatt is missing out on so much.

I know how lucky I am and my grief in not seeing family is so miniscule compared to those who have suffered with this virus and have lost loved ones.

But it’s Christmas. And its hard to forget the picture you painted in your head.

So, instead of wallowing in my sadness and letting the “could-have-been” scenarios continue to make me nosedive into a bottomless pit of emotion, I wiped the tears from my eyes and looked in my rearview mirror. To my husband singing his favorite Christmas song to our son, and to our son babbling and giggling along with the final chorus.

Because I know there’s always next year. And they’ll be waiting for us in the sun.