OPINION
She chose the Christmas tree and, while I carried it across the road to our house, she walked up the street to buy strawberries for a beach picnic with her - strange how teenage terms take hold - friend group. And there you have our father-daughter relationship, in fact the way of all parents, as nicely wrapped as any of the presents that will go under the tree. Her: decisive, popular, on the move. Him: taking orders, a drudge going about his labours, left behind. I like it like that. We’re happy.
She has always loved Christmas and there cannot be a child born in New Zealand since the Santa myth took hold who regards it any other way but sometimes love is feverish, manic, sleepless. It was the night before Xmas when all through the house a creature was stirring all night long - she would have been 5 or 6, as awake as any adult with adult woes staring at the ceiling in the dark, a child unable to settle for the excitement of it all, driving her parents mad, 1am, 2am, 3am, everyone just wanting it to be over and done with, sick to death of the Santa myth. But we were happy, eventually.
She counts down to Christmas from about August but this year NCEA kind of took her mind off it, possessed and occupied it, put it to work like it had never been put to work before. She spent Sundays studying in the public library. She had her favourite spot, at a table by a picture window that framed an oak tree. I’d come in to take her to lunch and see her deep in study. There was something heartbreaking about it - the paper-thin oak leaves holding the pale light, the little long-haired girl bending her head to the task. A truth known to all NCEA Level 1 parents is that the only thing at stake is their entire future. “Starving,” she said when I arrived. We’d go to lunch, happily.
She started talking about Christmas again as soon as the exams were over and she could be released back into the world of Things to Give and Things to Get. December 25, the day of Things; we never were all that bothered with the Jesus myth. I remember a friend making a little pious fuss about dragging his kids to church on Christmas Eve as some kind of alternative moral corrective to the mall. He presented a good case for it but I suspect it was influenced by his Grinchy dislike of spending money. The mall is where people go to share the true spirit of Christmas: buying Things for someone you love, wrapping happiness up in a gift.
