When Christmas hurts

​Written for When Christmas Hurts, St Stephen’s Fylingdales, Sunday 14 December 2025.
 
I loved Christmas when I was a child. My dad's beautiful voice reading us The Night before Christmas on Christmas Eve. Stockings in front of the gas fire before breakfast – a Christmas annual in the top and a satsuma, nuts and shiny coins in the bottom. Church and then home, a homemade mince pie, hot ginger wine and presents. It was a good year if I got something to make, something to play with and something to read.
 
As I grew up and got married, my parents encouraged us to build our own Christmas traditions, and these evolved over the years, but we always kept elements of those childhood Christmases.
 
My first marriage crumbled and my dear friend Tim, the sweet, witty, gentle man I had known since we were both in our early twenties became a rock and a shoulder to cry on. Our friendship grew into love, and despite me saying I would never marry again, we got married. We moved to a beautiful and ancient house in Tideswell where Tim opened a second-hand bookshop on the ground floor that became a quiet hub of the village. We built a life new life together. Became part of an amazing group of friends. Acted together. Celebrated birthdays and weddings and Christmases and New Years together.
 
Christmas was a special time for us. We would catch up with family beforehand, and then after sherry and homemade mince pies in the shop with friends and customers on Christmas eve morning, he shut the shop and I closed my office door. We might spend Christmas eve at the pub, or have Christmas lunch with friends, but the rest of the time it was just us. We hunkered down, ate wonderful food, played board games and watched films. And then headed away for New Year to see some of our oldest friends.
 
Tim had type 2 diabetes. Early one February morning, a few months after his 50th birthday, and half a year shy of ten years of marriage, his heart stopped. He was gone in just a moment. In a beautiful moment of quiet and love, Gillian and Simon, the village vicars, anointed him on his way and my friend Fiona swept me into the warmth of her wonderful home.
 
Breaking the news to his parents and to our friends and my family was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. They surrounded me with love and care.
 
At first, I was numb, unbelieving. Hearing the door downstairs rattle in the draft and thinking it was him coming upstairs. Waking up in the night and reaching for him. Dreaming that it was all a mistake and then waking up to remember that it was real. Then the reality sank in and I understood how lonely grief could be, even surrounded by people who loved both of us.
 
As the end of the year approached I started to get all the kind invitations from people not wanting me to be alone at Christmas. But I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything and I declined them as kindly as I could. I had a quiet lunch with friends in the village. I spent time with wonderful online friends from WAY Widowed and Young who understood. I took it gently – there were times I wanted to be with people, and times I wanted to be alone.
 
The second Christmas I knew I needed to do something completely different. I announced it early, before anyone invited me anywhere, and I booked a shepherd's hut in the Lake District. I loaded my Kindle full of books, took a box of simple food, snacks and drinks and a sack of wood for the woodburner, and slept, walked, read, slept some more and took time to heal.
 
Eight years on from Tim's sudden and unexpected death, I struggle with winter. It starts with his birthday on 1 December, and runs through Christmas and New Year until the anniversary of his death on 24 February. Trauma changes us. I am a different person now – not necessarily better or worse, just different.
 
But I have found love again and built new Christmas traditions, threaded through with the old ones, in the beauty and welcome of the North Yorkshire coast. In a house full of dogs and words and art and music and the sound of the sea. There are still elements of Christmas that hurt, but it's no longer raw – it's more of a bittersweet wistfulness wrapped around many happy memories.