I’ve been bringing exes home for a family Christmas for years. Now we have to rent a castle to fit them all in
This Christmas you’ll find me sitting around a crackling fire with my family: my mum whomping down her third mince pie, my sister searching for bubbly, and my stepfather burying his nose in the sports pages. One of my ex-boyfriends will be making us die with laughter while another ex polishes off the cava, and a completely different ex tries to pull focus from the first ex, who is on all fours pretending to give birth to a penguin. My actual boyfriend will either be in hysterics or dreading his turn at charades. Christmas is complicated.
People start moaning about how stressful Christmas is around the time Pret release their new festive sandwich. Single gay friends, especially, worry about travelling to towns they left as soon as they could, populated by people they hid from on Facebook and hoped never to see again. I know this feeling, because for years it’s what I did, too. Back in the early noughties, the thought of going home to Jersey was so gloomy that I was forced to take action. I was single, but had stayed pretty good friends with an ex who had grown up in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I asked him to come home with me. He was thrilled to have an invite, and that year proved that just because turkey is dry it doesn’t mean the holiday has to be. Having an ally took the edge off, and the lively addition of a guest with ADHD and a gift for candid storytelling meant we all had the most fun we’d had in years.
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