We never really did Christmas in my family. My mother was raised Muslim and tried her best while my brother and I were children but, once we grew up, she was happy to let the tree and the decorations and everything else fall by the wayside. We still do presents, of course, but usually eat whatever it is we happened to fancy that day, sitting on the couch. Christmas isn’t really special to us.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have our own traditions around that time of the year. It’s just that what we do has little to do with Jesus, and all to do with the time we forgot to book a restaurant table.
It must have been 2014, perhaps 2015. My birthday is on December 29 but we usually celebrate it the day before, as I was born minutes after midnight. That year my mother, whose finances are usually tight, announced that she had saved up and would take us out for a proper dinner in town.
The three of us dressed up to the nines – we don’t often go out together – and headed for the centre of Nantes. It was an especially mild evening, which probably explains what happened next. We got to the restaurant my brother and mother had picked – I’d been away for too long to have any preferences – but found it fully booked.
It was an annoying setback but not the end of the world. There were many other restaurants around. We tried another one and they were fully booked as well. Huh. We then spent some time going from place to place, and kept being told that there was no space anywhere. That had never happened before; we’d really not seen it coming.
After the fifth or sixth restaurant, we stood in the middle of the pedestrianised quarter and held a crisis meeting. What should we do? We’d tried every restaurant we knew and liked in the neighbourhood, and it was getting too late to get back to the car and try another part of town. It was also finally getting cold, and we were starving. What now?
No one can remember who suggested it first, as is often the way with good stories. One of us, at some point, probably as a joke, pointed out that there was a really nice kebab take-out just round the corner. We laughed and laughed, then we didn’t. Should we…? No we shouldn’t, obviously, but what if…?
In the end, we did. The three of us turned up, wearing our nice dresses and heels and jackets and makeup, and realised that the kebab place did in fact have one little table inside, usually occupied by people waiting for their order and anxious to leave.
We sat down and our mum, with a flourish, said that we could get anything we wanted. We ordered some kebabs and every single beer they had in the fridge – all four of them. We looked ridiculous; we had a really great evening. We ate and drank and laughed, and really it was all that mattered.
A year later, one of us suggested we do it again – probably as a joke, again. That’s when the tradition really took hold. For several years after that, we celebrated my birthday by dressing up and going to the kebab shop, and
having a lovely time.
It is true that we do not really do Christmas as a family but, in a way, this is about as close as it gets. We knocked on door after door, we weren’t let in anywhere, and in the end we managed to find somewhere that suited us just fine.
Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to have the turkey and the massive tree and the many, many distant relatives, and the sherry and the board games and whatever else people have when they take Christmas seriously. Most of the time, though, I’m happy to come from a family where all we need to have a great time is some grilled meat, a few cans of cheap beer and each other’s company. Really, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
