Empty Chairs At Christmas

 Title: The Empty Chairs At Christmas

It’s mid-November, and already the John Lewis advert is trying to emotionally manipulate me into buying a soft toy, and the supermarket aisles are an assault course of Quality Street tins.

I’m a bloke in my mid-fifties. I should have a handle on this by now. I’m supposed to be the sturdy oak of the family, the designated turkey carver, the one who groans when the heating gets turned up. And mostly, I play the part.

But if I’m honest—and it’s getting harder to lie to myself at 3am—Christmas has become a complicated beast. It’s the time of year when my mental health, usually ticking over like an old Ford Cortina, starts to misfire.

It isn't just the commercialism or the expense. It’s the crushing weight of nostalgia and the profound silence of the empty chairs at the table.

If you grew up in the UK during the seventies or eighties, you know what I mean. Our Christmases weren’t curated for Instagram. They were chaotic, overheated, and gloriously tacky.

I close my eyes and I’m back in 1981. The living room is thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of roasting meat. The tree is real, wonky, and already bald on one side, draped in those thick, multi-coloured lights that burned hot enough to sear your fingerprints off. There are foil decorations pinned to the ceiling that rustle when anyone opens a door.

The Radio Times and TV Times are on the coffee table, marked up with biro like battle plans—Morecambe and Wise, The Great Escape, Top of the Pops.

But mostly, the house is full.

Nana is in the armchair, sipping a sherry and slipping me a fifty-pence piece. Grandad is asleep before the Queen’s speech has even started, paper crown askew. Dad is stressing about the timings of the potatoes, smelling faintly of Old Spice and cooking fat. And Mum is the engine of it all, a blur of apron and anxiety, making sure everyone has enough, laughing that specific Christmas laugh of hers.

I didn’t know it then, being just a kid interested in my new Action Man, but that noise—that chaotic, cramped warmth—was safety. It was certainty.

Fast forward forty years, and the landscape has shifted tectonically.

When you hit your fifties, you are suddenly the older generation. You are the one people look to. But inside, you still feel like the kid waiting for his stocking. The problem is, the people who filled that stocking are gone.

The grief hits differently at Christmas. It’s sharper. It cuts through the noise of modern festivities like a knife. You find yourself doing the things they did—putting up the lights, buying the specific brand of cranberry sauce—as an act of homage, a desperate attempt to conjure their ghosts.

The hardest part isn’t the grand gestures of sorrow. It’s the quiet moments. It’s standing in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, waiting for the kettle, and suddenly having the wind knocked out of you by the realisation that you will never again see your Dad walk through the back door with a freezing cold crate of beer. That you will never hear your Mum tell you to get out from under her feet.

I would trade every single present under this year's tree just to have ten minutes with them in that smoky 1980s living room. Just to see Nana and Grandad in their chairs one more time. To feel that complete, unquestioning belonging.

This yearning can curdles into a profound loneliness. Middle-aged blokes, aren’t great at talking about this stuff. We’re programmed to "man up," to crack a joke, to have another pint and push it down. We stand at parties, surrounded by people, feeling utterly marooned in the past.

We feel guilty for being miserable when we have partners or kids of our own doing their best to make things magical. But it’s a strange dislocation, being present in body but having your heart stuck three decades ago.

So, how do we get through it without turning into Scrooge or drowning in a vat of mulled wine?

I’m learning that it’s okay not to be entirely "ho-ho-ho." It’s okay to take ten minutes out of the madness to just sit with the sadness. Acknowledge it. It’s the price ticket for having been loved that much.

I try to build small bridges to the past. I watch the old films. I play Slade louder than is necessary. I talk about them to my own kids, trying to make those two-dimensional photos on the mantelpiece three-dimensional human beings for them.

If you’re a bloke, or girl for that matter, of a certain age feeling a bit wobbly this December, you aren't the only one. The ghosts of Christmases past are loud. It doesn't mean you're ungrateful for the present; it just means you remember.

Raise a glass to the empty chairs. Remember the chaos and the warmth. And then, take a deep breath, put on your own paper crown, and try to be present for the ones who are here now. It's what Mum and Dad would have wanted.

The Ink Weaver