The cardboard boxes are almost as ancient as some of the contents. Glass baubles, fairy lights, bows and tinsel swags — they’re all here.
Some fragile cardboard and glitter decorations that my children made when they were small twinkle next to newer tin toys, collected on our travels.
These tiny trinkets are full of memories of Christmases past, and finding them each December, a sign of happy celebrations to come again.
For the past few years, though, most of my decorations haven’t made it out of the boxes, something that would have been previously unthinkable for me.
This Christmas? They’re all going on the tree. After my husband John died in July 2020 aged just 63, I approached the following Christmas with dread.
Now living with her grandson, Sonny, Janet Ellis has rediscovered her enthusiasm for the festive season
For someone who’d loved everything about the season, from opening the first window on the advent calendar to eating the last turkey leftovers, finding it all suddenly rather shallow and often irrelevant after John died was a shock.
Even writing cards was beyond me, I couldn’t bear the stark loneliness of my name without his.
And coming home after spending time with our kids, grandchildren and friends and not being able to discuss the day with him, reliving all the fun or sharing any gossip, left me hollow with grief.
Anything frivolous that we’d loved to do together — things like planning presents, testing recipes (usually cocktails, to be honest), listening to carols, watching Christmas shows or even meeting up with friends, all felt remote and exhausting.
The gap between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, usually a time of happy not-doing-anything-much and cosying up, felt bleak and lonely.
Of course, there were moments of happiness, and I always felt I’d have been letting John down if I’d hidden away. But I was often going through the motions.
Three years on, as anyone who’s lost a partner will tell you, is not a measurement of anything except discarded calendars. John is still my husband, I still love him and the fact he’s not here is as hard to believe as it ever was.
This year, though, my festive spirit has been reignited.
For the past few years since her husband died, Janet’s Christmas decorations have not made it out of the boxes. This year, however, they’re all going on the tree
How? Well, there are two of us in the house again. I’ll explain. Early last year, my daughter Sophie, 44, mentioned it might be an idea to consider the possibility that the eldest of her five sons come to live with me. Note ‘mentioned’, ‘an idea’, ‘consider’ and ‘possibility’.
Sonny was then in his final year at school, ready to move on but not quite ready for the whole ‘managing everything on his own’ next adventure.
‘It would be a loving halfway house before he moves on to share with mates,’ she said. It would also allow the household to re-allocate bedrooms, something his brothers were very keen on.
To be clear, Sophie, her husband Richard and my five grandsons live nearby in London, I see them all frequently and Sonny and I are very close.
We have lots in common, too. We share a love of anime films, sushi and people-watching, to name a few. But that seemed a very different prospect to him living here.
That would mean actually making sure he was getting up, eating properly, keeping safe (mainly, getting him up). Wouldn’t that change our relationship? Wouldn’t it also reveal that beneath my usually cheerful grandma demeanour there may lurk a bossy and inflexible old woman?
At that time, Sonny was fairly neutral about the idea and we needed him to be at least a fraction over 50 per cent in favour, so we let it lie.
Fast-forward to this summer. Sonny was embarking on a foundation year at college and all those ‘maybes’ and ‘possibilities’ got real.
Sonny celebrating his 18th birthday with his mother, singer-songwriter Sophie Ellis-Bextor
His brothers — Kit, 14, Ray, 11, Jesse, eight, and Mickey, nearly five — were all at school, the household was shifting a gear. Sonny definitely thought that moving in here seemed not only logical but exciting, too.
He was going to gain a kind of freedom as, inevitably, Sophie’s household tends to default to its youngest members.
As for me, after three years of putting out the bins and walking the dog solo, now I might have not just a companion, but, maybe, sometimes, a helper, too?
Cooking for one isn’t as much fun as the cookbooks imply. I’d have someone to cook for and eat with. And, it turns out, someone to hang up the decorations with.
The comfort of someone familiar just being around, especially at this time of year, is immeasurable.
Our family Christmases have always been large, jolly affairs. My earliest memory of Christmas, beyond hoping for a pony and eating too many Cadbury Roses chocolates unsupervised, is of my parents chivvying us children to follow my mother’s uncle as he carried the plum pudding.
After we’d eaten turkey and all the trimmings, when it looked as if the grown-ups would never get up from the table, there’d be lots of sudden activity.
To the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, we sang ‘Here Comes the Christmas pudding’ and, conga-style, wove our way around the house.
Janet with her late husband John. The couple used to enjoy the period in between Christmas and New Year as a time of happy not-doing-anything-much and cosying up
More often than not we went out into the street, too, and even into our neighbour’s houses.
The keeper of the flame (literally, as the pudding was set alight with burning brandy) was always the eldest adult male. As my grandfathers were long gone, Great Uncle Gerald stepped up.
After his death, the task — I mean, honour — fell to my Dad, who was fond of going in complicated circles so the conga would end up in knots. Who started this ritual — and, good grief, why — is lost in the mists of time.
Then after Pa died, my husband John took over.
As someone who’d only married into this family, he couldn’t have known he’d end up holding a flaming pudding and leading an unruly, singing gang, but he did it with good grace and not a little style.
Sophie was aged eight, and we already had our son, Jackson, now 36, by the time John and I had our first family Christmas. (In the space of just a year, John and I had got together, I’d left Blue Peter and Jackson had arrived in the August.)
That year, I was appearing in Aladdin with Anita Dobson, and, true to form as with any pantomime, we only had Christmas Day off from performances so we invited all the family to join us. It turned out to be 14 people.
As time went by, that proved to be a fairly small gathering. Our record attendance is 28. Friends, family, friends of friends of family — we got into the habit of inviting people without counting how many chairs we had.
Janet with grandson Sonny as a baby. The pair have a lot in common these days, including a love of anime films, sushi and people-watching
Magically, as Sophie’s household has grown bigger, the Christmas hosting baton has passed to her and Richard. I always contribute stuffings for the turkey, bread sauce to go with it and the pudding.
But don’t let Sophie’s turn in this year’s M&S Christmas ad —where she’s let loose with a blowtorch on a gingerbread house and Christmas cards — fool you: they’re both brilliant hosts and fabulous cooks.
To the groaning pile of treats and traditions over the years we’ve added Pieface (the board game featuring dangerous amounts of whipped cream), tree presents of immense silliness — anything from tinned fish to noisy toys — and the presence of a fake snow machine.
Like a lot of people celebrating the Christmas festivities, the days around the date were also filled with comforting habits and rituals for us.
Exactly when and how we opened our presents, drank mulled wine, pulled crackers, sang carols or played charades was pretty non-negotiable. The familiarity was part of the joy.
So was being together. I’d always taken a moment, over the years, to look round at my growing brood, our gathered friends and relatives, and been thankful.
When John was diagnosed with tonsil cancer in 2016, he found out just before Christmas. With horrible regularity from then on, bad news always seemed to come around this time.
Over the next three years, Christmas assumed a hitherto unknown quantity — expect the unexpected and don’t count on anything.
Janet’s daughter, Sophie, in this year’s M&S Christmas ad – where she’s let loose with a blowtorch on a gingerbread house and Christmas cards
I’m looking at a photograph of us from 2018. We’re playing the Water Game. It’s another ritual: someone chooses a category, let’s say ‘breeds of dogs’, and privately writes down an example — ‘Italian Spinones’, for example, best dogs ever — and goes round the group asking for their suggestions.
If they come up with the same example, the one the player has written down, they get an egg-cup full of water tipped on their head. Then it’s their turn to choose a category. Got it? (Probably sorry you asked.)
In this photo, John is punching the air in delight as our son recovers from having water thrown on his head. I’m laughing, too.
Although we had one more Christmas together, this was really our last because John was having a brief hiatus from his cancer treatment so he was able to enjoy every aspect of the season.
By Christmas 2019, he was more tired, had little appetite and sometimes even removed himself from our raucous company. He died the following summer.
The prospect of Christmas, instead of being joyfully anticipated and planned for, loomed large that year, 2020.
Not only were we going to spend it, unthinkably, without him for the first time, but the sudden announcement of lockdown meant my children, grandchildren and I couldn’t be together, either.
My younger daughter, Martha, bubbled with me and we stood outside in the freezing air with her brother and sister to open our presents. I know I’m not alone in having found that particular Christmas season difficult.
Whereas the house had been awash with decorations in years gone by, that year I had a little last-minute tree and nothing else.
Just as Janet and John enjoyed their own routines, she’s confident that she and Sonny will invent their own traditions in time
John was a minimalist by nature and I always thought he was tolerating my festive excess until I found him stringing lights onto the plant outside our front door. That was practically the Oxford Street lights for him.
But I know he’d have hated the house without the sparkles and swags I insisted on.
My grandson Sonny moving in has changed everything. Thankfully, I’ve lived where I am since long before Sonny was born. My kids grew up here, so the house is familiar to him; one less thing to get used to.
Clearing cupboards and readying a room wasn’t easy, though. I had become good at selective vision over the years, only seeing what I wanted to see, but I had to admit I’d let the spare room get not just tired but crammed full of everyone’s ‘just till I’ve got the space, Mum’ things.
Inevitably, a lot of that clearance was hard. Old schoolbooks, letters, drawings, photos… everything was freighted with memories of our lives before losing John and the unbearable reality since.
But at least this was sorting with a purpose. I boxed up innumerable books (why is it so hard to let books go?) and forced the kids into ‘save or keep’ decisions they’d been putting off, too.
When Sonny arrived, the room felt ready to be his, and his alone.
Wi-fi. What had suited me and the occasional visitor coughed and choked with new requirements. See also: milk. The amount a teenage boy can drink in just one cup of tea is astonishing. Everything that used to last me weeks runs down with unfamiliar speed.
Janet enjoys having discussions about the world with Sonny, as someone who is only just beginning to discover it
We’ve also established a) there is a dishwasher, and b) where it is, and I’m sure the step to actually putting things into it every time they’re used is only a little one.
These cavils look petty written down, of course, but they’re part of the huge, mutual adjustment for both of us.
Luckily, however, I’d need more space to detail the upsides. Sonny is articulate, emotionally astute and very funny.
There’s no grumpy teen sulking and it’s great to have discussions about the world with someone just beginning to discover it.
Nothing he does drives me mad, it’s more a question of recognising what needs to be said and what doesn’t. I’m also aware there’s a lot about me he probably finds irritating.
Plus, we share the space with my big dog, Angela. I’m used to her, but even I can see her often messy habits are challenging.
We respect each other’s privacy, but he’s far more than a lodger.
A few weeks after Sonny had moved in, his then seven-year-old brother Jesse wanted to inspect his room. His reaction was as glorious as if we’d opened the door to wonderland.
While she’ll never stop missing John, Janet is excited for new adventures with her new housemate
He admired every last detail, from the array of pens on Sonny’s desk to the view out of the window. Finally, he turned to me. ‘Can I live here when I’m bigger?’ he asked.
‘Well, it’s open-ended with Sonny,’ I told him. ‘But I’m sure in ten years or so you can.’
He glanced round again. ‘And,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘Can I have this room?’
I could see Sonny was both amused and a little put out. ‘It’s my room,’ he said.
‘It is,’ I agreed. It really is.
I’m about to make our Christmas puddings and I’ll get Sonny to stir the mixture and make a wish, just as we’ve always done.
He’s also tall enough not to need any help putting the fairy on top of the tree. Bonus!
And just as John and I established routines and traditions with our family, I’m sure Sonny and I will invent some, too.
By the way, the job of leading us round with the pudding has gone to my son-in-law, Richard. He’s a natural.
Things have to change, and if there’s always going to be an empty space where John should be, we’re blessed that we’re all able to talk about him often, easily and with laughter.
Although I’m never going to stop missing John and the lovely life we shared, I’m ready for new adventures with my most delightful new housemate.