Christmas

Christmas is both a public season of polished festivity and a private measure of what Queenie Jenkins has lost. At work, Gina turns the holiday into a fashion-blog assignment; in Queenie’s personal life, buying Tom a present and remembering Christmas with his family keep old habits alive even as the couple is apart. The season then gathers its sharper meaning on Christmas Eve, when Queenie’s unanswered attempts to reach Tom give way to an uneasy night with her extended family and an acute sense of loneliness.

The season as workplace material

Christmas first appears as a commercial opportunity at Queenie’s job. Gina proposes a blog post looking back at ten of the best black dresses worn at awards ceremonies by supporters of the Me Too movement. When Queenie questions the idea, Gina frames it as useful holiday content: readers need chic party dresses, and the article can attach moral standing to the shopping advice. The assignment brings seasonal consumption and political imagery together, turning an ostensibly serious cause into a route to partywear recommendations. Gina also sets a practical deadline: Friday morning.

That brisk editorial exchange offers a counterpoint to Queenie’s private preoccupations. Christmas at work can be packaged as timely content, with a clear subject and deadline. Outside work, however, the holiday carries the unresolved emotional weight of her separation from Tom. The same season that supplies a convenient blog angle makes the absence of the relationship’s familiar ceremonies harder to set aside.

Gifts, habit, and the lost family ritual

On the way home from work, Queenie battles through Oxford Street and buys Tom a present. Guilt plays a part, but she also acts out of ritual: there are things she is not willing to let slide merely because they are on a break. She is trying to prepare for a holiday without Tom and his family for the first time in three years. The change brings relief from choosing presents for his parents and from enduring casual family racism, but it does not immediately dissolve her attachment to the routines of being together.

A memory of her second Christmas with Tom’s family makes that attachment concrete. The novelty of a proper Christmas meal has already begun to fade, yet Queenie remains struck by the abundance of trimmings and by the family’s pork dishes, including one kind of pork wrapped in another and eaten in a single bite. The meal is presented through specific abundance and surprise: a festive custom that was once new has become familiar enough to revisit, while still retaining details that catch her attention.

The gathering also organizes the family around a game. Tom’s aunt finds a board game in the attic and places it on the coffee table; Tom’s mother responds enthusiastically, goes to get pens and paper, and asks Stephen to keep score. These small preparations make the occasion a shared family performance, with objects, roles, and expectations already in place. Queenie’s present for Tom belongs to the same world of repeated holiday gestures, even though the relationship that once anchored them is now uncertain.

Christmas Eve with her grandparents

By Christmas Eve, Queenie has spent the week watching her phone. She has texted Tom to ask whether they can meet so she can give him his gift, left a present at his office after he did not respond, and sent another message asking whether she may call his mother on Christmas Day. None brings an answer. The sequence escalates from a request to meet, to a physical attempt to deliver the gift, to an effort to retain contact with his family; silence is the only response she receives.

Instead of spending Christmas with Tom’s family, Queenie is staying with her grandmother, who is pleased to have her back after three years away. The arrangement offers family company but does not feel wholly chosen: Queenie thinks she is being made to attend midnight mass as a form of punishment. At 11:15 p.m., she arrives at the busy church with Diana, Maggie, Wilfred, and Veronica. She tries to sit beside Diana, but the two are separated like badly behaved schoolchildren. Just before the service begins, Sylvie arrives and stands awkwardly beside Queenie; Veronica quietly tells her daughter that she is late and should sit down. Queenie shifts along the bench to make room.

The scene brings several generations into one congregation without making their presence emotionally simple. Queenie is back among relatives, yet her initial reaction to Sylvie’s arrival is a huff and a reluctant shuffle to accommodate her. The crowded church and the enforced family seating contrast with the private attention she has been giving her phone all week. At the end of the service, Diana texts, and Queenie answers aloud with Amen as the congregation does the same. The ritual supplies a moment of collective response, but it does not undo the unanswered messages that have shaped the preceding days.

A holiday measured by absence

Christmas at her grandparents’ house offers little of the festive freedom Queenie associates with the holiday. There is no alcohol, Christmas television, or pigs in blankets. Maggie dominates the kitchen and barks orders at anyone who approaches; Wilfred retreats to his small shed, while the head of the house has gone looking for custard powder. The details give the household its own busy arrangement of authority, avoidance, and practical errands, distinct from the Christmas gathering Queenie remembers with Tom’s family.

With Diana away with her father, Queenie has no other young person there to talk to. She lies in the spare room beneath seven duvets that Veronica has put on her, eating Ferrero Rocher and watching Love, Actually. The familiar film usually makes her laugh through disbelief when she is not heartbroken, but this Christmas she feels bleaker than she can remember and intensely alone. The sweets, film, and piled bedding make a small, solitary version of holiday comfort; they do not supply the companionship she misses.

Queenie marks the emotional divide with two labels: BT, Before Tom, and AD, After their Division. Before the relationship, she did not know the closeness of sharing everything with one person and loving one another despite each other’s -isms. After the separation, that remembered intimacy makes the loneliness feel unbearable. The contrast explains why the holiday is not simply sad because Tom is absent: it is also the first occasion on which Queenie measures the loss against a form of closeness she has experienced and can no longer count on. When the front door opens and Veronica announces that Sylvie has arrived, Queenie pauses the film and listens. Her mother’s quiet greeting reaches her from elsewhere in the house, ending the account not with a reunion already resolved, but with Queenie alert to the arrival.