Groundhog Day with Grace

Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day? I loved it until that became my Christmas every year. It always felt like a laughably improbable concept, until it came to fruition in my own life.

One year, I started going to my great aunt Grace’s for the entirety of Christmas Day. I planned for it to be a one-off. She’s a pain in the proverbial; everything always has to be “just so.” She put me in in charge of bringing a decorative garland for the table centrepiece. I’m not a centrepiece kind of guy. I didn’t even know where to get one, but somehow, I managed it. I was uncomfortable being seen carrying it, so I put it in an opaque shopping bag and I was glad to get it off my hands when Aunt Grace took it.

My parents used to invite Aunt Grace for dinner every year because she was always on her own. In my view, some people are always on their own for a good reason. At least whenever she was the guest, she couldn’t dictate everything we did. Although she still had a good try at it. When my parents passed away, their dying wish was that we all spend that first Christmas at Aunt Grace’s house. It was even written into their will. Sometimes the cynic in me thinks they staged their simultaneous deaths just to get out of their Christmas obligations. I like to think that they’re having their own party somewhere with no annoying relatives in sight. Maybe that’s just my mind’s ridiculous way of making sense of it all, of grieving. It was all so sudden; I had to deal with it somehow. Usually, I find humour to be the most natural response. But with people like Grace Tomkins, looking for humour is like looking for brushed cotton in a public toilet.

So, that first Christmas, we all unwillingly trudged to her house. It was a white Christmas, but that image of perfection was very misleading. The rest of our day wasn’t to be so picturesque, even though Grace may have thought it was. She was the only person enjoying herself; I could see that. She gets a special kind of delight out of embarrassing others and breaking bad news. But in her own words, she “adores Christmas,” so she was pulling out all the stops that day.

She got us to gather around her organ. It has always been screechy and out of tune. She insisted we sing all the traditional carols to get ourselves into the right spirit. She used to play organ for the local church and accompanied their choir; now she just makes her loved ones suffer instead. I’m not sure that “loved ones” is the right term; I’m not convinced she even particularly likes any of us. We sang every old Christmas staple that went out of style centuries ago. Most of them didn’t even contain modern English. They were filled with words like “tis” and “ye.” I wished I could do a runner, but her front door has about fifteen varieties of bolts on it. She’s a paranoid old lady, always waiting for someone to cheat her out of her riches. There was no reason for the bolts to be locked that day, other than to keep us all in like prisoners at her unbearable carol service.

One of the kids was snickering through the songs as Grace did her best operatic delivery, which just sounded like a rusted wheel coming off a lopsided trailer. She silenced them with a stern look and a wag of her finger.

Dinner is usually a bit of respite in a stressful day, but dinner with Aunt Grace was anything but. She didn’t like any of the traditional trimmings, so she made her own favourites: brussel sprouts with onions, sloppy gravy, potatoes like boiled stones. I was sure she just did it to spite us. She wasn’t much of an eater. She just picked over her meal, talking about how she wanted to stay trim. She invited the rest of us to eat everything, announcing she didn’t want a scrap left behind. We picked over our plates too, moving everything around to make it look like we’d eaten more than we had.

During dinner, as I was thinking that it was by far, the worst Christmas I’d ever experienced, a surprise was yet to come. Aunt Grace did a tour of the table with her walking stick, peering at our plates and announcing whether we had eaten enough for our “special treat.” Bearing in mind that I was forty-five years old at the time, it was ridiculous. Grace scolded me for not finishing my sprouts, but I couldn’t have done it, even if she’d offered me her life’s savings on the spot. I can't stand them, almost, but not quite as much as I can't stand her.

“Hark,” Aunt Grace called. She was the only person I’d ever met in the twenty-first century to employ that word in a real sentence.

“It’s snowing again. Look at that blanket of snow,” she said, with a romantic wistfulness. I thought for a moment that she was going to share something touching with us – some small memory that made us realise she was human after all.

My nephew jumped up from his seat and begged to go outside with his sister to build a snowman, but Grace put a stop to that right away.

“I don’t want you tramping through the snow, spoiling the scene,” she said, “and trailing snow onto my good carpet.”

They both looked deflated, but not surprised.

Aunt Grace sat smugly on her seat, hands on her lap. She hadn’t offered a second course to anyone, believing that they hadn’t eaten enough to deserve it. She’d probably have a feast after we all left, and I wouldn’t even care because I would be going home, and I could forget about the whole thing for ever. I never planned to repeat that day.

Snippets of conversation held between my parents came to mind and I thought about the number of times they had complained about Aunt Grace. Did anyone like her or were they just stuck with her? I certainly didn’t plan to be for another year. Even if it caused a familial dispute, it was worth it just to avoid her.

Finally, after a grand build-up that was far out of proportion to the prize to be received, Grace placed a cracker in each of our hands.

“These are very special crackers,” she pronounced.

I wondered what on Earth she’d put in them, or if it was possible that they were just the typical cracker normal families got at Christmas. I reached across to pull mine with my cousin Chris. He pulled and I pulled, and Aunt Grace told us to watch her dishes. She was waiting for her favourite china to end up on the floor and she was waiting to blame us. The cracker made a dissatisfying “pop” and its contents fell into the centre of the table.

“Go ahead,” I gestured to Chris.

“No, Its’ yours. I insist,” he returned.

Tentatively, I reached for the gift. It looked to be a paper crown, a paperclip and a joke on a piece of paper; nothing too worrying upon first glance.

But whenever I read the “joke,” that was when the first fear crept in.

“What is it?” I asked her.

She gave me a knowing smile and looked very self-satisfied.

“It’s your fortune. It’s a special fortune cracker. What does it say?”

She had handwritten them, so obviously she knew, but she wanted to hear it come from my lips.

“You will repeat this Christmas forever. You will never have a different Christmas.”

I thought it was just a silly message, like a fortune cookie filler that's forgotten as soon as you've finished the cookie.

A decade later, I no longer take the fortune with a pinch of salt. Time has proven it to be right.

Christmas Day is by far the worst day of the year, but the saving grace is that it makes the other 364 days feel like a gift.