I have always felt a pang of sadness at Christmas - until this year | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I was indeed ambushed by Christmas this year: the tree was just decorated, and as for the homemade wreath that I normally lovingly create with greenery harvested in the neighborhood, forget it. I'm behind on everything from sending my tax information to my accountant to this column. I missed every Christmas delivery window and spent this week rushing around town like the harassed mom I am now. Due to the illness and the fact that the baby forgot how to sleep without the breast, I missed all the festive gatherings, personal and professional, including the Guardian Opinion do, a huge family weekend in a haunted house Welsh and various literary events, the schmoozing element of which might well have helped my new book's chances - a reference I've stepped foot on here in hopes it might spur pre-orders. I drank precisely one (one!) martini, my first in 18 months, and while I enjoyed it, I would have preferred three, although everyone knows two is the tipping point.

Still, I couldn't be happier. Despite the opening paragraph, if you came here for an extended moan, you'll leave disappointed. This crazy and chaotic singular year, I felt the meaning of Christmas more than perhaps any other. I am the very essence of the joy of the world, of peace on earth, of good news, etc., etc. I haven't even touched my misanthropic Merry Fucking Christmas Spotify playlist, because I don't wish I had a river I could skate on. I am happy here, with my husband and my baby, and although I may roll my eyes during the lullaby period when I come to lines such as "holy child so tender and sweet" and "the little Lord Jesus does not don't cry he says" it's only momentary. This year I received a big present, a present from a child, and that changed everything.

It's not like I hated Christmas before. I wasn't Scrooge; I have entered the spirit, but have always been keenly aware of the melancholy side of the season, a festival of celebration and light in a darkness that is never entirely absent despite our best efforts, as we think of the loved ones we lost and Christmases past and I feel, or at least I feel, a pang of sadness that we will never experience those innocent childhood memories again. Divorce, bereavement, illness, poverty, pain - all families face challenges, and Christmas can tend to highlight them.

In my case, being a child of divorce with a brother in a nursing home, it was the scattered nature of my family, so different in its patterns and traditions from the healthy, conventional groupings we see in advertisements, and the stress of traveling from one pillar to another to be with everyone. loved in a short period of time, which sometimes made me feel less joyful. Maybe that's why my favorite Christmas carol is In the Bleak Midwinter and my favorite Christmas song is Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis. I took a moody joy in the provocative and the untraditional, the saturnine and the grumpy, the ghostly and the uncomfortable. Darkness at the edge of Toy Town.

While I'll never experience a childhood Christmas again, I'll never fully experience the excitement from my first real tree in its red bucket, with its warm, multicolored twinkling lights encased in little plastic petals, or the anticipation of leaving Santa a little drink on the mantelpiece before going to bed, I feel that I received something bigger. Because I can see it through my grandson's eyes, and I can spend my time giving him his first Christmas. Whether it's taking him to pick up the tree, describing the decorations as he watches me decorate it, singing Christmas carols to him, and seeing his face as he watches Mr Bear's lovely Christmas on CBeebies (narrated by Stephen Fry, it's an 11-minute DIY animation by self-published author Lorna Gibson, made of felt, wool and foam and filmed on an iPhone using a stop-motion app at £5), everything has been magical so far. I loved dressing him up in a Christmas sweater, running charity shopping for toys, and picking out which books would become his favorites.

The most special of them all , however, was our trip to see the lights of Kenwood House earlier this month. We went there last year, when I was pregnant with him, my belly swollen, my walk about to become waddled, my fears of the Covid and the prospects...