If you celebrate Christmas, how has your experience of it changed over the years? Candice Prinsloo shares some of her memories and thoughts on what this time has meant in her life.

I remember waking up early on a Christmas morning, sure that Father Christmas hadn’t missed our house. My older sister said she had even heard the sleigh stop on the balcony outside our bedroom window. I ran into the lounge, still clad in my “Little Mermaid” pyjamas ready to rip open some wrapping paper.  I found a coochie coo doll... with a bottle and a change of clothes! How amazing was that? I would never need another toy in my life. I was 7 years old that year. After church our extended family met at my grandmother’s house and we unwrapped more presents.  There is a photograph of my cousins and I dressed in matching Bart Simpson shorts and T-shirts – courtesy of my grandmother.

In high school, the December holidays were just about the most amazing event in the history of the world!  Getting up late, seeing friends, sleepovers, going to the beach, the list was endless. My mother had other plans for me. Being a school teacher, she had holidays with us. December holidays for my mother meant baking 100 Christmas fruit cakes, washing all the curtains in the house, moving furniture around and clearing out all our old clothes. Basically, it meant kill the December holidays for your teen daughters – they’ll love you forever for it! So after the daily 8 o’clock wake-up call (we were lucky; her mother woke her up at 6 o’clock in her day) we had to clean one room in the house before we even thought of doing anything that involved leaving our house. But, as Christmas came and went, the house was spotless, fruit cakes were made and dishes were washed. I think we had a record year once of going through at least 5 bottles of dishwashing liquid!

As a student studying away from home, Christmas was gladly welcomed. It meant eating food from home – my mother’s cooking is totally amazing! It meant catching up with high school friends, bragging about who studied at the better college or university. Christmas was scheduled to spend time with my family and just enjoying my own bed.  During my year away, my mother converted my bedroom into a new walk-in storage closet and acquired a dishwasher. Hmmm... I felt replaced. I didn’t mind so much though, my granny still made my favourite Christmas pudding and left out the cherries just for me!

As a professional in my field, Christmas means that I go home now, playing the role of ‘Cousin Christmas’, bearing gifts for young and old.  I help my mother willingly with the baking (she has some good tips for me). I listen to my granny’s stories of being young and what a looker she was. My sister and her husband are expecting their first child, the first grandchild in my immediate family, and the whole Christmas cycle will start again.

Christmas is a time for families to work on each other’s nerves, give fashion faux pas presents to the masses and love unconditionally.

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