I’m not going to  bore you with a description of Christmas in general, I’ll just jump right in and say that Christmas is going to be very different for me this year. On the 28th of November this year my mum died. It wasn’t sudden: she was very ill with cancer, and over the weeks of her health gradually deteriorating it became more and more obvious that this year was going to be the first year that we were going to have to celebrate Christmas without her. We even celebrated my younger sister’s 16th birthday (Boxing Day) early, so that Mum could be around for it. My mum was a wonderful woman, and the festive period is going to be really tough.

As a family, we’re coping pretty well and are taken aback when people ask us how we’re doing, as if the default setting is that we’re not coping. We’re genuinely fine, but the festivities of Christmas may prove to be quite challenging. We had Mum’s funeral recently and lots of people asked me what we (my dad, my sister and I) were going to do for Christmas, as if they were expecting us to go wildly off the rails and spend the festive period in a Swiss cave eating fondue and petting wolves. In all seriousness, some people do feel the need to get away from everything when something like this happens, as if anything familiar will just make the absence all the more pronounced. My family are not going to be doing anything differently. We’re creatures of habit, so we’ve decided to spend Christmas exactly as we would have done if Mum were still alive, but with a turkey three quarters of the size.

Obviously, this means there are going to be some really sad moments. Firstly, Mum was always the person in our family who did all the Christmas shopping and, to some extent, she’s done so this year too. She knew she was going to be bed-bound for a while, and so planned Christmas presents for the three of us in advance. On Christmas day, after the Queen’s speech, the three of us will sit down as always and unwrap the presents which Mum personally picked out for us and they’ll be her final gift to us. Her last goodbye.

Also, Mum was in charge of the cooking in our house, and up until a month ago, the only things my dad could cook were bangers and mash and banoffee pie (both of which were top-notch, might I add). Dad has got a lot better at cooking since Mum died and, on Christmas day, my sister and I will both offer our assistance. However, we once collaborated on a key lime pie and forgot to add the lime, so we probably won’t be much help. Our Christmas dinner will probably suffer due to the absence of Mum, but the three of us will enjoy the social element of preparing food together.

Mum was also a stickler for organisation, so without her influence, the three of us may collapse under a pile of wrapping paper, stuffing and the overwhelming smell of burnt cinnamon that somehow always persists throughout the Christmas period.

I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but I reckon we’ll pause at several moments in the day and remember Christmas days past, when Mum concocted complicated stories to explain why Father Christmas used the same wrapping paper as she did. Or the time she spent the entire evening panicking over how to get her new phone to work. Or the countless loving smiles she gave me when she saw how happy I was at the end of a fantastic day.

When Mum was dying, my sister frequently asked Dad: “will we be happy at Christmas?”, to which he would immediately respond: “yes!”. My mum really was great, and that’s what will make Christmas difficult this year. She always put our happiness before hers, so she wouldn’t want us to spend Christmas day wearing black, sitting in mourning and refusing to wear the paper hats in our crackers. Mum would want us to enjoy Christmas.

In a way, the 25th of December (I’ve used the C word too much) will be a great way to forget the events of the last month and enjoy each other’s company, good food and a new episode of Doctor Who, but it will also be a way to remember Mum. She was an optimistic, fun-loving person and the reason I was so sad to say goodbye to her is that she features in so many of my happiest memories. We’ll be sad because she won’t be there, but it’s still Christmas, so it will be a pretty great day.

In honour of my mum, we’re going to have a really happy Christmas. It’s what she wanted