Remembering our Jacobite Christmas

When you live abroad, Christmas cards become even more important than they were when you lived at home. Last week I sent my “international” Christmas cards, and as usual postage was the most expensive aspect of the operation, costing £34.22 ($54.26 Canadian).

“It can’t be helped,” said my husband Mark, Scots philosophy winning out over Scots thrift. “Christmas cards are not a negotiable.”

Indeed not. As airfares skyrocket at Christmas, Christmas cards are the most practical way an expat can greet friends and family back home. And this year we weren’t successful in convincing anyone in our Canadian family to shell out the airfare necessary for the enjoyment of another Cummings Family Scottish Christmas.

We had more luck last year, when my sister and her son Jacob caught a transatlantic flight to London and enjoyed a day of sightseeing before flying on to Edinburgh. The saying “Christmas is for children” is not comforting when you have no children of your own, so I was absolutely delighted to see them. Jacob, who has two cousins in Montreal, still saw a lack.

“Auntie Dorfle,” he announced, within half an hour of his arrival. “I would like another cousin.”

“Oh,” I said, flummoxed. “Well, I think you should talk to your Montreal auntie about that.”

Jacob pondered this. Obviously I had missed the point.

“I would like a Scottish cousin,” he explained.

Instead he got a deeply theological reflection on how God doesn’t send babies to everybody and an introduction to the Polish undergrad who had had a housemate crisis and so was living in the dining room. Jacob seemed cheerfully resigned to both, and my auntly heart soon rejoiced to see both brown-eyed nephew and blue-eyed undergrad sprawled on the living-room couch watching Saturday morning cartoons with the exact same look of rapt contemplation.

Edinburgh is a holiday paradise for children. It has, first and foremost, Edinburgh Castle, which is not only an active military fort with soldiers, it has dungeons and the Scottish Crown Jewels, huge displays of weaponry, trinkets made by bored prisoners-of-war and a cannon that fires every day at one o’clock. Edinburgh also has the Museum of Childhood, with its collections of toys and tempting puppet theatre. It has a huge tartan emporium with an electric loom that judders and clacks, medieval Scottish armour for sale and endless racks of child-sized kilts. It even has a mysterious house of horrors called the Edinburgh Dungeon, and if you are under nine, you are denied admission. Anguished, Jacob declared he would not return to Edinburgh until he was nine.

Some genius — perhaps it was I — gave Jacob a little travel journal listing many of Edinburgh’s landmarks and attractions, and we all took great delight in finding yet another and ticking it off in the book. Unsurprisingly, the little wooden church we took him to on Sundays was not in the book, but there Jacob made more grown-up friends and astonished his relations by taking an interest in the incense-clouded rituals of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

Nevertheless, we spared him the rigours of Midnight Mass. My husband and I have no car, and the Christmas Eve bus service ends at 9 p.m., which means that we spend at least two hours of every Christmas Eve killing time in a bar, waiting for our church to open. So Jacob, his mother and I went to Christmas Morning Mass at the nearest Catholic church, a three-kilometre walk through woods and along the Firth of Forth. It was windy but warm, and Jacob shed his puffy coat as he raced along the shore after puppies. Church bells rang; it was all very old fashioned.

Except for Mass. Although Jacob behaved beautifully, the adults blethered cheerfully among themselves while the other children cried, chatted and ran up and down the aisles. The elderly priest gave long monologues between the actual real bits of Mass. Afterward my sister confessed that she couldn’t penetrate his Scottish accent. The boisterous informality, though, was familiar: “It was just like Mass in Ecuador, only in Ecuador I understood some words.”

We hiked home for breakfast, gift-unwrapping and the frantic annual test of adulthood that is making Christmas dinner exactly like Mum’s. There was a splendid family reunion over Skype, and I enjoyed very much my parents’ reaction to the revelation that Mark and I had given Jacob toy bagpipes for Christmas. We were soon to become very familiar with the sound of those bagpipes ourselves; they sounded like an asthmatic sheep.

When we finally saw Jacob, his mother and his bagpipes off, we returned to a house that seemed strangely quiet and empty. I sighed.