Kim Knight: Oh, Christmas tree

Illustration / Terry Moyle

When your dad’s birthday is at Christmas, tradition goes out the window, writes Kim Knight.

Ageing is the gradual discovery of the differences of others.

Not everybody puts Marmite on their corn fritters. Not everybody has a gold pogo stick, customised with flame decals, built by their father who harbours a desire to become the customised pogo stick king of the world. Or at least New Zealand.

It turns out that some of the things that happen at your house don't happen at other people's. Eating chicken with your hands, for example. "Just because television says it's finger lickin' good, doesn't mean it is," said Grandma, circa 1977.

My sister emailed to remind me that no children these days take part in "family brewing night", an event where the offspring of multiple parents form a production line in a rural kitchen with mustard-coloured carpet tiles to help put down 36 dozen. Our family's share was stored in my bedroom. Good practice for my 20s, which also smelled like a brewery.

It was summer when we made that beer and, at the Punakaiki Seaside Motor Camp, my dad would have been telling us how much he hated Christmas. My family was the recipient of other people's holiday plans. Strangers towed their fruitcakes and their casked wine to the motor camp my parents managed. They strung lights in their awnings and erected tiny fake trees on their mobile mantelpieces.

Oh, how we sneered. We would NEVER have a fake tree. Which is a bit surprising, because for my father at least, Christmas never came naturally.

"I'm going bush," he would declare, every year. We would laugh. Then we would believe he wasn't kidding, then we would fume, cry and plot to burn his birthday present.

My father has been ruining Christmas since 1949, when his mother put lunch on the table and then went into labour. She missed the meal and everybody else had theirs cold.

He was about 5 when he realised having a birthday on Christmas Day sucked, because he only got one present. Of course, it was an expensive, super-duper compensatory present, but, like he says, "When you're a kid, it's a numbers game".

He says it's a privilege to share his birthday with Jesus. Then, when people are lulled into a false sense of Christianity, he splays his arms and grins: "But it's a hell of a way to spend Easter!"

My sister and I didn't care for our father's Grinch-ish attitude to the festive season. Radio Scenicland was playing Snoopy's Christmas every hour on the hour, and it was time to get the tree.

"When are we going to get the tree?" "Dad, when are we going to get the tree?" "Daaaad, it's nearly Christmas - when are we going to get the tree?"

Eventually, he would back-up the ute. He'd drive across the road to the motor camp, which was surrounded by a ring of giant pine trees with dangerously low-hanging branches. He'd take the chainsaw and lop anything that threatened to break off and injure a tenting German. One! Two! Three! Four! Sometimes it took FIVE branches to make our Christmas tree. Dad would lash these spindly stalks on to a metal pole and say f*** at least six times as he attempted to wedge his DIY tree into a bucket of rocks. He would secure a line from the pole to the curtain rail and only then, health and safety concerns assuaged, would we be allowed to begin to decorate.

The lights go on first, the balloons go in last. And, at this point, I realise I may have lost you. Because anyone who grew up with a real tree, a whole tree, maybe even a tree especially bred for Christmas slaughter, knows you don't put balloons on a Christmas tree. Unless, perhaps, you need balloons to fill the pitiful holes that persist in a tree that has been constructed from the low-hanging limbs of its parent.

This was a difference in others I didn't learn until I left home. My father would be horrified to know what Aucklanders pay for a pine, so manicured and perfect you can't even see the wood.

As a child, Dad had just the one birthday party, when he was 8. It was the last week of the school year. An only child, he told his mother, quite casually, that it was quite normal to invite 20 or 25 children to a small house on a rainy day. There was cake and chaos. And balloons. There should always be balloons on a birthday.