Jane Brooke, a 75-year-old singleton, will be lonely this Christmas
Christmas is a time for families. Yet families can come with complications – if they come at all. Children have to go to their in-laws, or prefer to celebrate their new babies in their own little nuclear families. Fused families often don’t fuse because they have different traditions and resent the loss of their own. In-laws might not get on. But Christmas is most difficult for single people. As you grow older, you find yourself wondering whether it really was the right decision not to have children – as that also means no grandchildren. A friend of mine, though, says the sight of other people’s grandchildren running riot, high on Christmas pudding, is enough to remind her precisely why she prefers being on her own. Her answer to Christmas is to stay at home with a pile of books and switch her phone off. She says, ‘I don’t want to...
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