I’ve been well and truly ambushed by Christmas this year: the tree is only just decorated, and as for the homemade wreath I normally lovingly create with greenery foraged from the neighbourhood – forget it. I’m late on everything, from sending my tax information to my accountant to this column. I’ve missed all the Christmas delivery windows, and have spent this week rushing around town like the harassed mother I now am. Owing to illness and the baby forgetting how to sleep without the breast, I have missed every single festive gathering, both personal and professional, including the Guardian Opinion do, a huge family weekend in a Welsh haunted house, and various literary events, the schmoozing element of which could well have helped the chances of my new book – reference to which I have shoehorned in here in the hope that it might drum up some preorders. I have drunk precisely one (one!) martini, my first in 18 months, and while I enjoyed it, I would rather have had three, despite everyone knowing that two is the tipping point. Yet I couldn’t be happier. Despite the opening paragraph, if you’ve come here for a protracted whinge, you will go away disappointed. This mad, chaotic singular year, I have felt the meaning of Christmas more than perhaps any other. I am the very essence of joy to the world, peace on earth, good tidings etc, etc. I haven’t even touched my misanthropic Merry Fucking Christmas Spotify playlist, because I don’t wish I had a river I could skate away on. I’m happy right here, with my husband and my baby, and though I may roll my eyes during lullaby time when I get to lines such as “holy infant so tender and mild” and “the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes” it is only momentary. This year, I have had a great gift bestowed upon me, the gift of a child, and it has changed everything. It’s not as though I hated Christmas before. I was no Scrooge; I got into the spirit, but I was always acutely aware of the melancholic side to the season, a festival of feasting and light in a darkness that is never entirely absent despite our best efforts, as we think of loved ones we have lost and Christmases past and feel, or I do anyway, a tug of sadness at the fact that we will never live those innocent childhood memories again. Divorce, bereavement, illness, poverty, pain – all families face challenges, and Christmas can have a tendency to cast them in high relief. In my case, being a child of divorce with a brother in a care home, it was the scattered nature of my family, so different in its patterns and traditions from the wholesome, conventional groupings we see in adverts, and the stress of travelling from pillar to post to be with everyone I loved in a short window of time, that sometimes made me feel less than jolly. Perhaps this is why my favourite carol is In the Bleak Midwinter and my favourite yuletide song is Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis. I took a morose joy in the defiant and the non-traditional, the saturnine and the grinchy, the ghostly and the uncomfortable. The darkness at the edge of the toy town. While it is true that I will never experience a childhood Christmas again, will never fully live the excitement of my first real tree in its red bucket, with its hot, multicoloured twinkle lights enclosed in little plastic petals, or the anticipation of leaving a wee dram for Santa on the fireplace before heading to bed, I feel that I have been gifted something greater. Because I get to see it through the eyes of my baby son, and I get to devote my time to giving him his first Christmas. From taking him to get the tree, to describing the decorations as he watches me decorate it, singing carols to him, and seeing his face as he watches the lovely Mr Bear’s Christmas on CBeebies (narrated by Stephen Fry, it’s an 11-minute DIY animation by the self-published author Lorna Gibson, crafted from felt, wool and foam and shot on an iPhone using a £5 stop-motion app), it’s all been magical so far. I’ve loved dressing him in a Christmas jumper, charity shopping for toys, and choosing the books that will become his favourites. Most special of all, however, was our trip to see the lights at Kenwood House earlier this month. We went last year, when I was pregnant with him, my stomach swelling, my walk on its way to becoming a waddle, my fears about Covid and the prospect of giving birth in an understaffed maternity unit frightening me more than I let on as I posed next to the tree. To return with him bursting with excitement at the lights as snowflakes kissed his red, cold cheeks and he kicked his legs as his dad carried him in the sling was one of the best moments of my motherhood so far. Seeing a dad chase his toddler, who had illegally broken into a light installation and was running around, gave me a glimpse of what my life will look like next year. The next morning, I watched my son shake the snow that had fallen overnight from the branches in the garden. This time of year can be tough for lots of reasons. I’m not suggesting that having a baby can melt it all away, but it does feel as if I’ve undergone a personal shift. Instead of being haunted by the ghost of Christmas past, I’m embracing the ghost of Christmas future. It’s all for him now. All of it. What’s working I’m lucky enough to live near the Toy Project, a charity that recycles unwanted toys and sends them to children who need them, whether in refuges, hospitals, children’s homes or abroad. The range available to customers is brilliant, too, and if you’re in the London area it’s well worth the trip. What’s not My husband has been teaching the baby to sleep again, and is making great progress, but the sleep debt I’ve accumulated means I’m still catching up. After a disrupted night, I usually repair to the spare room with an eye mask and earplugs for a totally sensorily deprived snooze. Unfortunately, the cat has worked out how to open doors, and has decided that mornings are prime time for playing on my head. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author of The Year of the Cat, which will be published in January 2023