Christmas and the rotation

It is 4:30am on Christmas morning and I am awake in a quiet house. He is at his mum's this year. The pillowcase at the end of his bed is empty because there is no bed to put it on, in this house, this year. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee that is too hot to drink and the cicadas are warming up outside. The first Christmas without him under this roof is in fifteen hours. I do not know what I am going to do with the morning, with the lunch, with the long bright Australian afternoon that smells like someone else's prawns.

The first Christmas after a separation is the worst day of the post-divorce year. There is no avoiding it and there is no shortcut through it. What you can do is plan it well enough that you survive it without doing damage, and well enough that the kid (wherever he is that day) feels held, not abandoned.

The rotation, written down

Most separated parents in Australia end up on some version of an alternating Christmas rotation. The cleanest version is: she has the kid for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in odd years, you have him in even years, and the other parent gets Boxing Day. Reverse for the next year. Then nobody has to negotiate every December.

Other versions exist. Some couples split Christmas Day itself, with the kid at one house for breakfast and lunch, the other for dinner. This works in theory and is exhausting in practice for everyone, especially the kid, who spends his Christmas Day in a car seat.

What I do not recommend, ever, is leaving Christmas to be sorted out year by year. Pick the rotation, write it down, sign it (literally, both of you, just to make it feel real), and do not reopen the question every September. The whole point of a rotation is that the politics is decided once and then forgotten.

• Rotation written down, three to five years out
• Public holidays around it agreed in the same document
• Boxing Day rules clear (whose day is it, what time the handover happens)
• New Year's Eve and New Year's Day specified separately
• A clause for what happens if a grandparent dies or a wedding falls on the day

Christmas Eve versus Christmas Day

This is its own negotiation. In a lot of Australian families, Christmas Eve is now as big as Christmas Day, especially in the Italian and Greek households I have spent time in, but also in plenty of Anglo ones too. The seafood lunch on Christmas Eve at her grandparents' was the bigger event in our marriage. So when the rotation came up, we did not just rotate Christmas Day. We rotated the whole 24-hour block from Christmas Eve dinner to Christmas Day dinner. That worked.

If your families have different traditions (her side does Christmas Eve, your side does Christmas Day), you might find a version where each year goes naturally to whichever side has the bigger event. That is fine if you can do it without keeping score. Once you start keeping score, do the strict alternating thing and let the families adjust to the rotation, not the other way round.

What I learnt to do on the years he was not with me

The years he is not with me are still my Christmas. I am still allowed to have a Christmas. The mistake I made in year one was treating the day as a hole I had to fall into. By year two, I had learnt to do the day differently.

What works for me, and might work for you:

• Get out of the house early (a swim, a walk, the surf, anything outside)
• Have a long lunch with people who are also in non-traditional Christmas configurations (other separated dads, friends without family in town, the neighbours)
• Skip the formal lunch entirely (have a barbecue at 3pm instead)
• Do one thing the kid would think is funny (mine is wearing the same daggy Christmas shirt every year and sending a photo)
• Call him at a pre-agreed time, not on the spur of the moment (set the time with his mum in advance)

The call matters. Pick a time. Stick to it. Keep the call short (ten minutes is plenty). Do not interrogate him about what he is doing or who is there. Just say "happy Christmas, mate, I love you, what's the best thing you ate today?" Listen to the answer. Tell him one funny thing about your day. Hang up.

Long calls on Christmas Day make the kid sad. He is in the middle of his other Christmas and the call drags him out of it. Quick, warm, and gone is better than long and sticky.

Extended family expectations

Your parents, her parents, the siblings, the in-laws who are now ex-in-laws but somehow still text you. Christmas brings the whole apparatus out of storage and most of them have opinions about the rotation.

The line that has worked for me, said early and often: "We have a rotation, it works, we are not changing it this year, please stop asking." Said once to my parents, once to her parents (via her), and once to the aunt who keeps suggesting alternatives. After the third repetition, most people drop it.

The trickier conversation is with grandparents who feel they are losing access to the kid because of the rotation. They are, a bit. The kid cannot be in three places on Christmas Day. The compromise that has held: the off-year grandparents get a guaranteed dedicated day in the school holidays, just them and the kid, treated as importantly as Christmas itself. They get the day at the beach with him, or the day at their place with the cousins. It is not Christmas, but it is theirs.

The first Christmas (worst)

Year one, you will probably do something wrong. You will buy too many presents to compensate. You will get drunk at the wrong moment. You will cry in the car. You will text her something at 2am that you will regret.

Forgive yourself in advance. Year one is the trial run for years two through ten. The data you collect on year one is what you use to plan year two. Take notes, even mental ones. What worked. What didn't. What you would never do again. What you would do more of.

If you have a friend who has been through a few of these, ring him on Christmas Eve. Not to talk about Christmas. Just to talk. Old mates are the cheapest mental health insurance in this whole project.

The third Christmas (better)

By year three, the rotation feels normal. The kid does not flinch when he hears which house he is at this year. You do not flinch when you wake up alone. The new traditions you have invented have started to feel real. The traditions you decided to bury have stopped haunting you. You no longer compare this Christmas to a remembered version of a different one.

Year three is when you realise that what felt like loss in year one was actually a re-pricing. The day is not less important. It is differently configured. The configuration is sustainable. The kid has two Christmases now, and as long as the adults keep their nerve, he will tell you, eventually, that two is fine.

What ritual to invent, what to abandon

Some of the rituals from before the divorce are worth keeping. Some are worth burying with respect, the way you might bury a beloved pet. The ones I kept: the morning swim before lunch (solo or with him, depending on the year), the chicken sandwich made from leftovers at 4pm, the same Christmas tree decorations that we always used (he picks where they go).

The ones I buried: the formal sit-down lunch with the linen tablecloth (it was hers, in spirit, and I cannot do it without her), the Christmas Eve carols at the church (we never really wanted to go anyway), the photo album updated each year (now he has two, one at each house, neither pretending to be complete).

The ones I invented: the Boxing Day camping trip with him, two nights, no internet, river or coast depending on the year. That is now ours. It did not exist before the divorce. It exists because of the divorce. It is one of his favourite things in the calendar.

Australian Christmas specifics

Australian Christmas is not Northern Hemisphere Christmas, and that helps. The day is long, the light is huge, the heat invites you outside. You do not have to recreate a snowy domestic scene in a hot December. The beach is a legitimate Christmas venue. So is the pool, the river, the back garden with the sprinkler on. The kid does not need a turkey. He needs a swim and a sausage and a piece of pavlova.

If you can move Christmas outside, half the emotional architecture of the indoor lounge-room Christmas (where every chair has a memory) goes away. Outside, the day is just hot and bright and the kids are wet and the cousins are running around. Outside, a divorced Christmas looks a lot like any other Christmas.

A short closing

Pick the rotation. Hold the line. Build new things slowly.