The empty seat at the Christmas table

From my teenage years, mum developed a habit of setting the table for Christmas lunch, plus one.

It seemed like such an odd custom. An empty seat and an empty place at the table on Christmas Day, replete with dinner plate, knives, forks, spoons and a Christmas cracker. It was odder still because space was at a premium around the dining table with everyone shuffled up, elbows clashing over the cutlery, while this vast space went unused.

My mother’s explanation never wavered, The empty place at the table was left for lost loved ones. Dead or merely unable to navigate a path to our door by compass and map, I couldn’t say.

She came from grim Scottish Presbyterian stock who had settled in New Zealand in the mid 19th Century. Granite tough, they scratched out a living and grew wealthy on the riches our neighbour across the ditch had to offer. One became an early aviator who flew from Christchurch to Wellington at a time when such things were remarkable. The others owned large sheep farms on the South Island.

Catholic to his bootstraps, my father used to suggest his long dead in-laws were the sorts of people who would lock up the swings and slides on Sundays for fear children might have the temerity to have some fun on the sabbath.

Mum would often tell the story of her great uncle’s wake, an open casket job at one of the family homes. His brothers stood around the grey cadaver in the deepest repose. They opened an old whiskey bottle and each had a belt by way of tribute. Their sister, my mother’s grandmother, entered the room and ordered them from the house.

As they scuttled out the front door, she said, “If you ever consume strong drink at my funeral, I will come back and haunt you.”

My mother delighted in telling the stories of this flint-like matronly prohibitionist wowser. I once clocked the old bird in a photo and she looked even more fierce than my mother’s anecdotes indicated. Back in the day of daguerreotype photography, it was not the custom to smile for the camera as we do for the endless selfies of today. Back then being photographed was a rare experience and subjects would stand in stony pose as they might for a portrait artist working with oils and paint brushes.

Even then, my great grandmother’s visage seemed fixed somewhere between a permanent scowl and a snarl. She was utterly terrifying.

Naturally it did not take long for the boys in our family to insinuate the empty chair was for this vicious old crone who we guessed had entered our home through a wormhole in the cosmos reserved for the undead.

As Christmas dinner progressed we’d raise a glass to her and take long draughts in snide derision of her teetotal ways. At first my mother was amused but as my brother and I worked the joke to the point of an early grave, becoming increasingly inebriated with every toast, her demeanour shifted to irritation.

“Leave her alone,” she would shout protectively as if old Nanna Glen really was sitting there in translucent other-worldly form, glowering but unable to offer her stern judgment on our excesses.

Of course the seat was not reserved for the old harridan. Not specifically anyway. The empty place at the table really wasn’t for the long deceased figures one finds in the higher branches of the family tree.

When my father died the empty space at the Christmas table gathered real poignancy, so sharp and awful I couldn’t bear it and retired to the living room and ate my dinner on my lap. In the wake of his demise, my brother’s detachment from what remained of our family, provided greater clarity on what the empty space at the table actually meant.

The empty space at the table was for those who were lost to us, not geographically but physically and emotionally. The space conferred a sign that no matter what, they were always welcome at the table.

Now I have my own brood to sit down and break bread with at Christmas. My mother’s custom of the empty space at the table was quickly consigned to the ether. We will celebrate Christmas with gusto and no doubt to the point of wretched excess in terms of food and grog consumed. But, with just a nod to that tradition I had once thought so strange, we will raise a glass to those who are absent and extend a welcome to them all.

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

This article first appeared in The Australian on 22 December, 2017