Ok. So I’ve done a whole little Christmas past, present and future sequence. The past and present ones were pretty straightforward. I mean, they’re known quantities. Bit of descriptive text and chuck in a vaguely amusing anecdote – sorted. Future Christmas though, well that’s altogether more tricky.

Who knows what the Christmas of the future will hold? Literally no one. You can take a good guess, obviously. There’s a fair chance it’ll include a lot of food. A tree (possibly ‘rescued’ – see Christmas Past). A few presents.

I never used to have a problem imagining and planning for the future. Since my cancer diagnosis and treatment though, it does all feel a bit like tempting fate. I’m not saying I’m constantly wondering if I’ll see another Christmas – it’s more that I’m just much more aware of the fragility of everything. Everyone’s lives – and everything in them. Planning for something in a year’s time naturally assumes a whole heap of people will still be here, and a whole heap of things will be the same. They might be, obviously. Everything might be exactly the same. We might all be popping to Waitrose for last minute festive bits and bobs in the exact same state of panic as we did this year. But then again…

Slight detour, but in the course of writing about Christmases past and present, I realised something about supermarket verbs.

People don’t ‘pop’ to Sainsbury’s. Or Tesco’s, Morrison’s, Lidl or Aldi. They go there. Mum hasn’t popped to Iceland has she? She’s gone there. But they pop to Waitrose. They nip to M&S. I guess food shopping can be all fun and spontaneous when you don’t have to think twice about splashing £10 on six luxury mince pies.

Anyway…

Who knows what the Christmas of the future will hold. It might be pretty much an exact replica of the Christmases that have gone before. And that would be totally fine. It might be radically different. And that could be great, or it could be really, really challenging. I think I’m probably safe to assume, though, that at least some of the elements of Christmases past and present – friends and family, mainly – will still be around, and that they’ll be up for a challenge. Or, there could be just a minor variation. I might pop to Sainsbury’s, for example. And as long as they’re not all out of Battenberg (see Christmas Present), that would be totally fine, too.