This year, I will be spending Christmas with my three border collies and a brand new addition: a rescued spaniel called Alice who performs cartwheels at the merest suggestion of a frosty walk or a gravy bone. There will be no company of the human variety.
As a child, I thought anyone who spent Christmas alone was a laughing stock, a failure. What on earth had they done to end up so miserable? That will never happen to me!
But it’s more common than the TV adverts – tables groaning with food and surrounded by jolly family members – would have you believe: the number expected to spend Christmas 2026 alone is estimated to hit 8.4 million, a staggering one million more than last year.
I must confess I’m a little ashamed of the stigma of being alone on the most important day of the year. To the extent that even though I live in a vicarage next to the church in my Yorkshire village, I won’t be attending the Christmas Eve Mass.
Instead I will watch the congregation snake past my window and, if I open my back door, I can join in with the carol singing.
I’ve become used to life’s milestones happening just outside my window: weddings, christenings, funerals. Each one is about family, love, loss. People getting dressed up, hugging each other.
I always peek, hoping no one can see me. But this Christmas Eve, which should be about people turning up to your house with red faces, parcels and general chaos, will mark me out as one of life’s losers who no one wants to be around.
I wonder if anyone will notice just the one car outside my house but, then again, I doubt anyone cares about the mad dog lady with the Michael Jackson hair.
I’m a little ashamed of the stigma of being alone on December 25, the most important day of the year, writes LIZ JONES
I can put on a brave face, say I’m pleased there is no pressure, no need to put on make-up, but the fact I have no one to spend the festive season with does make me question everything.
I comfort myself knowing you can feel even more alone in a bad marriage. Before my divorce in 2007, my then-husband went to bed wearing ear plugs way before midnight on our New Year trip to Thailand, meaning I watched the fireworks by myself.
Christmas 2025 is certainly a world away from how I felt last year.
I was madly in love with a handsome new man – a cross between Daniel Craig and MasterChef’s Marcus Wareing. Just before Christmas, I booked a suite in Soho, along with a six-foot, fully decorated tree placed in one corner. He joined me for dinner before we went upstairs, kissing passionately in the lift.
For those few, brief minutes I was happy. He was impressed by the tree and joked, ‘Where’s my gift?’ (I’d already ordered him a cashmere cardi from N. Peal for the big day.)
For the first time, I was one of life’s winners. Back home, I even pushed a trolley around Sainsbury’s (I’m a basket gal, usually). The checkout lady, as she scanned the steak and smoked salmon – neither of which I’d touch – smiled broadly, so happy for me to no longer be a pariah.
Having read my starry-eyed recent columns, she said, winking, ‘So, he’s coming for Christmas, then?’
In my beautiful new vicarage, I erected a tree in the sitting room for all to wonder at as they passed en route for the festive services.
But, of course, it all came to nought. He cried off at Christmas, suddenly citing visits from his seven-year-old and ex-wife, and on New Year’s Eve pleaded exhaustion at the prospect of a long drive north. ‘I need three days to recover.’
So instead of seeing in 2025 with my handsome lover, I was on my sofa, sobbing. I later found out he’d been cheating with two other women.
All that promise, that sense of purpose, that festive cheer… turned to dust. I’d believed I had finally met my equal. He was well dressed, smelled of Dior, drove a Range Rover. When he’d come to Yorkshire for the weekend not long before, it was like a scene from The Holiday, with walks in woolly hats, his arm slung around me.
He said he loved me, wanted us to live together. I felt that my divorce, the loss of my home, the loss of contact with my family, the hard work, the fear and loneliness had all led me to him, so it was worth it. I finally had what I deserved.
But when I caught him cheating just days after having sex with me, I realised I’m not worthy of a happy ending. I’m ‘supermarket basket girl’ again, which is certainly cheaper, but even in Sainsbury’s, when couples with groaning trolleys wave me in front of them, I’m marked out as one of life’s losers. So you can forgive me if Christmas has become triggering.
It’s not just men who’ve let me down over the years, either. I haven’t heard a peep from my older sister or her nearly 30-year-old son since 2017, the year I was made bankrupt. You might say my downfall was inevitable, given my infamous largesse, but of course it’s more complicated than an addiction to The Conran Shop baubles and Bollinger Champagne.
Needless to say, as I am no longer useful or even, until last year, had a house to host in, I haven’t received a single Christmas card or even text from any family member since that fateful year of losing everything. Come to think of it, that is pretty bad going, since I’m the youngest of seven and an aunt and great aunt to so many I’ve lost count.
In fact, the only missive from a family member came in June last year when my brother’s partner emailed to inform me of his passing in January 2024. I wasn’t even told he had been ill, wasn’t given a chance to go to the funeral or even send flowers.
I can’t mourn him because even now his passing doesn’t feel real. I’m comforting myself with remembering him growing up: a ginger-haired nut, he had bow legs just like our dad and would spend all Christmas Day assembling his new Meccano kit on the carpet.
Today, I chuckle wryly at festive specials where the likes of Nigella admonish us to have warm cookies and cocktails to hand in case friends pop by. Who are these unexpected mythical creatures who arrive beaming, arms laden?
I have only one friend up here in the Yorkshire Dales – she was the main reason I relocated here in 2012 – but sadly we, too, are now estranged.
I’d written in my You magazine column of my exasperation at it always being her way or the highway. She was livid, cut off all contact. She’s not even been to my new house, which she knows was a huge milestone. I really miss how we used to drop off random gifts at each other’s houses: a veg box, a tea towel, a vegan curry.
Liz hasn’t received a single Christmas card or festive text from any family member since 2017
It’s no surprise writers tend to be lonely: I’ve written extensively about how I’d paid the mortgage on that aforementioned sister’s cottage, bought her son almost everything he owned, and not least of her explosive rages.
I wrote about my two other sisters’ alcoholism (they are both no longer with us), another brother’s death, saying he’d been difficult, reclusive but ultimately kind (when I was burgled in Brixton, he slept on my floor for ages to make me feel safe).
My nephew in Australia had asked me not to write about my sister’s death, but I did so anyway. Can’t I even own grief? My column was a eulogy, remembering how beautiful she was, talking to her former colleagues – she was an intensive care nurse at a heart hospital – who recalled how good she was at her job, how funny and sweet. But still, I’ve been ostracised for something I’d have read out loud at her funeral, if only I’d been invited.
And why am I the bad person? Christmas for me started to feel like a one-way transaction where I gave and everyone else simply took. No one has ever told me why I’m so ostracised. At least I didn’t use my dead mother’s bank account to pay the rail fare to attend her funeral. Oh, and pay for taxis to and from the station, like my brother and his family did. Perhaps writing about how I paid for my mum’s decade of care rankled with my siblings, too.
I didn’t always feel so hopeless at this time of year. I loved Christmas as a child. Untangling the coloured lights, inevitably needing to be mended by the reclusive brother. The excitement when Dad brought home the double Radio Times; I’d eagerly circle any movies starring Paul Newman.
Mum scrimped and saved to buy gifts: teeny fawn jodhpurs for my Sindy doll and a Diana for Girls annual. Later, No7 foundation to cover adolescent acne. I didn’t notice at the time, but catering for so many on so little must have been stressful for my parents.
I’d buy my dad pipe cleaners, Mum a jar of cold cream and Harveys Bristol Cream liqueurs. I’d string cards from school friends along a wall, lick paper chains and fashion a candelabra from coat hangers, à la Blue Peter.
Being the youngest of seven (four girls and three boys) meant I was proprietorial about my gifts and would place them in a neat pile on a chair. Big families aren’t always about sharing and laughter: I needed order, to know what was mine, a habit that developed into OCD in later life.
Once I’d left home, I always returned to spend time with my parents at Christmas. I never once took home a boyfriend, though, as men weren’t attracted to an anorexic workaholic.
But the most perfect Christmas I’ve spent was when I was 47.
I owned a Georgian villa stuffed with designer furniture and had a younger, novelist husband. A local florist decorated a huge tree and placed it in the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking my London garden square.
I invited my sister and her eight-year-old son to join us, ordered food and crackers online and expensive gifts: cashmere and a MacBook for the husband; a new games console for my nephew.
I’d arrived. I was happy, normal, loved. Anyone peeking in at the scene would have been as green as my tree with envy. Except of course there were cracks even then. My nephew screamed and cried when we went ice skating at Somerset House. We got home to find the curry my husband had stayed home to prepare had not even been started.
Exchanging gifts, I unwrapped only a DVD of the L Word from my husband; not even the box set, and I’m not even a lesbian.
I’m ashamed to admit I was so fixated on my Love Actually festivities, I had failed to spend the day with my bedridden, dementia-befuddled mum, whose only company – despite her many offspring – was her carer. I was sent a photo: Mum slumped in a chair wearing a paper hat.
‘She doesn’t know it’s Christmas,’ I assured my husband, misappropriating the Band Aid song.
She will be spending Christmas this year with her border collies and rescued spaniel Alice
Maybe my solo Christmas Day this year is karma. Since then men have come and gone – not a happy, coupled-up Christmas among them.
As for my on/off boyfriend – we got together in 2014, having first met in 1983 when he, the boy next door, had ignored me – on the few occasions he joined me for Christmas at my home in the Dales would buckle chippily beneath the pressure to perform.
I remember him ruining a New Year’s Eve party once, choosing that as the ideal time to let me know a friend had posted something wicked and untrue about me on Mumsnet. It was as far from the ending of When Harry Met Sally as it’s possible to get.
When I recall the letdowns, I wonder if I’m in fact better off this year. At least there’ll be no rollercoaster of emotions, no highs but also no crashing lows.
For the first time, I will be able to be selfish: what do I want to eat, watch, drink? (There is also no sniping man, counting the empty bottles and raising an eyebrow.) I’m not spending money I don’t have on people who have no respect for me or my feelings. I returned last year’s N. Peal sweater bought for the Daniel Craig double. A hard lesson learned: you cannot buy happiness.
So I’ll treat this Christmas as a rest – how many women can say that? Certainly never my mum, who was always stuck in a kitchen.
I comfort myself that I do have far-flung friends: the one in Belfast has sent me a fluffy hot water bottle; my Scottish friend an outfit from her shop, while my assistant of 19 years will doubtless deposit a year’s supply of Chappie dog food on my doorstep.
My best friend since we were 18 has invited me to join her family in Mill Hill, London, but I doubt she’d cope with a canine invasion. Mini Puppy, now 18, would never make the long trip. In fact my only real sadness is that this year will doubtless be her last. I’m going to ensure it’s her best Christmas ever. Even if it’s not mine.
