The first Christmas after care starts

Nobody warns you about the first one.

Care starts in March or July, the household adjusts, everyone settles into a rhythm that works. Then December arrives and the rhythm meets Christmas, and it turns out nobody has thought about what happens when a support worker is due at ten on a morning when there are nineteen people in the house.

None of this is difficult. It is just easier in November than on the twenty-third.

Sort the roster now

Ask your provider in November, not December, and ask for the answer in writing.

What you want to know is simple: which days are affected, who is coming on each of them, and whether the times move. Staff take leave over the holidays like everyone else, and a provider who rosters well will already be working on it. One who is not will appreciate the nudge.

Two things worth deciding at the same time. First, whether visits should change shape rather than stop. If the family is around all week, a personal care visit may still be needed while a social support visit is not. Second, whether the person who normally comes will be the one who comes. If not, ask who, and ask early enough that they can meet properly beforehand rather than arriving as a stranger on a strange day. We have written about that handover in when your regular support worker leaves, and the same thinking applies to a two-week absence.

Then ask about public holiday rates, in writing, before anything is booked.

Do not cancel the lot

The instinct is generous and it is usually a mistake. The family is here, so we will manage, so let us give everyone a break.

Two weeks is long enough for things to slip. Showers get skipped because nobody wants to be the one to offer. Medication timing drifts because the day has no shape. The walk that happened every morning does not happen at all, and three weeks later it is hard to restart. And the family carer, who was supposed to be getting a break, ends up doing the job full time through the one fortnight of the year they were most looking forward to.

Reduce, reshape, move the times. Just do not switch it off.

The awkward bit nobody says out loud

A support worker arriving in the middle of a family Christmas is awkward for everyone, and it helps enormously to name it.

The family feels watched. The worker feels like an intruder in something private. The person at the centre, who has spent the year getting used to having help, suddenly has an audience for it, and often does not want their daughter-in-law to see them being helped to dress.

So decide in advance how it will go. Which room, which half hour, who steps out. If the visit can be earlier, before people arrive, take that option, because privacy on Christmas morning is worth more than convenience. If a relative is going to do personal care that day instead, say so to the provider rather than leaving a worker to arrive and find out.

And tell the worker what is happening in the house. Someone who knows there will be fourteen people and a dog and a barbecue going will work around it. Someone who does not will walk into a wall of noise and improvise.

Let the day have a job in it

The quiet loss in a lot of first Christmases is that the person becomes a guest at their own event.

For forty years they cooked it, or carved it, or ran it. Now everyone has kindly arranged for them to sit down and be looked after, and they spend the day being handed things. It is meant well and it lands as being set aside.

So give the day a job back. Peeling something at the table. Deciding the order of things. Saying the blessing, or opening the first present, or telling the story everyone has heard. It does not have to be strenuous to be theirs. This is the same argument we make in small things that keep independence, and it matters more on the days that carry meaning.

The food is part of that too. If the dishes that make it Christmas are the ones from a particular kitchen in a particular country, that is not a nice extra, it is most of the point. Food, faith and family is about exactly that.

Somebody should get an actual break

The family carer usually has the worst Christmas in the house, because they do the ordinary work plus the Christmas work plus the hosting, and the help that arrives is mostly people who need feeding.

If a proper break is needed, respite is worth planning well ahead, because December books out. Respite care explained covers the forms it can take. Even without it, the fix is often just one person being given a defined shift so the carer can leave the house for four hours without holding a phone.

What we do about it

At Aldera the holiday roster is a Care Lead’s job, worked out with the household in advance rather than published at them in the third week of December. What is happening in a home over Christmas, who is visiting, what the person wants to still be doing on the day, goes into the One Story record like everything else, so the worker who comes on Boxing Day already knows.

The first Christmas is the awkward one. After that it is just Christmas, with a bit more help in it.