Well done

Do you know when I really start to feel like it’s Christmas?

I don’t have a Lorelia Gilmore propensity for snow, nor do I put up the tree in November. I don’t like eggnog and can take or leave a Yule Log. But there is a moment and whenever it happens, it feels like my soul is shrouded in mistletoe. And it is this: the Coke advert. 

Whatever people, I am a child of the 80s. 

The second Father Christmas appears on the side of those trucks and “Holidays are coming” starts its humming chorus, my heart skips a beat and I think, thank God! Christmas is here.

Which is also to say, holy shit, we have survived another year.

The second Father Christmas appears on the side of those trucks and “Holidays are coming” starts its humming chorus, my heart skips a beat and I think, thank God! Christmas is here

Christmas for me was the reward: the gift after a year of hard work, self-doubt, anxiety, and the various hurdles we have all jumped over and hoops crawled through to get to this moment where you knew you had made it. You had come to the end of the year and hopefully, despite whatever changes you had gone through, either emerged better and stronger, or if not, this was the moment of respite and comfort. 

I bloody love Christmas. 

Except last year. Because it was like someone took the most precious thing in the cupboard and dashed it to the floor. You looked at it unable to understand how the shards had ever made sense to you in order and form instead of the utter chaos that lay before you. There was no reward for one of the most collective hideous experiences we had gone through in our living memory – just more of the same. But with snow.

Who knows what this Christmas will be, but forced into the internal worlds not of our making and faced with its prospect looming before me again, I have taken one thing from the nightmarish version of 2020. 

We did survive another year. 

So I am going to say this if no one else does, if you don’t hear it, or if you don’t even really believe it.

Well done guys.
Well done for answering the emails and phone calls filled with desperation and horror at the world before us and how we were going to cope.
Well done for soothing those who saw their life’s ambition go up in smoke as the shutters came down on the bookshops needed to make their work fly.
Well done for comforting that colleague who needed that extra ten minutes on the Zoom after the meeting because – well – fill in whatever emergency here.
Well done for getting through Covid even though it wiped you out for days, weeks, months and you still had to work/parent/pay the bills/pay the rent.
Well done for realising your mental health was cheesecloth and you needed to step back from work to give yourself some time to heal.
Well done for 11x months of the longest winter of the soul even as summer came.
Well done for continuing to wear a mask.
Well done for getting out to the office even when you didn’t want to.
Well done for insisting on a new work practice that served you better than the one you’ve done before.
Well done for the deals, the clients, the author care, the agent care, the editor care, the self care.
Well done on the thousand thousand tiny things that burned you out but you still kept going.
Well done for standing up for the things you believed in.
Well done for holding the wisdom of your own counsel.
Well done for being here. Still. After everything.
Even though it doesn’t feel it; even though you wish X had gone better or you had done more of Y. Well done – because this was a shit show and you’ve sat through all the acts it has to give us and even the loathsome encores.

When I get to Christmas, I usually take stock of the year I have gone through, all the things that I have achieved, or not achieved or wanted to do better. But not this year. This year I will put up my tree listening to Nat King Cole. I will hang up my wreath with a glass of hot chocolate and I will fight again with my husband about whether or not tinsel is fun or just trashy. 

I will not pat myself on the back, or lament what I could have achieved. I will just sit down and realise I have made it and I can make it. And for now, there is the hope of an advert on the television and the promise of something good coming. Maybe it will be life as it used to be, of bookshops overflowing with the bevy of a robust high street; of families reunited without the threat of a virus hanging over them; of creativity and kindness. Maybe it will be all those things. 

Until then, the holidays are coming. 

And we are done. 

Nelle Andrew is an agent at RML. She was named Literary Agent of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards, and was a Bookseller Rising Star in 2016.