Across the UK, many families will be celebrating in December with their favourite food, their preferred time to share gifts and their own traditions. The chances are that no two households will celebrate in exactly the same way.

As we recognise that sometimes Christmas, New Year and other holidays need to look a little different for the families of care-experienced children, we want to celebrate the beauty and the joy in the fact that there’s really no such thing as a ‘normal’ Christmas.

"Christmas in my parents’ house is noisy. There are always loud conversations, often about big topics like religion and politics, sometimes pretty heated. There’s always amazing food, because my mum is the best cook. I offered to cook the turkey this year actually, and my dad wasn’t keen. “It won’t be the same,” he told me. There are lots of people, lots of laughs, and sometimes some big life updates. It’s one of the only times when the whole family gets together.

It’s normal to bring a few extra guests to Christmas; that’s the kind of family we are. Amongst all the siblings and cousins, a few new friends blend right in. So when I was a supported lodgings host, it felt perfectly normal for me to bring along the young people who were staying with me.

I became a supported lodgings host a number of years ago. I remember at the time there was a lot of negative news about teenagers – particularly Black teenagers in London. As a Black person from South London, the negativity felt foreign to me because I had had a very different, pretty positive experience growing up and calling this place home. I remember hearing this news and thinking, “Well okay, what are we going to do about it?” I tried to get got involved with my community, I got stuck in with church, I became a school governor. I saw an advert for supported lodgings, a provision for young people aged 16+ whereby they live in a room in the house of a ‘host’ who provides them with emotional and practical support and helps them prepare for adulthood and independence. I thought, “I can do this.”

Usually I’m in the kitchen on Christmas Day. That tends to be a good place to start with young people when I’m introducing them to the family for the first time. There are tasks that need to be done, you’re working with your hands, you’re asking how you can help. It breaks the ice, and the conversation generally flows pretty naturally from there.

The young people I’ve introduced to my family have always been welcome and felt at home, and even if they haven’t stayed with me long, my family remember them and continue to think of them. Just the other day, my uncle asked how one of the young people I had introduced him to was doing. I was able to tell him that she was doing really, really well – she’s studying, and she’s a mum now with three children. He couldn’t believe it; he was so pleased for her.

This year, one of my sisters is suggesting something very different – she wants to spend Christmas away, in a hotel. It sounds enticing, and so luxurious – but Christmas is a family occasion, and our family is huge, and it’s an open-door and open-invitation kind of day. I can’t see her idea working out… unless we can bring everyone else with us!"