The worst Christmas of my life was the first I spent without my mum. Seven weeks prior to that, in a fit of uncharacteristic impulsiveness, I’d packed up my bags and moved to South Korea to become a teacher. I’d started to make friends with some of my colleagues, but Christmas still hit much harder than I wanted.

I woke up late on Christmas morning, reeling from the sort of world-ending hangover you can still just about get away with at 23. I glanced down at the two-inch cardboard Christmas tree that my mum had posted me, switched on the television, watched approximately three seconds of the carol concert playing on the Armed Forces Network and then proceeded to sob uncontrollably all over the place. Home felt like a dot on the other side of the universe. Loneliness is one thing but, as I discovered, Christmas loneliness will pick you up and scoop you out.

I’ll be spending this Christmas without my mum too. And the next. And all the others I’ve ever have, for that matter, because my mum died this summer. And whatever hole she left in our lives is about to be magnified tenfold. To put it as simply as possible, Mum was Christmas. All the family traditions we ever had came directly from her. She bought the presents. She made the cake. She cooked the food. She decorated the tree. Once I’d left home, she’d always send me back laden down with Tupperware leftovers come the 27th.

Throughout the disinterested affectations of my adolescence, and the genuine anti-Christmas sentiment of my dad’s entire adult life, she was the one who worked tirelessly to make sure the day went off without a hitch. Not that there weren’t hitches, of course. There was the year that the gizzards stayed in the turkey. The year the turkey didn’t defrost in time. The year my parents spent in a Travelodge because their house burned down. But whatever happened, any offers of assistance were impatiently shooed away. It isn’t always the greatest thing in the world to have a control freak for a mother, but it helps a hell of a lot when Christmas rolls around.

So this year, I’m quietly bracing for impact. I feel her absence constantly, but Christmas was her time. It’s when she got to show off. The person and the day are impossible to separate. It’s going to be a rough one without her.

Not least because the rest of us have to figure out how Christmas actually works. From a simply organisational perspective, the whole thing is bound to be riddled with oversights. Just this morning, for instance, I suddenly remembered that crackers are a thing. Mum knew about crackers. She’d spent decades roadtesting various types of cracker, and eventually settled on a specialist crackermonger who sold his wares exclusively through eBay. If she was still alive, the crackers would have been bought and stored weeks ago. Meanwhile, I’m about to rush off in a panic to see if they do them at Tesco Express.

And it’s OK to be sad about all this, I know. Christmas is a sad time. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas is the saddest song that’s ever been written. Christmas is a natural punctuation mark, a chance to reflect on things that were lost. And it’s already starting to bubble up in unexpected ways. My brother Pete and I took our respective kids to see a garden centre Santa last weekend. Three of them in total, all reacting to Father Christmas with various degrees of suspicion and obliviousness. Our biggest takeaway was that, as flawed and stupid as the trip was, Mum would have loved to be there with her grandkids. But she didn’t. She won’t, now. But it’s OK.

I was still in Korea the following Christmas, but by then I’d figured out how to improvise. That Christmas Day, five of us — me, a Canadian, two Americans and a Korean — managed to avoid the previous year’s chasm of loneliness by cobbling together all our hodgepodge national traditions into something new. Using the crappy toaster ovens and useless two-ring hobs that passed for kitchens in our identically poky bedsits, we scraped together the barest semblance of a Christmas dinner. The Americans made eggnog. I made mulled wine. We ate and drank and spent the evening huddled together watching illegal downloads of Christmas programmes on a busted laptop. Then, after that, we went skidding around on an iced-over rice field. If you’d asked any of us prior to that what Christmas was supposed to look like, we wouldn’t have described the day we had. But none of that mattered. We missed the people we loved, but we had each other. Our day was imperfect, but it was ours.

Mum’s gone this year, and it’ll be weird without her, but again we’ll improvise. Between the three-family, seven-person rabble that we’ve now become, we’ve hashed out a loose plan to share the load together. Everyone will come to ours and we’ll open presents. I’ll do lunch with veg from Dad’s garden. My wife is doing the stockings. Later we’ll all walk to Pete’s and spend the afternoon there. This will be the first Christmas that my toddler understands what’s going on, plus between us we have two new babies who weren’t here last time around. It’s all brand new; uncharted territory for all of us.

We’re rudderless, but out of this mess we’ll grow new traditions. Our kids will look back at things that came from this Christmas, and they’ll cling to those as tightly as I do with the memories of Christmases with Mum. It won’t look like any of the Christmases we had together, but that isn’t such a bad thing. That’s what Christmas is going to be like now. We’ll miss Mum, but we’ll have each other. Not perfect, but ours.

@StuHeritage