The Posh Paw Blog

There’s something extraordinary—and mildly infuriating—about how quickly old family roles snap back into place the moment you walk through your parents’ front door. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you’ve earned, promotions you’ve gotten, or fabulous chapters of adulthood you’ve strutted your way through. One whiff of cinnamon, old wood polish, and home, and suddenly you’re right back where you left off. Like the universe quietly flips a switch the moment your suitcase crosses the threshold.

I woke up this morning feeling like my grown-up self. Sophisticated. Capable. A woman with a blog, a dance background, a glitter tolerance unmatched in the Northern Hemisphere. By 9:03 a.m., standing barefoot in my parents’ kitchen, wrapped in a robe I’ve owned since I was twelve, squinting at a cereal box I couldn’t read because I’d left my glasses on the bedside table in my room…

“Lu-lu” Mum groaned, drawing out all two syllables as though they were heavy luggage, “if you can’t read the label, LOVE, PUT YOUR GLASSES ON.”

Dad, meanwhile, was busy establishing his own holiday tradition: sabotaging my mother’s sanity via Glenn Miller. It’s his version of festive ambience. For some men, it’s scented candles. For Patrick Beaumont, it’s big-band swing played at a volume that rattles the ornaments.

I was stirring my tea when cue number one happened: Mum’s sigh.

“For God’s sake, Patrick, must we start Christmas morning with a brass section? Play Bing Crosby. Or Nat King Cole. Or ANYTHING that doesn’t sound like a ballroom reunion.”

Dad pretended not to hear. It’s part of the performance. He adjusted his glasses, hummed a little, and went straight for Glenn Miller’s ”In the Christmas Mood” Album, because of course he did. The man is nothing if not consistent.

And that’s when it hit me—a sudden, bright, ridiculous memory from my teenage years. One of those moments you forget until life nudges you and says, go on, tell the story again—you’re home.

I must’ve been about fourteen. Fully committed to rebellion in the vaguest, least effective ways imaginable. I’d never break a rule outright, but oh, I loved imagining it.

See, every Christmas, Mum is beging for non-Miller music. Every Christmas, Dad answers her plea by doing precisely… nothing. And I, standing in the middle of it, feeling the overwhelming itch to disrupt the annual musical standoff.

My idea was wicked. Genius, really.

I fantasized about sneaking into Dad’s vinyl collection and pulling off the prank of the century. I would peel the label off his sacred Christmas record—carefully, gently, like a jewel thief—and paste it perfectly onto a Rod Stewart album I’d found in a charity shop. My Trojan vinyl. My masterpiece of teenage chaos.

And then, Christmas morning:

Mum begging for anything but Miller.

Dad ignoring her and putting on what he believes to be In the Christmas Mood, anticipating to hear Miller’s version of ”Sleigh Ride” and then, the needle dropping onto the imposter record and suddenly, instead of a smooth, brassy swing…

“DO YA THINK I’M SEXY?” blasts at full nuclear volume.

Dad’s head turning the exact shade of plum pudding.

Mum laughing so hard she’s about to fold double and then when she grasps the situation, turns to him and starts swaying to the beat, ”oh, come along, Patrick, let’s not spoil the moment” – surely not wasting her chance to get her revenge on him.

Me, hands clasped in faux horror, secretly thinking I have altered the very course of holiday history.

Of course, I never actually did it.

Teenage rebellion only went so far.

My love and respect for Dad outweighed even my mischievous brilliance.

But that imagined scene played in my head every Christmas for years—like my own internal holiday special. A sitcom episode starring Rod Stewart, a horrified jazz connoisseur, and the teenage daughter caught between them.

The memory made me smile, and I wandered toward Dad’s record shelf—and there they were, as always… Miller, Goodman, Fitzgerald, the classics all lined up in their old reliable row. And then… I saw it.

My Disney Christmas Songs record.

The one Grandpa gave me so many years ago. The sleeve faded, the corners soft like well-loved pages of a storybook. I slid it out, brushed the dust away, and felt a familiar warmth tug at my chest.

I hadn’t thought about it in ages, but suddenly I was small again—cross-legged on the living-room carpet, listening to “Once Upon a Christmas” while Grandpa tapped his foot, humming along. He always hummed. He didn’t know all the words, bless him, but he hummed like each note held a memory.

Of course, I didn’t know by then that it would be his last Christmas, and that record would be the last thing he’d ever give me….and that’s what makes the memories from it weigh a little extra inside my chest.

Dad came up behind me, quiet, gentle, as he always is in moments that matter. He placed a hand on my shoulder and looked down at the record in my hands.

“I remember when you got that one,” he said softly. Then, after a pause that held both sweetness and ache, “Makes you think of him, doesn’t it?”

I nodded, unable to say anything for a moment. Grief doesn’t disappear; it simply folds itself neatly into the corners of your life, waiting to rise in moments like this—uninvited but welcome.

A couple of hours later, I joined Mum in the kitchen to bake shortbread, gingerbreads, and prepare all the other things that belongs on a Christmas table.

Mum was wrestling with the ancient recipe book, holding it half a mile from her face, squinting, sighing, tilting it like she’s trying to pick up a radio signal from 1978.

I was watching her patiently, had a sip of cocoa and then, I couldn’t hold back anymore so I simply said:

“You know, Mum… maybe I’m not the only one here who needs to put on glasses to read…”

Mum froze up like a popsicle and turned her head slowly, regal as a queen who’s been mildly offended at court.

“Lulu, that is not the same thing.”

And I delivered the coup de grâce:

“But oh, Mum…

it absolutely is.”

The very same moment, Dad arrived, leaned his shoulder against the frame, arms folded, the faintest grin tugging at one corner of his mouth.

He surveyed the scene — two generations of Beaumont women locked in a domestic duel of eyesight and pride — and delivered, in that deadpan, perfectly timed Patrick way and taps his glasses:

“You’ll be older too…

and if you say the word…

I could stay with you.”

A full, unmistakable Beatles wink.

Mum groaned and I bursted out laughing.

Dad, then looking very pleased with himself, stepped into the kitchen like he just walked onstage for his solo.

Mum groaned again and Dad asked, now smiling from cheek to cheek:

“What? It fits perfectly.”

And I followed

“It actually does, Mum.”

By the time evening settled over Saffron Walden, the house had gone soft around the edges. The Glenn Miller record had finally stopped spinning, Mum had retreated to her armchair with a stack of Christmas magazines she’d been “meaning to get through since 2003,” and Dad was pretending not to nap behind his newspaper — the same one he had been “reading” for the past forty-five minutes.

I slipped away upstairs, cocoa in hand, to my old bedroom. The door still creaks the same way it did when I was fourteen trying to sneak in after curfew. The fairy lights I left here one December a decade ago — a set Mum always insisted on keeping — still cast a warm glow across the lilac wallpaper.

And there she was.

Holly Golightly.

Still on the wall.

Still smiling like she knew every secret I’d ever kept.

“Goodnight, Holly,” I whispered, as I turned out the lights.

Merry Christmas,
Luce 💋