BRYONY GORDON: How I found the true that means of Christmas… by cancelling it and taking my daughter on vacation to Dubai with my grieving pal

I am lying on a sun lounger in 28-degree heat, my best friend Laura to the right of me, hot white sand underfoot. Turquoise waters lap at the Dubai dazzles on the horizon.

It is Christmas, apparently, not that we’d know it: not from the bright blue sky, the extravagant virgin mojitos, or the vigorous game of beach volleyball our children are playing with the team from our five-star resort’s kids’ club.

They’ve just finished necklace and bracelet-making, and inform us that they’ve also been decorating cupcakes and cookies, though by ‘decorating’ what I think they actually mean, given their energy, is ‘eating’ them.

Later, we will probably give in to their demands to take a pedalo out into the Persian Gulf, but first: a refreshing pineapple sorbet, followed by facials at the hotel’s spa.

Laura and I have promised that our Christmas gift to one another is an afternoon in the luxurious hammam, while the children get their hair braided and their faces painted under the constant supervision of paid professionals.

It’s not very festive, but frankly, neither of us could give a stuffed stocking.

We are here at the Anantara resort on the Palm in Dubai because Laura and I have taken the decision this year to cancel Christmas. Bah humbug, just call me Scrooge (in a sarong).

There will be no roast turkey, no festive jumpers, and absolutely no reminiscing about the year gone by.

The carols have been replaced by the squawks of tropical birds, the arguments with family over how best to baste the turkey swapped with cocooning body treatments at the Anantara’s chic spa.

It’s all a very long way from our normal Christmases at our respective homes in London – 4,340 miles to be exact.

But we are doing this for good reason. In October, the very worst thing happened when Laura’s lovely husband Alex Cole died. He had been diagnosed with bowel cancer in March of this year, this awful, awful disease ripping up life as their family knew it in a devastatingly short space of time.

Alex died just a few weeks after his 43rd birthday, a fortnight before his youngest child, Indigo, turned three.

A couple of weeks after that, Laura and Alex’s youngest son, Jules, had his ninth birthday, and almost a month later, their eldest, Teddy, turned 11.

Laura navigated all of these milestones with her typical dazzling brilliance, organising parties and presents and making sure the Cole family children had as ‘normal’ birthdays as possible, given the terrible circumstances.

There were Nerf guns and go-karting runs and freshly baked birthday cakes. But during those dreadful days after Alex’s death, as I sat on her sofa hugging her, she confessed to me that Christmas felt like a milestone too many to bear this year.

She didn’t want to hear people talking about the most wonderful time of the year, not when she was going through the most terrible time of her life.

Twinkly lights, festive get-togethers, people wishing you a ‘merry’ Christmas… this year, it would all have to be avoided, as much as was humanly possible.

So we hatched a plan to go to the most un-Christmassy place on the planet. The kids had a wishlist, with strict instructions of what was needed from a destination: it had to be really hot, with lots of waterparks, a variety of sushi restaurants and heaps of fun things to do.

With a three-year-old in tow, we didn’t fancy travelling through too many time zones. Which is why we are here in Dubai at the Anantara, where the waterparks are plenty, the temperature is balmy, and the only turkey we will be eating comes in the delicious poolside club sandwich.

There are many people, obsessed with Christmas and all its rituals, who would never dream of abandoning festive traditions.

But anyone who has experienced bereavement and loss will understand how hard this time of year can be, its customs somehow highlighting all that is no longer here.

And I would do anything for Laura, just as she would for me.

We met almost 25 years ago, through mutual friends, having grown up near to one another in west London – me in Chiswick, Laura in Ealing.

And while we no longer see many of those people from our teens, we have stuck steadfastly by one another’s sides, through thick and thin.

I remember, when we first met, that we immediately ‘got’ each other, bonding over late-night games of Mario Kart and drunken bike rides to the local kebab shop for chips smothered in mayonnaise.

Our 20s were spent at each other’s flats, singing and dancing and weeping over the various questionable men we seemed to attract as she started her career as a nurse, and I as a journalist.

Despite our bad luck with blokes, we did a lot of laughing. We were messy, chaotic, often cobbling together what money we had to fly to the south of France, where we would spend holidays in her grandmother’s static caravan living off baguettes and beer and wine.

Then, in our early 30s, a miracle! After many years of commiserating over our seemingly terrible taste in men, we both met and settled down with two lovely ones at around the same time – me with Harry, and Laura with Alex, a strategist.

I got pregnant in the summer of 2012, and as Laura took me shopping around Zara Kids on the first day of my maternity leave the following spring, she confessed that she and Alex had started trying for a baby, too.

She found out she was pregnant with Teddy just two days before I gave birth to Edie, at the hospital where she worked no less.

She was the first visitor, outside my family, and in the winter of 2013 they welcomed Teddy into the world. Jules followed two years later, with Indigo arriving in the winter of 2021.

Our families quickly became one, really. For my daughter, an only child, Laura and Alex’s children are the closest thing she has to siblings.

We would go away together at least three times a year, be it for weekends in the Cotswolds or entire summers at a dilapidated barn in the middle of France, where Alex and Harry would teach the children to dive while Laura and I read books and toured the local supermarkets (a favourite holiday activity).

We were so close that we joked that we would like to form a commune together, probably somewhere in the wilds of Cornwall, where we also spent a lot of time.

They were there for my bad times too. Almost my entire adult life I’d fought addictions: to alcohol and then cocaine, which I used as both a crutch and mask for the OCD, from which I’d suffered since I was a child.

By 2017, I knew I needed help, and took myself off to rehab. Shortly before I went, the Coles whisked me, Harry and Edie away to the Cotswolds, where they made sure I didn’t go near any alcohol and cooked me roasts, keeping me safe until I could be admitted into the treatment centre for alcoholism.

Despite the lows I had sunk to, they never once judged me, or abandoned me, and when I came out that Christmas, they were there with open arms, loving me unconditionally.

During lockdowns, when things first opened up, we missed each other so much that we would drive to a deserted beach in Dorset and ‘bump’ into one another for a few hours so that we could pretend we were on holiday, driving back to London, sandy but happy at the end of the day.

As recently as August, we were all together in Cornwall, testing our favourite Viennetta flavours and building sandcastles.

So it was never in question that we would be there for both of them during those terrible, dark moments in the early autumn.

In the last few weeks of Alex’s life, I would work from the hospital waiting room, feeding Laura and taking her for walks, crying with her as it became clear that the very worst thing was about to happen.

Along with a group of other friends, we stationed ourselves in the ward visitors’ room, where we stayed until the bitter end, forming that commune of love for a man who meant so much to so many. On that unimaginably awful day, as a small group of us delivered her home, I promised Laura that I would not leave her side.

Harry and I had pledged to Alex, too, that we would look after his wife and children, and that’s a pledge we will never, ever break. It’s partly why Harry has stayed behind in London this year – yes, he has to work over Christmas, but he felt as much as I did that this needed to be, more than anything, a girls’ holiday.

It wasn’t a difficult conversation to have – just the commune, pulling into action.

Plus, Harry and I both feel it’s a small sacrifice given everything that Laura and the children have been through.

Edie, meanwhile, is simply delighted that she gets to spend two weeks in the sun with her best friends.

Harry is going to spend Christmas Day with his father and cousins, and judging from the FaceTimes we have made from the beach, he’s making the most of the series of free passes this has given him – playing golf, drinking pints in the local pub, and watching the boxing late into the night with friends. We had a small family Christmas last week, before meeting Laura and the children at Gatwick and heading out to Dubai.

Here, Christmas is more of a concept really, than a celebration. There is a tree almost as big as the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in the Anantara lobby, and a life-size gingerbread house made of actual gingerbread, while someone, despite the heat, has rather gamely dressed up in a Santa suit.

But if you focus on the sea and the sun, it’s all pretty easy to ignore, and certainly a lot easier than being in the rain-soaked, wind-lashed UK, where it doesn’t get light until mid-morning, and everything is plunged back into darkness shortly after tea.

Here, we can start the day with iced coffee and sea swims, and end it with non-alcoholic sundowners on the beach.

The children will all get stockings on Christmas Day, and there will be a lavish buffet for us all to feast on. But it will involve sushi and salad, which has a much nicer ring to it than sprouts.

We’re spending Christmas Eve at Nobu, and Boxing Day at a waterpark, and there is talk of hiring a boat and exploring the Palm.

None of this, of course, changes what has happened. But it does remove everyone from reality for two weeks, at least until the beginning of January, when we will return. In the midst of unbearable grief, I hope this will provide a small amount of blessed relief.

And in a weird way, isn’t this what Christmas should truly be about? Not the presents and the tat and the twinkling lights, but the gift of unconditional love, of being there for the people you consider your family.

I remember, during the summer, Laura sending me a WhatsApp in which she apologised for only ever seeming to message with bad news.

‘That’s not what friendship is about, I’m afraid,’ I replied. ‘I don’t just get to choose the good bits, and ignore the bad ones. We’re here for each other through everything – the sunny uplands, and the dark valleys.’

I meant it, and still do. And as we navigate the next few days together, I know that there is no place I would rather be this Christmas… and most importantly, no person I would rather be spending it with.

Ever feel like life is a bit…too much? Bestselling author and journalist Bryony Gordon is here to ditch the shame and dive headfirst into life’s messier bits. Search for The Life of Bryony wherever you get your podcasts.