Family matching pyjamas for a family of two

Late October, a shopping centre

Who wears the daddy ones?

Megan was thirty-one, a project coordinator who worked from a two-bedroom apartment in Al Barsha three days a week and from an office the other two. Isla was four, and had opinions about everything, including the Christmas display in the middle of the shopping centre: a wall of red tartan, every pack held together with a cardboard sleeve showing four smiling faces.

Isla picked one up and studied it. “Who wears the daddy ones?” she asked. It was not a sad question. Isla had never lived with her father and didn’t miss what she hadn’t had. It was a practical one. There were four pairs and two of them.

Megan put the pack back. She could have bought it, given the spare pairs away and called it done. But she found she didn’t want a Christmas that came with leftovers. That evening, after bedtime, she opened her laptop and typed “matching pyjamas mum and daughter” into the search bar.

The same week, after bedtime

Looking for family matching pyjamas for two

It turned out the sets for two existed. They were simply filed under different names: “mummy and me”, “mini me”, or sold separately in adult and children’s sizes from the same range. Megan learned quickly that the second option gave her the most choice. She could buy exactly two pairs, in exactly the sizes they needed.

She also learned what to leave in the basket. A pair with a cartoon reindeer across the chest made Isla laugh and would date by January. A shiny satin set looked lovely on screen and felt like wearing a shower curtain. In the end she chose a small red and green tartan in brushed cotton: soft enough for a child who complains about labels, warm enough for an apartment where the air conditioning runs all December, and plain enough to look like pyjamas rather than a costume. Isla’s pair was one size up, with the cuffs rolled. They arrived nine days later in a padded envelope, and went straight into the wash.

A Sunday in early November

Eleven photographs of the two of them

The idea of a photograph came later, and it came from her phone. Megan was clearing space for an update and scrolled back through the year: four thousand pictures of Isla. Isla on the beach, Isla asleep in the car, Isla with a face full of cake. She counted the ones with both of them in. There were eleven, nine of them selfies taken at arm’s length, the top of Isla’s head cut off in most.

That was the moment, she said later, that she stopped thinking of a family photoshoot as something for other people. She had been the one behind the camera for four years. She wanted one picture, just one, in which she was in the frame with her daughter and nobody was holding a phone.

She almost booked a Christmas Mini, because Isla was small and it seemed the obvious choice. Then she read that the Mini is for children only, and realised that was precisely the photograph she already had four thousand of. She booked The Christmas Edit instead: thirty minutes, up to four people. Two people, it turned out, is well within up to four.

The morning of the session

One outfit each, and it was already decided

The advice was one outfit each, and for once the outfit chose itself. Isla had been asking to wear the new pyjamas since the envelope arrived. The deal was that they were for the photographs first and for Christmas Eve after, and that deal had been renegotiated most evenings.

Megan did the things that make a morning with a four-year-old go well. A proper breakfast, not a rushed one. A small snack in her bag that wasn’t sticky and wasn’t chocolate. Socks for both of them, because cold feet make for short tempers. She ironed the pyjamas, which she had never done before and will never do again, and packed a hairbrush she did not use. Isla wore the pyjamas in the car under a cardigan and told the parking attendant they were going to have their picture taken in their nightclothes, which he seemed to find entirely reasonable.

Thirty minutes in the Christmas Room

Nobody told anyone to tuck their chin in

Isla hid behind her mother’s legs for the first three minutes. Nobody hurried her. The photographer talked to Megan, asked Isla whether the tree was taller than her house, and let her decide for herself when the room was interesting enough to come out for. When she did, it was to inspect the baubles one by one.

There was no posing to speak of. They sat on the floor by the tree and Megan read the book she had brought. Isla climbed into her lap, then onto her back, then tried to put a ribbon in her mother’s hair. At one point Megan laughed so hard at something Isla said that she forgot there was a camera in the room at all, which was the whole idea. Nobody was told to tuck their chin in or look at anyone. The small tartan held up beautifully: close to, you could see the check; across the room it read as a warm, deep red against the green of the tree.

Five days later

The one on the floor

The preview gallery arrived within five days. Megan opened it on her phone at her desk, which she would advise against, because she cried a little in an open-plan office. There were pictures in which they both looked lovely and a handful in which they both looked exactly like themselves, and it was the second kind she kept going back to.

The one she chose first was not the neatest. Isla is mid-climb, half on Megan’s shoulder, one sock coming off; Megan’s eyes are shut because she is laughing. It is slightly chaotic and it is completely them. She chose the rest of her selection that evening with Isla beside her on the sofa, who voted for every picture with a bauble in it. One print went into a frame on the bookshelf. Another went into a flat parcel for Granny in Cardiff, along with something that had been Megan’s idea since the pyjamas arrived.

Christmas Eve, six o’clock

The Christmas Eve routine

Christmas Eve is a working day in Dubai for plenty of people, and it was for Megan, so the routine had to be simple enough to start at six. Bath first, with the good bubbles. Then the pyjamas, washed since the shoot and folded on the bed as if they were new. Then hot chocolate in the two enamel mugs that only come out in December, drunk on the sofa with the tree lights on and every other light off.

None of it was elaborate. That was the point. Megan had grown up with a Christmas Eve that was all preparation, her mother in the kitchen until midnight. She wanted Isla to remember the evening before Christmas as the quietest, warmest one of the year, and pyjamas that matched her mother’s were, it turned out, a large part of the appeal. Isla checked several times that they were still the same.

Seven fifteen, a phone propped against the fruit bowl

A third pair, in Cardiff

The parcel to Cardiff had held a third pair of pyjamas, the same tartan in Granny’s size. At quarter past seven Dubai time, a little after three in the afternoon in Wales, Granny answered the video call already wearing them, sitting in her own armchair with her own tree behind her.

Isla was beside herself. For twenty minutes the family of two was a family of three, spread across two time zones and one tartan. They held their mugs up to the camera. Granny showed them the framed print, already on her mantelpiece. Then the call dropped, as calls do, and Isla announced that next year the pyjamas should come with slippers.

Eight o’clock

One story, and it is always the same one

The rule on Christmas Eve is one story. Isla argues for two every year, and every year Megan holds the line, because the one story is the same book her own mother read to her, and it is better for being the only one.

Isla was asleep before the last page. Megan sat for a while in the dark with the tree lights on, looking at the photograph on the shelf. A family of two, in matching pyjamas, laughing on the floor. It looked like a family photograph because it was one.