I suppose some of us still have an idealised vision of the festive season. The happy family trudging through the snow to midnight mass, then home to a glass of mulled screech and a plateful of hot buttered turkey giblets. Ah those were the days… nostalgia, nostalgia.

But we are living in the nearly new millennium – times change and with them so does that festive season. Oh yes, Christmas isn’t what it used to be… and then some. Take last year for instance. Sure we intended to do the midnight mass thing but… well what happened was…

On Christmas Eve I had the annual office do. Last year it was drinks and pizza at the office itself due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless it turned out to be no less joyless and stressful than the more usual sit-down lunch in some cheap caff. Right on cue the unmarried staff got plastered, with the majority throwing up their carbonaras or funghi… some even managing to do so into the staff toilet. As usual I got lumbered with the office bore… no I do not care whether AC Milan are top or bottom of Serie A. And the boss’s annual diatribe was word for word what last year’s diatribe had been.

Anyway, half sloshed and feeling thoroughly un-Christmassy I arrive home late to find my wife in the sitting room in the company of our next door neighbours Phillip and Melanie. Now if you had asked me which two people on the planet I would less want to find in my home on Christmas Eve – or any other eve for that matter – Phillip and Melanie would be top of that list.

Philip is a manic depressive with a penchant for bursting into floods of noisy tears at the mention of his nannu, (and he mentions him a lot) who actually snuffed it in 1969, and she will tell you – at the drop of a canapé – all about her latest operation, in all the gory details. And nobody has had as many operations, or as many gory details as Melanie.

Anyway, neither the demise of granddad nor Melanie’s septic toe seemed to affect their capacity for making a giant dent in my Christmas alcohol stash. They hung around until well past midnight, staggering back to number 24 at precisely 1.45am. After they left my wife informed me that long before they finally took the hint and departed, I was snoring loudly in my chair and the dog was whining, even more loudly to be taken out for his last needs of the night.

On the way back I managed to plough my foot into something the cat left outside our front door

Needless to report, Christmas day was something of a write-off. Neither of us felt like turkey for lunch, so we ‘feasted’ on a cheese sandwich, washed down with a half glass (I threw the rest of the bottle away) of cheap plonk. The afternoon was spent dozing fitfully in my chair, before the ‘festivities’ in the evening.

These comprised mopping up the dog’s pee. Well the poor little guy had been kept in all day by his semi-comatose owners. We were momentarily roused from our torpor to answer the telephone. Oh goody! Would it be the eagerly anticipated call from my cousin in Argentina… or the promised chat with the wife’s sister… to tell us just how much their Miami holiday bungalow had gone up in value in 12 months.

Or even the lawyer for my multi-billionaire uncle in California, phoning to tell me the old boy had died and left me one hundred million dollars and his beach house in Malibu, except of course I don’t have an uncle in California… alive or dead… billionaire or pauper.

So I drag myself to the phone and… wrong number.

Which explains why I made my way to a precious bottle of whisky and, wouldn’t you know it, our neighbours had drunk the lot on Christmas Eve. So I checked out the drinks cupboard and all that’s left are the dregs of a bottle of chocolate liqueur, which I detest. Anyway I gave it a try and… yuck, it tasted of mouldy milk.

So I took the dog for a walk instead. And my Christmas nightmare didn’t end there. On the way back I managed to plough my foot into something the cat left outside our front door and trailed it all through the house. This naturally brought the wrath of God… or the next worst thing, the fury of my wife, down on my head… or at any rate my shoe. So, after scraping the mess off my brogues I gave up on Christmas Day and went to bed.

I usually enjoy Boxing Day, it’s the day when we check over any gifts we may have acquired. “Oh look, a pair of acid green ankle socks, what sadist saw fit to present me with these? Oh did you… right… well maybe I’ll also get given a pair of acid green tracksuit bottoms to match.” Joke presents are usually only funny for the people giving them, the recipient rarely gets it… the joke that is.

Many years ago, long before I was mortgaged with a marriage, we played one of these jokes on my father. Poor old dad had very little sense of humour, he also had a thing about giving people toiletries as gifts. He felt that this implied that you were suggesting that they were dirty, or worse, that they stank. So on Christmas morning my brother and I, with the collusion of our mother, wrapped up a bar of red carbolic soap in layer upon layer of bright, sparkly Christmas paper and placed it under the Christmas tree for dad to find. We watched him open it and, his reaction when he discovered the soap was entirely predictable. He threw it onto the floor and stomped off to the downstairs WC, where he remained until mum managed to coax him out for lunch.

I don’t think dad ever quite forgave us for that.

So whether you spend Christmas celebrating the birth of someone rather special, or just another excuse for whatever it is you want to do, have a good one.