Jennifer O’Connell: celebrities line up to peddle the fantasy of the perfect Christmas

By now you'll have the presents all neatly stacked under the tree, wrapped in neatly ironed Fair Trade paper that you ordered last June and had personalised with amusing photos of your family pulling turkey faces. You're currently putting the finishing touches to your gluten-free gravy and your mince pie cookie dough, while your loved ones are playing vintage board games in front of the fire, wearing matching onesies and witty Mad Men hats.

Or maybe I've just been spending too much time on Instagram. As I've written before, in a column about selfies that was bafflingly passed over by the Pulitzer Prize committee, we are living an age of narcissism in which only our most perfect and carefully filtered selves are presented to the world.

Nowhere is this more evident than on Instagram, the app that was originally designed to allow people to share pictures of lattes and sunrises, but which was hijacked by celebrities eager to outdo each other in the rush to appear either (a) richer, more lithe and better suntanned or (b) more “normal” than everyone else. By normal they don’t actually mean posting photos of the hair they woke up with, or arty shots of the inside of the press under the sink, or the bottles of Xanax lined up on their bedside locker. No, they mean normal as dreamed up by a team of stylists and branding experts and executed by professional photographers, make-up artists and lighting experts, along with some crafty photoshopping.

There are many celebrities at whom we could point the finger for peddling this hypercharged, faux normality, but at this time of year a few in particular stand out. Chief among them are the Olivers – Jamie, wife Jools and the children (give yourself another Quality Street for each child you can identify by name, plus a bonus caramel keg for every middle name you provide.)

According to the wisdom being dispensed via Instagram directly from the iPhone of Jamie Oliver, Christmas dinner is a four-day event, requiring a spreadsheet which you can pop up in the kitchen, on a blackboard you'll have whipped up yourself using the MDF and blackboard paint you've just sent one of your team of assistants down to Homebase for.

Cutting the MDF and applying the paint only takes five minutes, he says – presumably not including replastering of the kitchen wall after the hook comes down for the seventh time, or the epic marital row you’ll have over the wisdom of embarking on daft DIY projects in the middle of Christmas dinner preparation. (Of course, if you’re following Jamie’s advice, you’ll already have prepped the chicken liver parfait and are currently working on your flavoured butters, so you’ll have plenty of time for that impromptu consultation with your divorce lawyers.)

If that all sounds too much like hard work, you can always refer instead to Gwyneth Paltrow's website and accompanying Instagram account, Goop. On Goop.com, you'll find suggestions for how to make midnight moon apple pie moonshine cocktails (Gwynnie doesn't have to worry about trying to say that after imbibing several of them, as she doesn't do calories, which rules out alcohol) and how to wrap your presents cheaply using cinnamon sticks and twigs from your back garden.

Gwynnie is also everyone’s favourite go-to person for cheap and easy last-minute Christmas shopping advice. On her list this year is a €3,800 gold-plated juicer, a €256 bocce set and a €3,647 canvas shopping trolley by Valentino that is the perfect combination of practicality, old-lady chic and a price that someone plucked right out of the air.

Even our own, otherwise adorable, Donal Skehan is at it, posting photos of delicious-looking foodstuffs on perfectly imperfect crockery, and his gorgeously dishevelled dog.

Is this just fantasy?

They’re all peddling a harmless fantasy that their lives are somehow better organised, infinitely more stylish and cinnamon-scented than our own. The trouble with all of this is that once you’ve been exposed to enough of it, you start to get confused about what’s real and what’s been dreamed up by a team of overpaid marketing executives and stylists; you begin to wonder whether you’re the only one in the world whose Christmas tree is tilting at a suspicious angle and whose delicious homemade brown bread was so rock hard that not a single piece got eaten at the six-year-old’s class heritage party, while the toxic coloured festive muffins from Walmart were hoovered up. (I am not at all bitter about this.)

Like everyone with a smartphone, I, too, have succumbed to the pressure, posting photographs of my beautiful, handcut Sierra Redwood Christmas tree and carefully editing out the boxes still unpacked from our recent move (yes, okay, our move in August), my son’s apparently self-propagating dirty socks and the baby vomit stains on the new sofa.

Queen of Christmas

For perspective, we should turn to the Queen of Christmas, Nigella Lawson. I’ve always had a soft spot for Nigella, and after a couple of years in which the fiction of her perfect, Instagram-worthy life was slowly and painfully dismantled, she seems to have given herself a year off being a domestic goddess, at least as far as social media is concerned.

Aside from half-hearted retweeting of old recipes, the sum total of the Christmas preparation advice she had shared at the time of writing was a picture of a nutritionally dubious bowl made from bacon that she intended to buy. Now that’s my kind of festive planning. Have a good one.