Paul Lynch: All I want for Christmas

What I really want for Christmas . . . is Green Chartreuse, that recherché French drink that comes from the Carthusians. It's zippy and herby and looks like grass that's been allowed sit in pure grain alcohol for a year with plutonium. It is amazing in gin cocktails. I don't know why, but I never seem to have any.

What I really don't want for Christmas . . . is that random item you picked up in TK Maxx because you don't know what else to buy me. I would rather you gave the money instead to charity.

This Christmas . . . I'm getting married. I cannot think of a more beautiful time for a wedding. If it snows, all the better.

I'll never forget the Christmas . . . I could have died. I was smoking fags in a bar and was hospitalised at 3am with an asthma attack. That was back in the early days of the Celtic Tiger when we were all slightly insane and thought we were invincible.

My favourite thing about this time of year . . . is festivity. If Christmas did not exist, we would have had to invent it. Those long, dark days at the end of the year do wear us down.

The one thing that brings out my inner Grinch is . . . Christmas jumpers. You won't find me wearing one. I was a child of the 1980s. My mother was a knitter. Every day of my childhood was Christmas.

It wouldn't be Christmas without . . . prawn cocktail, with homemade Marie Rose sauce and crap iceberg lettuce. Nom nom.

Paul Lynch is the author of Red Sky in Morning, published by Quercus