THE psychotherapists have got their hands on Christmas and they won't let go until we all admit it is the most traumatic, stressful, divisive, lonely, uncaring, disgustingly materialistic, unreligious emotionally draining time of year. If you do believe this, they can help. There are work-shops where you can learn how to say no when your sister-in-law asks if she can bring her in-laws to the Christmas dinner; where you can role-play through an argument over whether to open the presents before breakfast or afterwards.
Experts on radio talk-shows will tell us communication is vital - you must sit down and talk to people (far better than just talking, this sitting down and talking), about what you want and what they want and how you can meet half-way. Hey presto - Christmas will be fine. Most of us will ignore such advice and just stagger through as usual, tempers boiling away like the pudding.
Of course we'll be wound up like watches throughout the holiday but that's normal; that's just Christmas for you. Long before the holiday comes, people wonder if they can face another Christmas Day at home. Middle-aged "empty nesters" - those lucky folk whose children have upped and left them in peace - may fantasise about going away to a hotel where meals will be served to them, there's no washing up and no grandchildren swinging out of the Christmas tree. Sadly, they don't get away with it because their married children want it to be a Jambo Christmas, like it has always been, with all the trimmings.
That means hauling the usual 12-foot Christmas tree into the usual position in the hall and decorating it with 40 years of baubles, including the wonky silver-paper ones made by an arty au pair back in 1976. Woe betide if from sheer exhaustion, they decide on just a small tree, one of those nice fake ones with real pine cones attached. Their 30-something children won't like it one bit, particularly the emigrant ones who jet in once a year and expect time to have stood still in their absence. The same blow-ins are likely to have a fit if "their" room, which they haven't lived in for 15 years, has been redecorated - or worse, if their collection of Fob 208 magazines has gone into the skip.
Once the family has assembled, all the old rows break out and soon everyone feels time has stood still. There are bitchy spats over old boyfriends and girlfriends, outfits borrowed and destroyed by spilled pints or cigarette burns, loans that were never repaid. Insults that were given years ago are remembered word for word.
Of course, it's all Greek to the visiting boyfriend from Missouri who hasn't got over the fact that he is billeted on the sofa in the television room - particularly odd since he and the youngest daughter have been living together for two years. He keeps stretching and wincing and going ooowwwee to indicate his back is nearly broken but everyone ignores him. Someone is bound to make someone else cry and a heavy object or two might get thrown across a room; and all this happens long before the ordeal of the Christmas dinner.
Most Christmas dilemmas revolve around food and drink - and central to the chaos is the Christmas dinner. Who is going to host it? Who has to be there? Who is escaping? Who will do the setting up and the tidying up? What is going to be served?
Now, 99 per cent of households have that one sorted out. A heap of turkey and ham, sprouts and mash, pudding and cream. What else would anyone want? Foodies want more, the greedy things. "What do you do when your mother-in-law is an appalling cook and yet insists on doing the meal year after year, even though any of us could do a better job?" moaned one colleague. Eat it and be done with it, is the answer to that. Try to be helpful by sharing the cooking - even importing the meal - and you are in trouble. Some big baby will refuse to eat the prune and armagnac stuffing or the chestnut-stuffed ravioli, and the be grudgers will say that goose always struck them as a very greasy sort of bird. At least one person will be on a complicated diet that permits 22 potatoes but no meat, and somewhere at the table will be someone who wonders how in all conscience anyone can eat so much food when there are so many people starving in the world.
IN the middle of it all will be the inevitable Family Friend, happily munching his way through second and third helpings of everything. No one can remember when he started coming, but it was a long time ago and who could blame the poor divil for wanting to get out of the nursing home for the day - or for a couple of days, because it would be cruelty to throw him out after the dinner, and he fast asleep in the armchair. Long ago the - Family Friend performed some vital function in the house involving the central heating system, but he has long since retired from plumbing and, having lost his wife several decades ago, has become a bit of a sad case - no one else in the world to go to, he says cheerfully, lowering himself into the chair nearest the fire.
But at least he is a known quantity. What do you do when someone wants to invite a total stranger to the family dinner?, One friend who is throwing her house open to her husband's family this Christmas Day (a huge Brownie-point exercise she will be able to hark back to for decades to come) has been fending off all sorts of extra personnel because her sister-in-law, of kindly disposition, attracts waifs and strays. "No, you'll really like this guy," I heard her saying to my friend the other day. "He's a poet and he has nowhere else to go, and I think his girlfriend is so interesting, she'll fit in, no problem." The answer was no.
"But, but, but my friend said.
"Thanks a million," said her sister-in-law. "I'll let them know."
IN the run-up to Christmas and the round of drinks and lunches, dinners and teas with people you haven't seen all year, it's important not to leave the house without a small gift-wrapped item about your person. This will come in useful when you meet an acquaintance for a drink and she whips some vast parcel out of a carrier bag and tells you it's just something small she thought would suit you. If you have that uni-present, you won't have to get flustered and tell lies about leaving her gift on the bus. And something small will do. Just because she gives you a big vulgar hamper doesn't mean you have to reciprocate.
Never mind about the acquaintances, though what about the big presents for family and friends? Unless you're one of those people who buys everything in the January sales, including the wrapping paper, and hides it under the floorboards for 12 months, this is a hideously expensive time of year.
If your family has grown out of all proportion, with greedy nieces demanding 10 different types of Barbie on one side, and elderly ladies with a penchant for silk nighties and expensive chocolates on the other, then it could be time to introduce a system. Lots of families embroil themselves in such complicated lotteries around the middle of November to establish who will give to whom, with (ideally) each person only having to give one or two gifts instead of 37.
In principle this is a grand idea. The problem is that some people are better at buying presents than others. You can get lucky and draw your rich and successful sibling (case of wine, Lainey Keogh jumper, weekend for two in Sheen Falls) or a doting granny (large bit of silver from the vaults envelope full of used notes of large denomination); alternatively, you could be assigned - The Family Friend Who Always Comes For Christmas (Michael Collins biography still in Eason's bag but with a message on the fly leaf so you can't take it back). Whoever you draw you should be gracious about it. Above all, don't try to rig the lottery - or at least don't get caught trying to fold rich Uncle Joe's name in a distinctive way so that you can draw it out for yourself.
Of course, children are exempt from this carry-on; so you still have to rush around like a lunatic on Christmas Eve looking for Buzz Lightyear pyjamas or spend £45 on an Audrey Hepburn Barbie because that's the only one they have left in the shop. If you are the doting aunt or uncle with no little ones of your own, remember children can be horribly ungrateful and may not even give you the satisfaction of breaking your offering before teatime, because they just can't be bothered to open it.
The overseas branch of the family should have been bought for, and despatched to, some time in October: if you didn't, it's too late to start now - unless - you can find a courier. A very good-natured one.
A neighbour announced back in July that she was off to visit family in Sydney for Christmas. Now her front porch is full of "really small" items friends want her to take to their families in Australia. These "miniscule" parcels include a 20-bag box of Tayto, a hairy jumper for somebody in Waggawagga and a rolled-up bundle of Ireland's Own for a priest in Singapore whom she might be able to look up in the two-hour gap between flights.
"Sure you'll hardly have to bring any clothes at this time of year with the weather being so hot there," said one chancer, trying to give her a six-pound pudding. She is far too nice and has taken everything, and will probably hand-deliver the lot. What she should do is eat the edibles, dump the rest and then say customs confiscated everything on the other side. Simple.
