So have you got your Christmas morning plans sorted? Will you be getting up at five to entomb some giant, ominous-looking fowl in the oven (woken several hours earlier by a child or two vibrating with impatience, possibly)? Or are you piling bags, pets and presents into the car for a multi-centre, multi-meal tour of your relations, all of whom feel hard done by that you aren’t staying longer and will take every opportunity to make that clear? Perhaps you’ll be taking a few snatched moments to meditate or beg the universe for forbearance and serenity as you prepare to host the most explosively mismatched group of people to share a space since the cast of Big Brother 11?
I’ve done most of that, including taking an overnight Christmas Eve ferry to get us where we needed to be for Christmas morning (the onboard buffet was surprisingly festive). It’s a lot, isn’t it? In a YouGov poll in 2019, a quarter of people said Christmas made their mental health worse; 51% of women and 35% of men said it made them feel stressed. The only surprising thing about that for me is how low that is; I’d be willing to bet the subsequent years of pandemic and cost-of-living anxieties have increased our festive stress.
