I love the week between Christmas and New Year. Peace descends and all the frantic socialising, cooking, shopping, present-wrapping and frenetic organising is over. Everyone has retreated to their own homes to lie low and eat their Christmas chocolates undisturbed.
People in the media refer to this time as ‘Twixtmas’, but I’ve never heard anyone in the real world actually call it that and I’m hoping that I never will. It sounds so twee, a bit like estate-agent speak when they refer to a house ‘twixt town and river’, which really means that it’s down a remote back street where no-one wants to live. The period between Christmas and New Year, however, is a place where I enjoy spending time. A period of hibernation is fine for a week, but I don’t think it would be good for me long term. I might grow to like it too much.
So what do I do during this quiet time? I conduct a post-Christmas review. First, there’s the food. As usual, there was far too much. Why do I lose all sense of proportion at this time of year and cater as though I expect a tribe of ravenous teenage boys to descend on us at short notice? As a result, I force family members to go home with food parcels, I freeze things that aren’t remotely suitable for freezing and for days to come we eat dinners composed of stilton, wasabi peanuts, pasta salad, cranberry sauce and Lindt chocolates.
Presents – still far too many, but the number is definitely going down now that we have no small children in the family. Our gifts are mostly food and drink, which are useful since there’s so little in the house. The rest of the presents seem to be travel-related, including guide books, luggage and handy water bottles with built-in filters. Then we give each other the gift of trees planted in a foreign, tropical land to help counteract the effect of all that travel. Guilt doesn’t go away at Christmastime. Far from it.
Christmas entertainment is a tricky proposition, with the challenge of appealing to three generations. We all enjoyed watching ‘Elf’ (well most of us did) and the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special was a great hit. My mother and I tried hard, but no-one was prepared to sit through ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ and anything in black and white was vetoed as well. Board games also have to be carefully chosen because some family members (me for instance) object to having to learn complicated and intricate rules, especially after a few glasses of mulled wine. The simple games win out, like Articulate and the Logo Game. These invariably lead to cries of ‘you cheat!’ and much shrieking and laughter, so are considered a great success.
All in all, I think it went quite well. There were no serious arguments and definitely not a repeat of last year, which involved spending most of Christmas Day at the local hospital, with the vegetarians left at home to cook the Christmas turkey. Things could only improve and they did. So now I’m going to retire to the sofa with only a book and a mince pie for company.