How you behave at Christmas reveals who you really are as a person

Christmas brings out the best and worst in us and some years are better than others but, writes Jenny Eclair, this year will put all previous mishaps in perspective

Which hat will you be wearing on Christmas Day? (iStock)

So for those of us in tier 4, Christmas has effectively been cancelled. We should have known; the writing was on the wall and yet we all tried to keep the festive show on the road for as long as possible, hoping right up until the last minute that there would be some kind of celebration.

Why do we even care so much? I think it’s because Christmas takes up such a large amount of space in our emotional memory banks, possibly because it tends to be so vigilantly photographed. “Oh look, that’s when we lived in the flat and your mother was still alive.”

As a 60-year-old looking back at my childhood, I realise I am shaped by Christmases of the 1960s and 1970s. I remember clearly my third Christmas when, having recently returned from Singapore, we were staying at my grandparents’ in Blackpool. I had measles and was confined to the bedroom. On Christmas night, while everyone else was partying downstairs, I feverishly went to the bathroom and fell into the loo. I’m pretty sure this incident shaped my future comedy career. Oh yes and I was always the narrator in the school nativity play, “nice and loud” apparently. Nothing really changes.