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.

Who you are as a person is also very much revealed by how you behave at Christmas. I was a Christmas snooper, creeping around the house from mid-November, trying to “find things”, which might be for me. I once discovered a couple of Patch dolls (Cindy’s little sister) in my mother’s wardrobe and hugged this secret to myself until 25 December when my sister and I were both handed a similar-shaped parcel. It was our Patch dolls, but she got the one with the blonde hair and I got the one with the brown hair. I was livid. I was the blonder out of the two of us. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair.

Dealing with disappointment is a Christmas rite of passage for most children: the toy that doesn’t work, the batteries not included, the sibling with the better present. One of my worst Christmases occurred when I was about 12 and, for the first time in my life, had become really self-conscious about my weight. A pink denim shirt my parents had bought me didn’t fit and I made sure this ruined my day. I’ve always had martyr tendencies.

There was another Christmas disaster a few years later when my parents bought me an Anglepoise lamp for my homework desk, rather than the champagne tree that I wanted. God, I was spoiled.

We are all spoiled – that’s why we cannot bear to relinquish Christmas. We all want this day of Adland perfection and what we forget every year is that there is no such thing.

On reflection, though, Christmas has taught me many things. For starters, as a non-cooking person, I really admire people like my brother who is capable in the kitchen and can juggle gravy and roast potatoes for 12 without having hysterics on the kitchen floor. I have also learned you cannot retrieve a bowl of piping hot stuffing from the oven without burning yourself and consequently eating your meal with one hand in a vase of iced water. And, most importantly of all, if you overdrink on Christmas Eve, you will regret it until Boxing Day.

As a mother, the biggest Christmas lesson I ever learned was that children can feel really pressurised by the gifts you accidentally give them. Case in point: when my daughter was eight, my partner was offered a cheap second-hand electric guitar at work and we bought it for her as an extra “surprise”. On the day, I couldn’t understand why she looked at this gift with such horror and it was only when she was old enough to articulate her feelings about it that she was able to explain. In a nutshell, she thought the guitar meant we wanted her to be a pop star and it frightened her.

Christmas brings out the best and worst in us, and some years are better than others. All of us have had the “most wonderful time of the year” ruined by winter vomiting, relationships cracking and broken-down cars. My sister was once burgled on Christmas Eve when all the carefully wrapped Christmas presents were stolen through an unlatched window.

Christmas is always a series of highs and lows, but it also marks the end of a year and there is always something about every year that makes it memorable: the time it snowed, the power cut, the time the turkey fell in the sink.

This year is going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons – 2020, the year we couldn’t see or hold or touch, the year we were all terrified of accidentally killing our nearest and dearest.

Mad, isn’t it? Strange how a pandemic can put other Christmas disappointments into perspective. I don’t think I’ll ever open “the right jumper but in the wrong size and colour” and moan about it ever again.