but it wouldn’t prompt you to leave all your belongings, remove your high heels and make your way to the nearest exit (which in some cases may be behind you). I’d hear that noise a lot over Christmas holidays spent in the Swansea valleys with my mum’s side of the family. They were never big drinkers, but if alcohol had been consumed then the whoops would become more frequent and much longer in duration. By 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve it was like hanging out with a bunch of malfunctioning but very friendly flight simulators.
As we know, consumption of alcohol speeds up our heart rate, widens our blood vessels, lowers our inhibitions and can cause significant damage to fixtures and fittings. It can help to put old arguments to bed, but can also help to create exciting new arguments, rich with potential and possibility. People start to fall over with theatrical flair. And at Christmas the British pursue all this stuff with vigour and enthusiasm; alcohol becomes the national anaesthetic, suppressing social awkwardness and allowing us to laugh at things that aren’t particularly funny. In 2004, some people with nothing better to do did a global survey and discovered that the British ratchet up their boozing at Christmas more than any of the other G7 nations. So we sit there, at the top of the pile, saying ‘cheers!’ to each other and wondering whether we should be feeling proud or not.
Stoptober and Dry January have become widely observed periods of abstinence, and they form a convenient bookend to what we might call Bender December. The counting of alcoholic units, a foggy concept to the British at the best of times, becomes even more erratic at Christmas. The quantities being slung back across the land make the whole idea of units seem a bit ridiculous, like measuring turkey consumption in micrograms. Quiet, unassuming relatives who barely touch booze under normal circumstances will suddenly be heard to say things like, ‘Ooh, don’t mind if I do’ or ‘Perhaps just a small one’, with a glint in their eye and a large empty glass in their hand. Later, they will do the can-can.
Hendon, Christmas 1976
I remember my mum and dad hosting a daytime drinks party in the run-up to Christmas. Those kinds of events were memorable when you were young, because you’d see adults getting drunk. You didn’t really understand it but you knew something unusual was up. This particular party had ended, and my dad, perhaps unwisely, was giving some people a lift home in the car.
He had a favourite crystal glass, for special drinks, on special occasions. In the course of tidying up, my mum, who was not a drinker but had had a number of sherries, picked it up and dropped it. It smashed into pieces. This was in the living room, and I remember her slumped over an occasional table, drunk and helpless with hysterical laughter, saying, ‘It’s his favourite glass, it’s his favourite glass.’ I’d never seen my mum lose it quite like that, and I remember feeling confused. I didn’t understand. If it’s his favourite glass, and you’ve broken it, that’s a bad thing, so why are you laughing?’
J. M.
In, say, March, or October, the casual suggestion of having booze for breakfast would prompt concerned relatives to plan some kind of intervention. But it’s different on Christmas morning, when orange juice is upgraded to Buck’s Fizz without any nudges, whispers or worried phone calls. This festive combination of mild depressant and vitamin C is one of a curious array of seasonal drinks that tend not to be consumed at any other time of year, with advocaat being another obvious example. We don’t show as much enthusiasm for eggnog as our American cousins (probably because we’re too busy laughing at the word eggnog) but we embrace advocaat – essentially eggnog plus brandy – warmly, perhaps because Warninks, the pre-eminent brand in the UK, has the decency to keep the mention of egg to the small print on the back of the bottle.8
“Just two more minutes, everyone. Just two more minutes.”
Back in the 1960s, the advertising slogan for Warninks ran ‘Eveninks and morninks, I drink Warninks’. This excuse definitely won’t wash with your family if they ask you why you’re drunkenly humping a footstool, and it seems extraordinary that an alcohol brand ever marketed itself as perfect for pre-lunch consumption. But a morning snowball (advocaat plus lemonade) is an acceptable part of the British Christmas, and, approached with care and caution, can make Christmas morning zip by in a pleasant haze. People can, however, go too far, and they do. Let this be a Warnink to you.
Twickenham, Christmas 1990
My family has always been quite boozy, and this particular year – I remember it was World Cup year, Italia 1990 – some friends of the family came to visit for Christmas Day. I went to the same school as the kids, and my dad was best mates with their dad, so they all came over in the morning and the adults started drinking enthusiastically. We had Christmas dinner at about three in the afternoon, but as soon as the starters had been cleared away my friends’ dad just fell asleep, face down on the table, snoring loudly. Nine of us were sat around the table. None of us could wake him up.
My dad, who has quite a rich baritone voice, started singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ [‘None Shall Sleep’!], which had been the big anthem for the World Cup that year. The singing got louder, and louder, but he kept on snoring, so we all joined in, all eight of us, in this big crescendo, because we’d heard the thing so often during the World Cup that we all knew it. And by the end, the big ‘Vincerò!’, everyone was laughing, but he still didn’t wake up so we had to move him to the sofa.
C. C.
Maintaining adequate stocks of Christmas alcohol can involve bottles of wines and spirits being moved between homes with the slick efficiency of a narcotics network. Unlabelled bottles of potent home brew can help to make up the numbers, and it’s quite likely you’ll find sloe gin in at least one of them. ‘Everyone round here gets very precious about their sloe berry spots,’ says Willow Langdale-Smith, who turns her local Leicestershire berries into booze and describes the results as ‘like a mince pie in a glass’ and ‘fucking phenomenal’. ‘Last year it was really tricky to find a sloe crop because some of the blackthorn bushes had been infected by a virus,’ she says. ‘When I found one that was unaffected, I quickly started filling empty dog poo bags with them – whatever I had in the car, it was a case of fill anything you’ve got.’
Making your own Christmas booze may be cost-effective and rewarding, but most people opt to march to the off-licence for a festive spending spree. Of all the drinks on offer therein, Baileys has manoeuvred itself into pole position as the UK’s Christmas favourite.9 We’ve been persuaded that chugging back a few measures of Baileys in December is sophisticated and slightly sexy, although after seven or eight of them you’ll be neither of those things. There was an advert for Baileys that ran for three or four years on British television during the 1990s, featuring a couple in a swanky hotel who were sufficiently emboldened by their Baileys consumption to start getting amorous in an elevator. While they did so, other hotel guests peered in enviously through its scissor-gate doors. Those guests represented us, a nation; we wanted a piece of hot Baileys action. ‘The advert was very aspirational,’ says Joe Cushley, who played one of the guests. ‘And they were evidently trying to sex up the brand. We were told to look into the elevator as if we could see the couple “performing sex”, but “not too much”. It was weird. I remember all the actors developed this primitive desire for free Baileys, but there was only one bottle there, which was the prop. Anyway, over the years the repeat fees for the advert were enormous, so I still raise a glass to Baileys to say thank you.’
The British alcohol industry has gone to great efforts over the past few decades to equate Christmas drinking with opulence, cream, comfort, cream, warmth, cream, elegance and cream. It’s a tried and tested marketing technique, from Harveys Bristol Cream (cream, button-back armchairs, roaring fires, ‘the best sherry in
