their drink, b) keep asking what you think of their jumper, c) order two rounds at once, including cocktails you’ve never heard of, and d) cause general havoc to a Christmas soundtrack until 1 a.m. Spare a thought for those who serve us the alcohol that will soon compromise our dignity. After all, we did ask them for it. They’re only obeying orders.
Peterborough, Christmas 1992
Me and my partner, who I lived with, went to the pub on Christmas Eve and he proceeded to drink much more than I did. Much more. I woke up relatively early the next morning, and sensed a steamy fug in the bedroom. It was a bit… cowshed-y. It was only when I got up that I realised he’d wet the bed. It was Christmas Day, the mattress was sodden, and worse, he was still absolutely hammered.
Initially he denied that he’d done it, which was ridiculous. Then he started to find it funny, but I was livid, and I told him that he’d ruined Christmas. He then went completely Basil Fawlty on me. ‘Right! I’ve ruined Christmas, have I? Well, in that case, why don’t I ruin Christmas completely?’ He marched down the stairs, over to the presents and unwrapped all of them, one by one, reading each label out to me as he did so. ‘So, Happy Christmas Uncle John, is it? Let’s see what’s in here, shall we?’ I just stood there, watching this drunken idiot ripping up paper. We’re not together any more, but I sometimes wonder if he remembers. It’s not something you’d forget, is it?
K. M.
We may all hope for the kind of soft-focus Christmas that we see in a Marks & Spencer advert, but alcohol can quickly turn from being an effective way of masking our emotions into suddenly becoming the bearer of great clarity. Situations that we’ve spent all year trying to avoid will suddenly be right there in the room, as honesty buttons are pushed and reality sets in. Drinkers find themselves doing things they really shouldn’t be doing, as booze traps them in their own worlds and causes them to unleash their own unique brand of embarrassing behaviour.
Weybridge, Christmas 1988
We always had big family Christmases. I’m one of seven, and we often had family friends over too. One Christmas when I was very young, I remember my primary school teacher turning up on the doorstep just as we were all sitting down for Christmas lunch. He had no trousers on. He was terribly apologetic about this, but he explained that he had no trousers with him either. My mum, who is very nice and would never have done anything other than invite him in, shooed him into the kitchen while she went upstairs to fetch some trousers for him. It was funny at the time, but of course now I understand that he was an alcoholic.
S. S.
Wandering trouserless in the streets isn’t remotely festive, and there are evidently people for whom the drunken revelry of Christmas is problematic. The sight of wobbly guys and gals making fools of themselves can be amusing, but festive boozing might be more of an issue for Brits than we realise. The December wind-down to Christmas can become rammed with social engagements, many of them defined by drinking; the week before Christmas Day can feel like a Carlsberg-sponsored assault course with a first prize of some more Carlsberg; oh great, thanks. And if we’re not drinking to have a good time, we might be having a few glasses of this or that to alleviate the Christmas pressures of gift buying, food preparation, logistical arrangements and coping with the unusual whims of our in-laws. Perhaps tragically, we use alcohol to help us spend periods of time with people who, despite being part of our family, we just don’t know very well.
‘These days I make much more of a thing of, say, putting out the reindeer’s food,’ says Lucy Rocca, who’s been dry for six years and heads up Soberistas, a worldwide community of people trying to give up alcohol. ‘I used to rattle through all that stuff, because my entire focus was on getting drunk. It took precedence over everything. Now there’s a different emphasis that’s more about revisiting my childhood, I guess. And I don’t know whether it’s because people are thinking more about their health, or because they’re resisting the cultural pressure to drink, but these days we get a lot more people joining us in the run-up to Christmas rather than waiting until January.
‘Drinking can absolutely be about twinkly fairy lights and glamorous parties and lovely cosy evenings indoors, but the people for whom it isn’t… well, they’re not often thought about.’
The thing is, it’s not always easy to let our hearts be light or, for that matter, put our troubles out of sight. Christmas boozing can assist with all that; it can help to clear out our mental in-trays and vigorously toe punt our worries into the New Year. But there, along with the dying Christmas trees, gym memberships and the dryest of dry Januarys, our problems will sit, waiting patiently for us to all turn up, regretful, dehydrated and wincing. Glass of Prosecco, anyone?
Carlisle, Christmas 2007
I had a traditional boozy Christmas Eve catch-up with some school friends in the pub. At closing time I went back to my mum’s, where I was staying in a small computer room. As soon as the lights went out things deteriorated pretty quickly. Trying to find my way out of the smallest room in the house at 3 a.m. was for some reason (and I still can’t fathom it) impossible, and I resorted to running my hands down every wall surface in a desperate attempt to locate a light switch.
Unfortunately, all I succeeded in finding was the top of a bookcase, which I proceeded to pull over and towards me, pinning me to the bed. Disoriented, confused, surrounded by books and, crucially, leathered, I was now completely stuck, and my mum was trying to prise the door open (which was forced shut by the bookcase) and wondering what on earth was going on. I called her a ‘stupid woman’ and told her to go back to bed. Those were the first words I said to her on Christmas Day.
D. K.
Orphans [singing]: God bless Mr B at Christmas time and Baby Jesus too,
If we were little pigs we’d sing piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,
Piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy woo,
Oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo, piggy wiggy woo, oh piggy wiggy wiggy woo.
Blackadder: Utter crap.
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1998
Musicians are fond of wistfully recalling the first song they ever wrote. I’m now obliged to reveal that mine had the title ‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’. The passing of time would have wiped this from my memory, but I’ve got a cassette here marked ‘Christmas 1980’ which I’ve just listened to while biting my knuckles with embarrassment, and there I am, this precocious kid, giving its world premiere to a battered cassette recorder. My family isn’t religious, so I don’t know why I got rhapsodic about Bethlehem and set those words to music, but I did. I wasn’t very imaginative; I didn’t throw in mentions of any jugglers, traffic jams, poodles or candyfloss, and just stuck to the accepted version of events, i.e. wise men, shepherds, a stable and a star. The tune is meandering and the poetry is poor; I rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘rare’, for Christ’s sake. (Literally for Christ’s sake.) If I’d written it today, of course, I’d have rhymed ‘myrrh’ with ‘monsieur’, ‘masseur’ or ‘frotteur’, because my vocabulary is now enormous.
‘When Christ was Born in Bethlehem’ never entered the liturgical canon, partly because my parents
