Christmas time is about sharing food and breaking bread, not breaking your ass worrying whether everything is picture-postcard perfect. Families are not perfect but they are usually the perfect people to be with on Christmas Day, writes Marie Murray
Christmas brings family relationships into sharp focus every year.
With superb predictability, families annually re-enact their inevitable best and worst patterns of interpersonal interactions at Christmas time.
They do this despite most adult family members deciding in advance that this year they will take an observer position and an objective view - because it is never possible to be an objective onlooker on one's own family life.
The need to be in there, to be part of whatever is going on, to engage in the marvellous mayhem that is family life at Christmas is irresistible.
Whether the interactions are positive or negative, familiar or oddly new, family members find it hard not to enter the emotional family fray, particularly if they are staying in the family home for Christmas.
One's family-of-origin is more than a collection of people. It is more than parents or siblings or extended family. It is more than the closest relationships of childhood.
It is the essence of childhood and, therefore, the essence of oneself. It is the place where one began, the people one grew up with and those who made and shaped the intrinsic emotional filaments of one's sense of self.
The family-of-origin is not external to, but is an integral part of each person's personal identity. That is why when families congregate for Christmas, adult children recapitulate most of the behaviours, friendships and feuds that characterised their interactions with each other as children growing up.
This is not surprising. Emotionally most adults do not entirely leave home. Even those who have emigrated, established a new life, a new family and a new persona in another country, often find that they regress emotionally to their former patterns of interaction with their families when they return home at Christmas time.
Sibling rivalry is never more evident than at Christmas between adult children seeking to be the "best" in parental eyes this Christmas: to be the most entertaining, impressive, sympathetic, successful, hardworking, helpful, frivolous or festive.
Large families are likely to have the richest interactions, for the combinations, coalitions, alliances and allegiances of former times re-emerge in an interesting adult variant of the past.
The family hero will continue to rescue and support, the black sheep will take the blame for everything, the difficult and demanding sibling will be pampered in the interests of maintaining family harmony on Christmas Day and at least one person will do more than his or her fair share of work.
Families with extended families know who will answer the door, entertain the guests, pour the drinks, watch the nieces and nephews, play with the grandchildren and who will tidy up after everyone else.
At the dinner table the unspoken codes of exchange between parents, between parents and their individual children and between siblings catching each other's eyes will surface, just as unconscious but as powerful as ever before. Grace will be said or not said, complied with or resisted depending upon tradition.
Who sits beside whom at the table will confirm either former hierarchies or current choice. Eyes will watch who is served first or last, the best cuts, the tender pieces, the better portions, and for whom the titbits they particularly loved as children have been prepared.
Those who are abstemious will remain so, as those who guzzle gustily will tuck in, each an affront to the other and a reminder of their difference despite their genetic ties.
Old arguments may emerge as anecdotes are told, validated or revised. Admissions that have waited years may be made: I broke your doll, I hid your dress, I told on you. Parents may receive irrelevant confessions about things they always knew.
Apologies, unexpected, may be given or an inflexible righteousness may remain to rancour for another year. Living the present and revisiting the past is an inevitable part of Christmas Day.
But what makes families so special, what brings families together on Christmas Day, what ensures that no matter what irritants may arise, most family members still want to be with each other is because there are no other people on earth with whom you are so closely connected.
There are no others who share your early history, who lived their own childhoods alongside yours, who know you in a way not accessible to others, who are a part of who you are. Home is where you began and so it is where you return at key times.
Parents do not last forever and each year is a memory to add to the one before. Siblings may not be perfect but they are ours and when the chips are down they are the ones who love us and who have to care. Most of all, if there has been sadness, loss or a family death during the year (think how many families may need to huddle together this Christmas), only the family can understand what that death means to each and every one of them.
This Christmas as families converge with all the challenges that enforced communal living and mandatory merriment impose, it is good to remember that the ties of kinship are long and strong. Families are not perfect but they are usually the perfect place to be on Christmas Day.
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray's most recent book is Living Our Times, published by Gill and Macmillan.