The festive season brings ancient family dynamics out, and highlights new ones
IS IT the done thing to diss Christmas anymore? With the new "embrace what matters and forget capitalism - the hippies won" ethos crossing the nation, is it still permissible to become fully enraged at the sloppy pageantry of it all?
For the first few years of the kids' lives I bought the "It's all about the kids" line. Maybe it was once, or maybe I was keen to get sucked back into my own old childish wonderment at this time of year.
The fact that the "It's all about the kids line" holds any water is testament to the subtle marketing power of the toy manufacturers.
As far as I can tell, every weekend is Christmas for my kids. There is very little they are denied. I write this dressed in a sackcloth because the last time I could purchase something for myself was in September 2001.
The kids flit by in the corridor outside on hydrogen-cell-fuelled hover scooters smuggled, at a price, in from NASA, decked out head to toe in DG, screaming for their quail eggs and caviar.
No, the notion of Christmas with kids being great because you have the opportunity to re-experience the wonder of the festive season is utter tosh.
Christmas with kids is about managing expectations. It's about eking out a thank you for the toy you remortgaged the house for, or possibly an unrequested acknowledgement of the huge effort that was made to either source the unfindable or supply and serve a banquet of bacchanalian proportions.
Instead, more often than not, you find yourself resisting the urge to commit GBH on your glowering six year old after she has thrown her plate of gazpacho at the wall because it was cold, or poured treacle into her just-opened Nintendo Wii console because it had the gall to be white instead of the leopard skin she had requested.
You not only manage their expectations, but also your own. Because every year, no matter how hardened and cynical you become, your inner idealist will raise its head and you'll imagine smiling, fair-haired kids around a tree, exclaiming in delight at the torches and slingshots they've helped each other open.
Out of control now, you'll forget you live in a three-bed box worth half what you paid two years ago and imagine a colonial mansion, bathed in white lights on a bed of snow in ski country, Vermont.
You'll have golden kids and golden parents and golden in-laws and white, straight teeth. You'll all gather at the door as carollers sing so sweetly the angels weep. You'll wear a novelty jumper and part your thick, lush hair at the side.
You'll chuckle as your son, Chip, presents you with your own likeness whittled from cherrywood. A project he undertook for extra credit in his spare time, but one he felt nothing but joy for as he anticipated the pleasure it would give his father.
It'll happen and that old December demon, hope, will creep in. Your employer, if you still have one, will have paid you early this month and for a week you'll feel rich. You'll empty your wealth out onto the counter in Smyths toys and hope, yes hope, that this year your sacrifice will buy that postcard Christmas.
That this year, for the first time ever, the coming together of adults who haven't cohabited for decades but still harbour resentments for actions that took place way back then, will result in harmony and a sharing of insights gained with experience and wisdom.
Not a regression to your 15th Christmas when your brother took great pleasure in telling you he had scored a girl, the one you had spent the year lusting after, behind the swimming pool after the youth club party.
Christmas brings all the old dynamics out, and highlights the new ones being hothoused in your own little unit. In our house, December not only means Christmas but also three birthdays. Every year, round about now, the missus turns on me and wonders aloud: "Just what the hell is wrong with you?"
Realisation dawns and she calmly strokes my arm, "Don't worry hun, it'll pass. It always does."
And she's right, it does, just never quickly enough. My Christmas meltdown is legend in our extended family, and, like a black family secret, I try to hide it from the kids. But my misery generally overpowers my skills at deception and they shy away from the inhouse Grinch.
I will try. I will smile. It will pass. It always does.