Christmas is a time for tradition - for repeating activities that have been part of life at this time of year for generations. Christmas shopping, decorating the tree, carol singing, the school nativity, wrapping presents, roast turkey followed by Christmas pudding...the list goes on.
And in the home too, on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, events tend to recur. For anyone who has a family Christmas, in the same house with the same people every year, certain things are almost certain to happen. You could call them rituals. They are not intentional. They are not planned. They just happen. Every Christmas, without fail.
This year - for the first time in a while - I am spending the break at my parents' house with my extended family, and I would stake vast amounts of money on the probability that the following will take place:
Seeing my mum in a steam-filled kitchen with a million pots on the stove, we will all ask if we can help, but she will say no and carry on single-handedly preparing a lavish meal for ten.
Encouraged by me, my sister will drink too much at dinner and deliver hilarious anecdotes on people we used to go to school with.
My brother will effortlessly work out the answers to every riddle in the crackers.
There will always be one electronic gift that does not work even with the appropriate batteries. Someone will spend hours with a screwdriver and instruction manual trying to work out why.
At 3pm our elderly relatives will position themselves on the sofa to watch the Queen's speech. The more cynical 'youngsters' (me, my sister, brother and husband included) will remain in the dining room chuntering about the royals being an unnecessary expense and a general pain in the backside.
At about 3.30pm, when it is just starting to get dark, some of us will go for a walk around the village. At least one of us will step in a pile of dog dirt which will have to be laboriously extracted from the shoe treads with a stick
Barely two hours after we have finished our Christmas dinner, my mum will present us with huge platefuls of turkey sandwiches, mammoth bowls of trifle and huge wedges of Christmas cake for tea.
At some point my dad will tell either me, my brother or sister off over some incident, in the same Victorian Father manner that he used when we were children.
We will play Scrabble and my brother will win.
The predictability of Christmas is, for many people, the reason for loving or hating this time of year.
Some find the strain of having to step out of their adult lives and become part of something they first experienced as a child extremely difficult.
It's as if the ghosts of Christmas past have come back to haunt you.
I expect to find it all very reassuring.
But if my dad tells me off more than once it will be a cottage in the Highlands next year.
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