Why organising a family Christmas just got EVEN MORE stressful

BACK in September, my phone buzzed on the kitchen table. That’s when it all started. ‘You have been added to the group Christmas 2017,’ said the words on my screen. It was a new group on WhatsApp, the instant messaging service.

‘Oh good,’ I thought peevishly. ‘Just what we all need. Another WhatsApp group to vibrate at all hours of the day and night with passive aggressive messages about who’s ordering the turkey and whether anyone will eat any Christmas pudding this year.’

No doubt you understand this — the tyranny of the WhatsApp group — since a billion of us around the world use the little green app to communicate with our friends or family.

It’s not that I don’t love my family and friends. I do. I love them very much. But these days, given we’re already slaves to a constant stream of emails and phone calls and social media notifications, I also love the odd five peaceful minutes to read a book or have a bath. And WhatsApp has made this harder.

I currently have 17 active WhatsApp groups on the go. Seventeen! I’m quite surprised that I have 17 friends, let alone 17 WhatsApp groups. I don’t think I started any of them, either. And so the second that I sit down to write at my laptop or get in the car to drive somewhere my phone pings and my attention span — already dramatically shortened to around four or five seconds, like a goldfish — will be drawn back to my phone.

‘Ooh, a message! I wonder who that is?’ I think. ‘Maybe it’s something exciting. Maybe it’s a handsome mystery man!’ But then I check my phone and it’s just my sister on the ‘Christmas 2017’ group telling me I’m in charge of doing the stockings for the dogs.

THERE are WhatsApp groups for everything these days. Not just for Christmas. For different friendship groups, for different family clusters, for organising birthday parties and holidays. Mobile phones have become our adult comfort blankets, always clamped in our fingers.

And in the eight years since WhatsApp was founded in California, designed as a free, instant messaging service for anyone in the world to download and use, it’s become the go-to method of communicating, with 60 billion messages sent across the globe every day. Little wonder its founders, former Yahoo! employees Brian Acton, 45, and Jan Koum, 41, sold the app to Facebook in 2014 for roughly €16 billion.

On the one hand, it’s free. It’s convenient. It makes talking to a big group of people easy. On the other, do we need all this mindless chatter? I’m not sure we do. I’m not sure we need anything which feeds our obsession with checking our phones more than we already do. And there’s science behind this.

It’s become a real addiction. Our nervous system sends our brain a little hit of the happy chemical dopamine every time we receive something on our phones, which makes us feel briefly euphoric. This, in turn, fuels our craving to check our phones again and again.

It also makes stalkers of us all. You text someone, or a group, and two little grey ticks appear beside your message to tell you it’s been delivered to their phone. Once they’re read the message, these little ticks go blue. But sometimes, the little blue ticks stay grey for hours, even though you can see the recipient is online!

Because WhatsApp, not content with making us obsess about whether our messages have been read or not, also alerts you when someone is actively using the app. It’s like playing a terrible game of cat and mouse. Now they’re online, now they’re not, now they’re online, now they’re not.

Oh the hideousness of knowing your paramour was online three minutes ago — messaging someone else — but is ignoring the message you sent him this morning! Oh the cruelty of the little ticks! Did Brian and Jan know they were creating a new form of dating torture when they invented those ticks?

More deranged still is the fact you can create WhatsApp groups of up to 256 people. Imagine that! Imagine 256 people sending one another photos of their breakfast and their babies.

And I’m sorry to tell you there’s further bad news: the app is reportedly developing group voice and video calls, to be launched sometime in the near future.

YOU can mute groups, so although messages pile in, your phone doesn’t ping. You still have to check in from time to time to see how the row about the brandy butter is going.

It’s also terrifyingly easy to text the wrong group. ‘I’ve bought Mum’s present already and I’ve made a Christmas cake so can one of you guys sort out the wine?’ your sister will text your siblings group in an accusatory way.

‘Sure thing,’ I reply, sending a row of little wine glass emojis to lighten the mood.

Brrrrr. Your phone vibrates again with a message from your brother. ‘God she’s being bossy. I hate Christmas cake anyway,’ he says. Except he’s sent it to the whole group accidentally, instead of just you. And now your sister is crying and your brother is trying to pretend he was ‘just joking’.

And what you’re thinking, is next year you might just go to a nice hot beach and have Christmas on your own. A nice hot beach . . . without any wi-fi.