Nothing says Christmas like work, funerals and drinking for the stress

You know you’re in trouble when you run into a neighbour in SuperValu with a stack of selection boxes and biscuit tins in her arms reaching all the way up to her eyes and she greets you by rolling the latter and lamenting, ‘is there no end to it?’ while you realise that in your world, it’s basically still July. Not a sprout, not a tree, not a card, not a present.

Forget about no end to it; there has been no discernible start to it in my house.

It’s not that I’m a member of the bah humbug brigade or one of those Last Minuters who prides themselves on doing all their shopping on the afternoon of Christmas Eve (or ‘men’, as they’re otherwise known). I just haven’t had time. A brutal work schedule has effectively seen me chained to my desk for the past few weeks and what tiny windows of free time I have had have been spent drinking to get over the stress of the work or going to funerals.

I am aware that somewhere out there, in a parallel universe, there is something called a party season in full swing. If it’s still going in late March, when my current work commitments ebb to a more humane schedule, then I’ll certainly look forward to dipping a seasonal toe into it. Though I suspect the mistletoe might be mildew by then.

The worried Youngest wants to know if I intend putting a tree up at all this year and when I suggest we get it this weekend, she warns that there probably won’t be any left. So by the time you read this — everything crossed — the tree will hopefully have been sourced, bought and carried home, and the Christmas preparations will have officially started. Decorating the tree will be another day’s work in every sense. If I can get it done before Santa starts rattling around on the roofs, wondering why ours is the only house in the estate with its outdoor lights indoors and still in their box, that will be my very own Christmas miracle.

On the plus side, the job of sending cards shouldn’t take too long. When I started sending Christmas cards — one of the seven signs of ageing, incidentally — there were loads of them and an entire evening had to be set aside to get through my list. Now, I feel like the whole ordeal takes about half an hour. It’s a shorter list because a lot of the people on it have conveniently died and most of the rest of them seem to have used the tradition of not sending cards on the Christmas after a family bereavement to strike me off their own lists forever when my brother died.

I am writing this a couple of days before you read it and I am surrounded by both my Christmas cards — and one of those is from a lovely stranger who sent me a biography of WB Yeats after hearing me talking about my love of the poet on the Today show. My late mother-in-law never threw out a Christmas card so that by the end of her life, she was putting up about a thousand cards every year, most of which were from people who had died in the previous century. I used to quietly think she was mad, but now I am ruing my own aversion to hoarding anything. If I’d kept all the Christmas cards I’ve ever received, I might at least manage to fill the mantlepiece.

My present-buying responsibility is similarly reduced, though unlike the cards, that was never exactly exhausting to start with. A very small family, most of whose members essentially seem to regard the whole business of giving Christmas presents as a personal affront, had always made this aspect of the festive season fairly manageable, and now that Santa has skipped back to the North Pole, the onerous and stressful job of filling demanding wish lists has evolved into an expedition to Penneys and Marks & Spencer to fulfil everyone’s wildest cheap underwear and scented candles desires.

After that, there is only the food and drink to think about and you can’t do that too early in case the fridge breaks or The Boy and I drink all the seasonal jar by mistake. And sure it’s only Christmas dinner for 12 people, 11 of whom will be staying overnight in my house which currently looks as though a Leitrim tornado has passed through it and oh God oh God oh God. At least that’s the first Christmas column written. And there may or may not be a naked tree in my house.

I have so got this.