Arguments, broken ovens, unwanted presents… the playwright extols the joys of a dysfunctional family Christmas (and wonders why she’s signed up for another one)

November is when it begins. The tightening of the knot in my stomach as the family Christmas gathering is first mooted. ‘It’s a jolly holiday with Mary,’ and Dick Van Dyke’s ropey old vowels already running in a goading loop in my head. The Whatsapp messages and emails fired from laptop to laptop, as lunch is deliberated over dinner, a Boxing Day walk is put in the diary, then taken out.

With the diplomacy of a small contingent of uptight ambassadors negotiating on behalf of some minor conflicted state, we will strategise and scheme, shuffling the pieces like some cheap sliding puzzle in a cracker, punching the air when a date and time has been settled upon for everyone to meet. Until one of our number realises that promises have been made to one set of in-laws, and a commitment to tea with another and negotiations must start all over again.

At some given moment, usually as we creep into December and there is still no cessation in proceedings, my mother will throw her arms up in the air and declare, ‘ I’m spending it on my own this year.’ Secretly, I am delighted at the thought of this, her threat echoing what I imagine we all at some point yearn for.

A Christmas Day when pyjamas are worn from dawn until dusk. When lunch is picked from the back of the fridge with a glass of fizz in hand. A certain novelty to carve a turkey that you didn’t have to wedge your foot behind to get in the oven. No need to engage in furious debate on how to cook the crispiest roast potato, usually whilst standing, wrist deep in goose fat, puce and cursing whoever invented the 25th – all of this suddenly redundant. Presents opened without the tentative enquiry ‘Lovely – but did you keep the receipt?’

Over the years, there have been some corkers. A near punch-up when lunch was late, and families collided. A Christmas Day in Thailand with a man who preferred to spend the festive season with a newly met and pretty local masseuse. A legendary family argument one Christmas Eve in the checkout aisle of Sainsbury’s when no coriander was to be found for love nor money, and the Christmas when the oven broke and my sister threw herself on the mercy of the vegetarian neighbours, who kindly sunk their principles (with the aid of a lot of bubbles) and ensured the goose was cooked.

Yet there is a golden thread to this festive season that tugs at my core. A thread that pulls us back, pulls us together, pulls us forward. Embedded in this brilliant, volatile, time bomb of emotional mayhem, is joy. A crazy lemminglike desire to hurl myself over the top and into it, with such a compulsion every year, I still don’t entirely understand.

The only thing I know is I once wept in a hotel, in some foreign resort, because the sea was just too beautiful, the sky just too blue, and the electronic organ playing Once in Royal David’s City in the all-you-can eat buffet, on Christmas morning, so heartbreaking, that I longed for the misery of a British winter, the marathon potato-peeling and stocking-stuffing that each new year brings.

This is Not a Pity Memoir, by Abi Morgan, is out now (John Murray Press, £14.99)