The one phrase you need to get you through Christmas

The festive season is tough on your nut; here's how to cope.

First, here’s a little story about Christmas at the Delaney’s back in 1990, when I was 15.

Like every year, there was five of us: me, my mum and my three older brothers. On the piss from the early hours in our little council house, perched on the edge of the A4 in the suburbs of west London.

My mum treated us good: we all woke up to bulging stockings at the end of our beds. Chocolate money, walnuts, satsumas, the usual stuff. My brothers always got ten fags and a Clipper lighter in their’s. When I got to 15 she put fags in mine too - even though I never smoked. I told her this but she thought I was just trying to act like a goody two shoes. “It’s Christmas, I don’t mind if you have a fag.” I just shared them out among my brothers.

My mum was never a big boozer but my brothers and I saw the true meaning of Christmas as being all about legitimised daytime drinking.

We all set about getting fully wankered from morning onwards: on lager, Baileys, whiskey, Stone’s Ginger Wine - anything from the arsenal of booze, lovingly accumulated inside the ‘Christmas cupboard’ over the preceding weeks. Then we got stoned. By the time the Christmas pudding was finished my brothers would have been on the gak, but I was still a bit too young for that. By six o clock, other people started to join the party. My best mate Olly came round, dropped off by his dad, a well known television game show host of the era (true story).

My brother Dom had a new girlfriend called Polly who turned up with a gift for the rest of us. She was obviously trying to impress because the gift was a brand new Italia 90 themed Subbuteo set.

Now, Subbuteo had been banned in our household a few years beforehand as a result of all the violence. We used to run a league among ourselves and a few mates every Sunday afternoon on the kitchen table. We took it very seriously - whenever the FA Cup final was played we made our mum dress up as the Queen and go along the line of little plastic players, pretending to shake their hand and make small talk with them. But the matches would almost always end in punches being thrown so my mum had packed it all up into the attic and forbidden us from every playing again.

By 1990 the ban had been in place for a couple of years and we pleaded to mum that we had all matured a great deal in the interim. Plus, it was Christmas and I don’t suppose she wanted to offend Polly by denying us the chance to play with her very thoughtful present. So she said we could have just a couple of games.

Bear in mind, we had all been on the cans since 9 am and three of us had been topping up with cocaine since lunchtime.

It was never going to be a straightforward Subbuteo tournament.

So we set up the new gear, all chose a team and decided ‘Fuck it, let’s recreate the whole of the Italia 90 World Cup from groups stages onwards! We could stay up all night if we wanted! It’s fucking Christmas!’

Things progressed as you might expect any Christmas Day Subbuteo tournament between four paralytic brothers to progress. Conflict. Anger. Accusations. Cheating. Spillages. And the creeping spectre of violence hanging over proceedings constantly until, BANG! It all exploded during a tense quarter final encounter between Italy and West Germany.

An offside decision was disputed, voices were raised, things were said that could not be unsaid, a can of Fosters was spilt on the imitation astroturf pitch and the first fist went flying. Within seconds a bona fide meleé was in full swing. Polly started crying. Olly started to laugh with a nervous hysteria. Bella, our dog, ate three of the West German midfielders who had fallen to the floor amidst the mayhem.

My mum tried to diffuse the situation in the only way she knew how: by pretending to faint. When nobody paid any attention, she got back up and pretended to faint again.

Eventually, the chaos was punctuated by the reappearance of Olly’s famous dad back at the front door. “Everything alright?” he asked, peering down the hallway towards the signs of pandemonium in the kitchen. “All fine!” said my mum in her best ‘I’m just a normal mum with a normal family having a magical Christmas Day with absolutely no fighting or drugs’ type voice.

And so the tournament was abandoned. Everyone started to drift away to pubs or other people’s houses and eventually it was just me and my mum left. Her finishing off the Stones Ginger Wine and falling asleep on the sofa. Me minesweeping the dregs of lukewarm beer cans and smoking the dog ends of abandoned spliffs in front of Jean De Florette on BBC2.

Christmas round ours was always noisy, never boring and usually actually quite fun.

There was plenty of love, yes, but it was very rarely relaxing or peaceful. It’s fair to say that between the ages of 0 and 19 I felt decidedly ‘on-edge’ every December 25th.

I now understand that a peaceful Christmas, without too much going on, is the best sort of Christmas.

I’m pretty sure the whole point used to be about ‘peace unto all men.’ But in the modern world, this is the last time of year you’re likely to get any peace. Modern Christmas is about excess and indulgence. I was conditioned from an early age to believe that unless you were gorging on everything throughout Christmas day - presents, food, booze, drugs, shouting, dancing, singing, Subbuteo - then you weren’t really doing it right.

But that is a narrative created largely by TV, advertising and the man. From mid-October onwards we are surrounded by messages that guilt us into thinking that without that sort of wanton excess we’re somehow letting ourselves and all of our loved ones down. No wonder people can get so miserable at this time of year. We’re force fed an idealised form of Christmas that for a great many is impossible to live up to (and even for those who can, is just fools gold).

People who are trying to lay of the booze and the gear say that it is particularly hard at this time of year.

Maybe this is because they feel that they’re being a bit boring by not joining in with the madness. But when it comes to having a good time, I am certain you have more imagination than that. These days, when I feel people are trying to pressurise me into having fun on their terms and not my own, I find the phrase that always works for me is ‘fuck that.’

‘Fuck that,’ is an important maxim for anyone to deploy liberally at times like this, especially anyone who is trying to cut down on bad habits, because it’s about setting boundaries and taking control of yourself. It’s about thinking clearly about what you really want to do and not bending it to the expectations of other people or the conventions of society.

‘Self-care’ is a corny term used in the mental health industry. I used to always think it referred to going for massages or having long baths and that. But I now realise it’s more about knowing when to say ‘fuck that. I’m not doing that. I’m doing something else.’

Of course, if you want a drink, have a drink. If it’s not harming you or anyone else, why not?

But do it because you want to not because of tradition or expectation of others. Say ‘fuck that.’ If you don’t want to attend every do you are invited to (even the stilted ones you might have to endure via Zoom), then don’t. If you don’t want to get on the booze all day, then don’t. And if you don’t want to do lines of gak in your nan’s downstairs loo with your cousins during the Queens Speech, then don’t do that either.

‘But what if I do want to do all of those things and more Sam?’ you might be asking. Well, do them then, I guess.

Just make sure to stop and ask yourself what you really want to do as opposed what you think you should do. If you’re a grown up you should be able to make these decisions in a clear eyed way, guided entirely by your own self-interest. So when your mates are saying ‘Come on it’s Christmas!’ you are able to say to yourself- and possibly out loud to them too - ‘fuck that.’

‘Fuck that’ is the phrase that has always and will always sooth the troubled soul and turbulent mind of the anxious man at Christmas.

I reckon happiness is not about putting more things into your life but taking more things out of it. This will be my sixth sober Christmas - and I can tell you they have comfortably been the six best Christmases of my entire life. Waking up clear headed and early to open presents, play with the kids, cook lunch and really experience the day properly - not through the nauseous fog of a hangover which you combat with immediate re-intoxication - is absolutely fucking sensational. You have energy. And that nagging feeling of pain, discomfort, anxiety, hunger and boredom you seem to always have simmering beneath the surface, to which booze often seems like the only remedy? Most of the time it’s just tiredness, mate. Knock the bad stuff on the head and it soon melts away.

So try to keep things a bit simpler this year if you can.

You can only really control your own actions in life. Allowing yourself to become distracted, frustrated, angry or upset about the actions of other people is a recipe for going bananas. It follows that the less complications you put in your life and the less stuff you do that feels slightly off, as if you’re doing it because other people expect you to do it, the more content you will be. It’s worth remembering that at this time of year when the distractions and pressure often reach their zenith.

Be lucky - and Merry Christmas

Sam

Some services and links to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/