A Christmas turkey. ARCHIVE.

It’s turning out to be a different sort of Christmas this year. The big family seasonal lunch – with turkey, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding and gravy, if you’re British like me – is on Christmas Day, December 25. However, this year my family had our Christmas lunch – complete with crackers and Gregg dressed up as the Grinch – on November 30.

Bypassing tradition and doing our own thing was more by accident than design. My wife and I spent 10 days in the UK in November, with our flight back to Barcelona set for Monday December 1. My sister invited us for a coffee at her house on the Sunday evening, after which she would drop us off at the airport hotel. A couple of family members got wind of the plan and invited themselves over for tea. A few more suggested doing Sunday lunch, which led my sister to go all in and do a full Christmas meal for everyone.

The fact that it was November 30 rather than December 25 didn’t make any difference. We ate and drank, told jokes from the crackers (What did the donutmaker say when he decided to close his shop? I’m fed up with the hole business!), played charades (the high point for me was, after indicating a book and a film, my niece held up six fingers and I answered correctly without hesitation: ’The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’), and sat in the living room complaining about how full we were.

Possibly the downside to the experience was that I now feel I’ve already done Christmas and I’m not looking forward to doing it again in a few weeks, albeit this time with my wife’s family. Yet even that is no saving grace, as we see them plenty throughout the year and can have a family get together any time. Was it, came the thought, time for us to give up Christmas? I’m a miserable middle-aged man now, my wife has never liked Christmas, our children are grown up and probably only come for lunch out of a sense of obligation. Also, you can have too much of a good thing and we’ve celebrated so many Christmases at this point that surely we’ve more than paid our dues and can reward ourselves by substituting the seasonal festivities with an escape somewhere quieter, and very likely warmer.

Curious about my options, I did what any modern person does these days to get answers: I resorted to AI for help. This is what our future digital overlord told me.

If I wanted to get away from it all, it suggested going to a place where Christmas isn’t a thing, like a Muslim country such as Morocco, Egypt or Indonesia, which have the added advantage that they are generally in warmer regions and tend to be reasonably priced. Good call, I thought, although I was less keen on the other suggestion of going to a remote area where there are very few people, such as the Faroe Islands or the Antarctic.

If staying at home and wanting to avoid Christmas Day, I was given the choice of booking a 24-hour spa, some of which are open 365 days a year and popular with Christmas-adverse people, attending a silent meditation retreat, or – more up my alley – signing up to a 24-hour online video game binge with people around the world who don’t know, or even care, that it’s Christmas.

A final suggestion that is worth mentioning was volunteering at an animal or homeless shelter, which are always looking for help on the 25th and where you are sure to avoid the celebrations while also feeling good about yourself.

It’s too late this year to pull the plug on Christmas, but I have a feeling 2025 may be my last one for a while.

THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT

THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT

Catalonia Today 07-12-2025, Pàgina 31

THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT  

THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT

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