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Christmas Day looms on the horizon.

In my youth it was an annual highlight. It came with the thrill of presents, the buzz after an extra spoon of brandy butter and even some Church. Happy church. Not in the ‘happy-clappy’ new age sense – but belting out carols and chatting up girls from the city who came to the mountains for the holidays to visit their hayseed cousins. In the days where you ended the big day with a hefty net gain, rather than the bill for a bacchanalian feast.

Our Christmas tree appears on the first day of December, along with an Elf on the shelf and the annual questions about Father Christmas’s identity. The buildup increases in intensity from the traditional holiday of many names on 16 December to the crescendo on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve, depending on your age or testosterone levels. We South Africans were due to miss out on the holiday this year because the 16 December falls on a Saturday. But fortunately, the Boks went back-to-back, and Cyril decided that the extra damage to the economy caused by another public holiday was worth the votes. This government have always been generous in this way.

Nowadays the payoff on Christmas Day is less symmetrical. Responsibilities accumulate with age, and cracks have appeared in the innocent lens through which we once viewed the world. Dark clouds of reality have dampened the blue skies of our youth. Christmas Day is a complex event now, requiring curation and finesse on many levels. Heightened emotional intelligence is essential to keep this multi-faceted familial circuit connected. Inter-generational conversations go off piste rapidly after a couple of G&T’s and a few gulps of fizz, particularly when the topics veer towards religion, politics, or sexual orientation.

Parents also tend to be more judgmental about other people’s children, particularly if they are married to their own kids and procreation has taken place. As ever, the alternative is to lean into the wine and forget about it although sustaining that approach can be problematic. The first step is managing the annual reintroduction (to each other) of occupants of different levels of the family tree (including outlaws and children). This pressure is exacerbated if you are all living together in a confined space alongside the emotional baggage accumulated over a few generations of coexistence and then distilled by different levels of financial or social success.

Next is the psychological battle for the alpha roles. Who will make the vital decisions of the holiday such as whether we will eat Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve or at lunchtime on Christmas Day? Will we have to endure the old man’s incinerated lamb chops or will the pretender with credentials from the Chef’s Warehouse be permitted to take the tongs? Will the Christmas meal consist of traditional ham and turkey along with the usual Anglophile trimmings in the heat of high summer or will segues be permitted into Ottolenghi-style turkey meatballs and coleslaw?

I always wonder how this plays out in families containing multiple overachievers and egos inflated by corporate brown-nosing. Only God knows the carnage that occurs in families from across the religious and cultural divides. Our diaspora is widespread these days with all the running away that has taken place.

How will we last the best part of a week listening to our in-laws’ theories on Covid, the Illuminati and Bill Gates’s real plan without erupting with rage? How will I pretend to be delighted by another pair of socks or underpants two sizes too small? Once again, the answer could lie in long walks, golf, the bar, or any activity that keeps one out of the house for hours at a time. Provided that doesn’t involve changing into spandex or playing Padel.

In hindsight, Christmas complexity shouldn’t surprise me. Ours were historically chaotic. My family was synthetically created by death and a second marriage. This meant complexity was ubiquitous, rather than only appearing at Christmas like a cold sore at the matric ball.

My mother’s mother was usually the catalyst for disagreements. She was harmless unless she managed to sneak a third Cane at evening drinks. If she had that drink, Mr Jekyll appeared and zeroed into the weaknesses in the flimsy social structure. Withering criticism would be delivered down a long nose and with a mild slur. It fanned existing fires and lit new ones which turned the dinner table into a battleground. The Christmas day of my youth took a familiar path. First was a dawn wakeup to open the little somethings in our stockings. Then Church at seven am.

Opening more presents under the tree with tea and mince pies followed, highlighting that modern Christmas was just the first incarnation of Black Friday for retailers. We knew what most of the gifts were already, having felt them up while no-one was looking in the days preceding.

The highlight was a singing and dancing extravaganza on our lawn put on by the staff in the late morning. Everyone wore Sunday best. Someone brought a drum and families helped themselves to Christmas treats. There was clapping and singing with the drum beating in the background while dance solos were performed to our collective joy. We all joined in as best we could. The moves grew more ambitious as the morning wore on, and the visits to the drinks table increased. Think of a Christmas pantomime collaboration with singers from the Ndlovu Youth Choir, dancers from Juluka and refreshments supplied by South African Breweries.

Meanwhile, lunch was being prepared by cooks more used to providing instructions than cooking themselves while the regular cooks enjoyed themselves outside. Gravy of turkey innards and a mishmash of herbs was stirred on one end of the coal stove, while bread sauce was being coagulated on the other. December heat and the coal stove combined to produce sauna temperatures in the kitchen along with frequent meltdowns. Hams adorned with tinned pineapple slices and glace cherries were checked while Brussel sprouts were mutilated.

We usually sat down for lunch when the mercury in the thermometer threatened to burst the north end of the glass. Both my grannies would be as glazed as the ham by this stage. My stepsisters weren’t particularly discerning about their boyfriends and the beginning of the meal usually involved one of my grans instructing a boyfriend how to hold his knife properly while the other explained how it wasn’t done to smother roast turkey with tomato sauce. I usually used these distractions to pour myself an extra glass or two of Distell’s premium sweet sparkling wine.

One year my father’s mother blew off so loudly during a pause in the conversation that everyone assumed the eruption was a chair being dragged across the wooden floor. I heard that she had innocently taken a puff on a marijuana cigarette given to her by a stepsister’s boyfriend and then lost control of all bodily functions. He probably had a better sense of humour than we gave him credit for. I was sitting directly opposite her and recognized the noise for what it was. I laughed until I was sent to the kitchen. When I returned from the kitchen, she choked on a 20c piece that had been put in the Christmas pudding for luck and the uncle with the longest arms had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre.

She ended an inglorious day snoring in an armchair. I spent Christmas Day away from home a few times. Once in London with the only two friends who hadn’t gone home for the holidays. The lead-up was festive with carols in the Albert Hall, a little snow and chestnuts being roasted in the high street, but I was banned from the pub and had to spend Christmas eve home alone. We cooked a Christmas meal and tried to be as festive as possible, but the day fell flat. We ended up walking around a frozen duck pond in the half-light wondering what was happening at home and then watching a rerun of Michael Caine performing in Zulu on BBC two. Family is the vital ingredient for a good Christmas. This strikes you when they aren’t around in their dysfunctional glory.

Children’s excitement about their presents and the occasion is important, but it’s the quirks and the generational aspect which hold the key. Tiddly grannies and bachelor uncles all add depth to a pagan feast as much as baubles and trees draped with twinkling lights. Please remember this when the lead starts to fly this year. Christmas is also a time for reflection, as Winston Churchill pointed out from Washington in the gloomy winter of 1941. There are floods in Queensland and fires in Simonstown. We have stripped our planet like careless squatters in an unoccupied house. And yet most of the attendees of COP28 were representatives from the oil and gas companies directly responsible for the abuse of fossil fuels.

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise given the jamboree took place in Dubai. Why do we allow this? We watch wars rage in Gaza and Ukraine like ghouls on news channels whose viewing figures are directly proportional to the suffering they portray.

The pillage and mismanagement continue at home while our leaders in Luthuli House pontificate, politic and posture rather than getting on with the boring job of effective and responsible administration. But this remains a free country, and we all have a choice. We can burn the Christmas tree and put our heads back in the sand or register and vote for a better future. We have that chance this year. Sixty percent of our electorate are expected to abstain. How can this make sense for a people whose ancestors fought so long for this fundamental right?

King Charles III’s second speech will round off the afternoon at five pm CAT and the half-sozzled survivors of lunches across the former Empire will slump into armchairs to watch the old boy reel off his second effort in plummy tones. Who knows what will happen at lunch this year? I predict teary speeches and mild inebriation. I hope for laughter, carols, and a decent outcome at Secret Santa. The Presidency hasn’t announced what time Cyril will address us.

We will give him another chance and watch it again out of equanimity, and out of fear of being labelled soutpiels – like turkeys voting for Christmas.