Séamas O'Reilly: Christmas is a time for simmering tensions and seething acrimony

Sad, desperate little girl during parents quarrel. Clog the ears.. Family quarrel on the eve of Christmas

If you find yourself back home this Christmas or are, like me, staying with your in-laws, you might be familiar with the strains of this period. 

Christmas is a time for love and friendship, but it is also a time for simmering tensions and seething acrimony. 

A combination of cold weather, free time, and extended periods living at close quarters with people you don’t usually see that often can make for unedifying arguments even among friends, let alone the freaks and weirdos of our extended families.

Sleeping in a spare room — or worse, a childhood bed that’s still covered in glow-in-the-dark Casper The Ghost stickers from 1995 — means you may well start each day hungover and grumpy, and your mood will only derail further from there. Maybe you’ve been sat beside a really right-wing uncle. Throw in copious lashings of mandatory booze, and the odds of getting into some disagreement with someone rapidly start becoming shorter.

So, how do we navigate this minefield? What steps can we take to prevent this Christmas from becoming the bleakest of bleak midwinters? Some say you should avoid talking about contentious topics and keep things light. In most ways, these moral cowards are probably right. But I’m here to promote another, less likely solution, that might not work, but will make for a much more readable article. 

My advice, dear friends, is this; don’t have fewer arguments, have better ones.

Below you will find a seasonal selection box of stratagems, going over every conceivable dinner-table dust-up and fireside fisticuff that could kick off this Christmas, telling you exactly how to steer past it and on to a better, more fulfilling alternative.

Christmas Starts Too Early Every Year

Woof. This old classic. Looks like you’ve really ended up at the top table of Christmas tedium. Are you sure you’re related to these people? 

The only way to go with this one is a hard double-down in either direction. Simply tell them that Christmas should start exactly six months beforehand, on June 26, with a slowly ramping advent calendar that covers an entire outside wall of your house, with windows that reveal a staggering inventory of edible treats for the whole family, beginning with summery dishes — chicken skewers, mimosas — and gradually turning toward wintery favourites — mince pies, turkey legs. 

As well as building excitement for the holiday, it will also be a boon to small businesses and farmers, all year round.

I Reckon Die Hard Is A Christmas Movie

Ugh. You’ve just sat down to the table, a good 20 minutes before food is being served, just so you can avoid your cousin’s boyfriend, and now he’s sat
beside you, proffered a cracker, and dropped this ancient Die Hard opinion, like someone who hasn’t used the internet since 1996. 

You find yourself making a mental inventory of all the pointiest items on the table, in the hopes of severing his carotid artery with speed and stealth — but wait! There is another way. 

The temptation is to one-up him with an increasingly ill-fitting selection of movies that happen to be set at Christmas but have nothing to do with the holiday itself — Eyes Wide Shut, Brazil, The Long Kiss Goodnight, In Bruges — but a more winning approach is the opposite.

Agree with him, but straightfacedly proffer your own films that are very clearly Christmas movies, with bonus points if they have Christmas in the title, solely to antagonise and annoy your tedious companion. 

Eg — when he says: “Do you know what? I’ve always thought of Die Hard as a Christmas movie!” simply reply: “Ah yes, I’m the same with A Muppet Christmas Carol!” and refuse to give him the acknowledgement he craves.

Not Liking When Anyone Over 14 Says “It’s Only X Sleeps To Christmas”

I get it — depending on who’s saying it, this phrasing does sound reprehensibly twee, but hating people for saying it makes you worse. I’m sorry, it’s Christmas, I don’t make the rules.

Should Fairy Tale Of New York Have The Homophobic Slur Removed?

Shite, Uncle Pat’s been at the cooking sherry and started saying weird things about female newsreaders. 

Auntie Pauline is nowhere to be seen and your eyes have now met as The Pogues’ yuletide classic comes on the stereo. He seizes this moment to tell you he thinks people are being sensitive about that lyric, don’t you think? 

My advice is to avoid getting into the fight this person wants you to have. 

Some issues about free speech and artistic intention are nuanced and deserve consideration. This is simply not one of them. 

We are over a decade into this “debate” and it stopped being about oversensitivity or political correctness a long time ago. Not least since the slur is now so universally regarded as unacceptable that even the band themselves have issued statements to this effect, and happily sing alternatives. 

This whole line of argument is now used exclusively as a proxy battle in the tedious, soul-sapping culture war that the most boring people in Ireland seem intent on importing from England.

Instead, unsettle your conversational partner by recommending more cuts, namely the bit in which Kirsty MacColl sings: “They’ve got cars big as bars”. As a songwriter, few artists can hold a candle to MacGowan, so this bizarre six-word detour into inane, rhyming dictionary doggerel is an offence in and of itself, and has no place in a song of such sweeping, heartfelt profundity. 

As well as being entirely right in this opinion, you may annoy your companion in a new, satisfying way they did not expect or, better yet, find common cause with them. 

I mean. Bars? They’re not even the right shape. And how big is a bar? Semiotically, it makes no sense. Oh God, I’m angry again.