• my friends will want to go to the Tav tonight and I will flatly refuse, as since I have moved to the city, I have grown out of getting shitfaced at dirty bars in the Hills.

CORRECT – in honour of the Tav’s famous night club re-opening, my school friends were extremely keen to pay $15 for the pleasure of reliving our youth by chugging breezers, dancing on a podium and getting fingered in the carpark.

• a few hours later, I will be standing on a table in the beer garden at the Tav doing shots of sambuca.

INCORRECT – I went to my parents’ house, watched an episode of Studio 60 and then went to bed. I am so boring.

• I will yell at a taxi driver and pass out in the study at my parents’ house.

INCORRECT – I was able to sleep in my old room, as the lesbian couple who has been staying there was away for Christmas.

• Mum will knock on the door at 8am tomorrow morning and ask me if I want to go to church. I will pretend not to hear her.

INCORRECT – the woman is learning.

• My brother and I will wake up 5 minutes before my parents come home from church and pretend we have been up for hours.

INCORRECT – I got up early and went for a run, then made avocado on toast and read a weight loss magazine. Oh the shame of it.

• My mother will give me a Bryce Courtenay book, which I will never read, and I will give her a scarf, which she will never wear.

CLOSE – I got a novel by Philippa Gregory (an author I liked around 2001) and a Jamie Oliver cookbook, which I will never open because I am in no way gifted when it comes to food preparation.

• My brother and I will hand each other cards containing $50. Sometimes, we just pull out our wallets and exchange notes.

INCORRECT – we have developed a new arrangement where we request very specific gifts and nobody is disappointed. I am hoping to work my mother into this system for 2011.

• My mother will drink a glass of champagne while she’s preparing a dip plate, then have a hot flush and retire to the lounge while my father finishes all other food preparation for the day.

CORRECT

• Our Christmas lunch guests will be church families and awkward singles, because my mother believes that the days surrounding Christmas are for catching up with relatives and in-laws, but Christmas Day itself should be spent with her spiritual family.

CORRECT – this year’s line up included some people who were our neighbours during the 80s and an elderly woman with severe dementia who stared at a blank television screen for most of the afternoon.

• My brother and I, faced with the prospect of a long lunch with our estranged childhood Sunday School friends, will begin putting away beers as though our lives depend on it.

CORRECT – I don’t remember much after 5pm.

• Lunch will include a lot of seafood, which I will remind my parents I do not eat. (“Oh how nice of you to provide for everyone. Thank you so much.”)

CORRECT – but my mother also made a ham, which was the cause of many arguments but tasted delicious.

• I will start a fight with someone about Christianity, get shut down by my mother, sulk for the rest of the meal and then leave the table as soon as is vaguely socially acceptable.

INCORRECT – however I did make several racist jokes which were met with awkward silence and a lot of throat-clearing.

• I will sit for half an hour with my cat and then fall asleep on the couch.

INCORRECT – I partied all day and drank cocktails in the pool. Obviously the cat decided to spend Christmas Day hanging out with all her loved ones (ie. herself.)

• I will wake up after all our guests have left and my dad will make up a fruit platter just for me. We will sit in front of the fan and watch a documentary about Hitler.

INCORRECT – after a drunken stumble to a BP station to purchase microwave popcorn, my brother’s girlfriend and I watched Ricky Gervais’ Science and then I passed out around 10pm.

1. The one where my mother tries to prove her knowledge of contemporary music to my brother…

Mum: Is that Metallica?
Chris: No.
Mum: Is it Korn?
Chris: No.
Mum: Who is it?
Chris: It’s Jesus Christ and the Shut-the-Fuck-Ups. Do you mind? We’re trying to watch a movie here.

2. The one in the car…

Dad: Can you please stop clicking your pen?
Mum: What, so you couldn’t hear that annoying woman who kept announcing the keno numbers at the restaurant but you can hear my pen clicking? What is this, some gender-based selective hearing where you can’t hear annoying women?
Dad: Well I can hear one now.

3. The one where I think my grandfather’s girlfriend was trying to ask me whether I have a fuck buddy…

Edith: So, have you got a fella?
Me: Nah.
Edith: Do you have a special friend though?
Me: Huh?
Edith: Do you have a…you know…a special guy friend?
Me: Um, I have male friends?
Edith: Good.

4. The one where my grandfather’s girlfriend insults the modeling industry in general…

Edith: Have you tried any modeling yet?
Me: No.
Edith: Why not?
Me: Well for one, I weigh more than a hundred pounds.
Edith: Yes but you’ve got nice hair.
Me: I dont think that’s going to cut it on the runway.
Edith: Yeah well some of those girls really shouldn’t be up there anyway. They look like dogs.

• my friends will want to go to the Tav tonight and I will flatly refuse, as since I have moved to the city, I have grown out of getting shitfaced at dirty bars in the Hills.
• a few hours later, I will be standing on a table in the beer garden at the Tav doing shots of sambuca.
• I will yell at a taxi driver and pass out in the study at my parents’ house.
• Mum will knock on the door at 8am tomorrow morning and ask me if I want to go to church. I will pretend not to hear her.
• My brother and I will wake up 5 minutes before my parents come home from church and pretend we have been up for hours.
• My mother will give me a Bryce Courtenay book, which I will never read, and I will give her a scarf, which she will never wear.
• My brother and I will hand each other cards containing $50. Sometimes, we just pull out our wallets and exchange notes.
• My mother will drink a glass of champagne while she’s preparing a dip plate, then have a hot flush and retire to the lounge while my father finishes all other food preparation for the day.
• Our Christmas lunch guests will be church families and awkward singles, because my mother believes that the days surrounding Christmas are for catching up with relatives and in-laws, but Christmas Day itself should be spent with her spiritual family.
• My brother and I, faced with the prospect of a long lunch with our estranged childhood Sunday School friends, will begin putting away beers as though our lives depend on it.
• Lunch will include a lot of seafood, which I will remind my parents I do not eat. (“Oh how nice of you to provide for everyone. Thank you so much.”)
• I will start a fight with someone about Christianity, get shut down by my mother, sulk for the rest of the meal and then leave the table as soon as is vaguely socially acceptable.
• I will sit for half an hour with my cat and then fall asleep on the couch.
• I will wake up after all our guests have left and my dad will make up a fruit platter just for me. We will sit in front of the fan and watch a documentary about Hitler.

Mum: We had this terrible incident at the hospital a few years ago… A woman who worked there part-time was going around stealing all the nurses’ purses and-

Me: Wait, hang on, the nurses’ purses?

Mum: Yeah, so?

Me: NURSES’ PURSES? That’s hilarious! It sounds like a shitty crime novel. Like, Nancy Drew and the Troubling Case of the Missing Nurses’ Purses. Haha!

Mum’s friend: So what happened then?

Me: Oh who cares. Let’s open another bottle of wine!

Mum: Can you open the champagne, darling?

Dad: The Chandon?

Mum: No, the Veuve. I told you to bring the Veuve!

Dad: Well I just grabbed whatever was in the fridge.

Mum: The fridge in the kitchen?

Dad: No, the fridge in the garage.

Mum: Why would you do that?

Dad: You just said ‘get the champagne from the fridge’. If you meant a specific champagne from a particular fridge, you should have said so.

Me: Yeah, Mum. The guy’s a GP, not an oracle.

Mum: I just don’t understand why you never listen to me properly. If you were unsure, you should have asked.

Me: Yeah, Dad. You went to medical school for six years but you can’t even figure out what champagne to bring to Christmas lunch?

Dad: I have worked my arse off so that you people can have champagne in the first place, and then this is how you treat me?

Me: Yeah, Mum!

Mum: Oh, right, because birthing your children and raising them into semi-respectable adults was just one big goddamn holiday for me.

Me: Yeah, Dad! Wait…what do you mean by semi?

Dad: Annik, please tell your mother that if anybody needs me, I’ll be in my study.

Mum: Come on, get up, get out of the spa. We’re going to pose for a family portrait.

Me: Seriously?

Mum: Yes, your uncle brought his camera and I can’t remember the last time we all had a photo together.

Me: I don’t want to do that.

Mum: Just shut up and get out. It’s Christmas and we’re going to look happy.

Me: But I’ve had, like, eight beers.

Mum: Well at least you’ll be smiling.

Mum: It’s so sad, what’s happening with Margaret’s family…

Dad: What happened?

Mum: Well her children from her previous marriage are always torn between spending Christmas day at Margaret’s house, or spending it with their dad and his new wife. This year, they’ve all been fighting about it, and now all this nastiness has come out of the woodwork and it looks like they might not have Christmas lunch at all.

Me: YAWN.

Dad: Can they really not reach an agreement this year?

Mum: I don’t think they will, no. The daughter-in-law is being extremely defensive and firing up at everything Margaret says. Every time they try to have a conversation, it descends into bickering.

Dad: It is a pity. But maybe these issues need to be dealt with before the family can move on? Maybe it’s a good thing?

Mum: Yeah, I guess even normal families have to compromise at Christmas time. I mean, we always have to drive up to Newcastle to see your dad, and he hasn’t come down here in more than five years because he simply refuses to make the drive. Then we have to meet him at some awful club because he won’t cook lunch for us.

Dad: What? Dad made lunch for us on Christmas Day three years ago!

Mum: Yeah but it was woeful. A barbequed chicken and some salads.

Dad: Well is Christmas about the food you eat or the people you eat it with?

Me: Guys, Christmas is about getting drunk and admitting how you really feel about people. It’s about starting fights over repressed grudges and having painfully awkward public arguments in front of all your other family members, who scramble like mad to get out of the firing line as you attempt to embroil everyone else in your petty disputes. I’m glad to see you two are already getting into the swing of things.

Mum: Oh shut up, Annik.

Me: That’s the spirit!

Most of my relatives live interstate or in France and the Sydney ones don’t like us, so my family usually spends Christmas day getting drunk in our living room and letting out all the pent-up rage that has accumulated over the year.

“Why should you get to park in the driveway while my car sits out on the street like a whore?” I snap at my brother, tearing open a carefully wrapped gift from my mother. “Oh look, more Bryce Fucking Courtenay. You know he hasn’t written anything good since Four Fires. Buy me some Tim Winton or something. Goddamn it.”

“I’m the oldest,” my brother says, slurring slightly, “I get to park where ever the hell I want.”

“You’re the ugliest,” I retort. “Besides, you sell cleaning products, you’re going nowhere in life. At least I went to uni. I tried to make something of myself.”

“Yeah, tried being the operative word. Unlucky for you, there isn’t much demand for ice-queen bitch accountants with half a degree under their belt and a drinking problem. Face it, Neek, you’re a fucking failure. You have no career prospects, and no man will ever marry you because you have terrible genes. No offence, Mum.”

“You cunt, I’ll kill you,” I say, smacking his beer off the coffee table and reaching for his eyes, which were recently operated on and cost him $9,000 in medical bills.

At this point, my father rises from his cane chair and sighs. He walks over to his new electric piano and plugs in his headphones. Then he sits and plays Gershwin for three hours, until we have all passed out or gone to our bedrooms. The piano is my father’s happy place. He is an amazing musician, and people often go to my parents’ church just to hear my dad play. But at home, he plays to himself through headphones while the rest of us sit on the couch and watch television. Eventually, my mother falls asleep on the lounge and my brother goes to the garage to work on his motorbike. I walk down the road to the park with play equipment and sit at the top of the slippery-dip. I smoke cigarettes and ash onto the slide, thinking about all the local children who will now go home to their mothers with ashy, smelly pants. I think about how much I hate my family. I think about how much I hate Christmas. I think about the arbitrary cruelty of having a designated day of the year where I am forced to spend 24 hours with my family, regardless of whether I am in a good mood or have a sufficient supply of valium to see me through the holiday.

It wasn’t always like this. We used to have guests over for Christmas. Not traditional guests (ie friends and family) but random people my mother had met throughout the year who didn’t have anything better to do on Christmas day, because they were so scummy that they had failed to achieve basic relationships in life and had nobody to hang out with on the most important holiday of the year.

First there was Warwick, a thirty-something IT professional who lurked around my parents’ church and rode his bicycle everywhere. He came over for Christmas each year, and I hated him passionately.

“I think he’s a pedophile,” I told my mother as we stood at the kitchen window, looking out at  Warwick in the backyard. He was sitting by the pool, supervising the neighbour’s children as they swam.

“Do any of you kids know what skinny dipping means?” he asked them, trailing his big toe through the water. “I like to skinny dip.”

Then there were the pregnant bikie trashbags. They only came once – the last year we had guests. My mum had invited Gail, a crusty woman she met at TAFE, and her daughters. They showed up for lunch at 4pm and were all wearing leather jackets.

“Sorry we’re so late,” Gail said, picking something out of her teeth. “Young Natalie here had to stop every five minutes to take a piss.”

“I’m pregnant,” Natalie explained.

“Cool,” I said, draining my wine glass.

“Not cool!” Gail shouted. “Do you know how many times I’ve driven her to the abortion clinic? She pussies out at the last minute every time and decides to ruin her life instead.”

“How old were you when you had Natalie?” I asked pleasantly.

“She was sixteen,” Natalie replied, “Just a year older than me now.”

“What a charming family tradition,” I smiled, pouring myself a gin and tonic. “I recently turned sixteen myself.”

“If that’s the case,” Gail interrupted, “Should you really be drinking, young lady?”

“Well I’m not pregnant,” I replied.

Just then Warwick entered the house, holding a dripping child under each arm. “Did somebody say something about babies?” he gasped.

“Yeah,” I said, “This is Natalie. She’s pregnant, but she’s still trying to work up the guts to have an abortion.”

“I beg your pardon!” Gail spluttered.

“I like babies,” Warwick said.

“Oh my god, we’re out of wine,” Mum whispered to me.

“I’ll get some more,” I offered. I caught a bus to the local shopping centre and smoked a joint on the loading dock. Then I watched The Ring three times because nothing short of the apocalypse would cause Greater Union to close their doors. By the time I got home, Mum was asleep on the lounge, Dad was playing the piano, and my brother had disappeared to the garage.

Around this time every year, my mother sits at her computer for a day and types up her annual Family Newsletter. This usually opens with a witty anecdote about how domestically inept she is, describes something stupid my dad has done, bitches about the fact that my brother still lives at home, and then reveals everything embarrassing I’ve done during the year. Mum then prints out 400 copies and mails it to all her friends, family, neighbours, co-workers, bible study group, TAFE classmates, hairdressers, therapists and accountants. It’s up to me to avoid all those people for the following 12 months.

Past newsletters have included the following:

• Annik has stopped going to church in order to pursue a life of sin (2001)
• Annik lost her virginity (2002)
• Annik went drinking instead of studying for any of her HSC exams (2004)
• Annik got alcohol poisoning (2004)
• Annik has been dumped by the same boy three times (2005)
• Annik has begun experimenting with drugs (2006)
• Annik failed her uni degree (2006)
• Annik has gained a stack of weight (2006)

…and so on.

I wonder what little gems Ma will choose to include this year? She has quite a selection to choose from:

• Annik has quit no less than five jobs throughout 2008
• Annik got her nose pierced and refused to remove the ring despite various infections
• Annik lied to an entire South African community in order to exempt herself from completing a volunteer work assignment and gain compassionate priority for an international flight
• Annik had a seizure and wet her pants in front of a thousand odd people at the Hordern Pavillion
• Annik can’t remember her own birthday because she was so intoxicated she spent 3+ hours straight sitting on the same couch in front of a fan

While I was growing up, my family did not put up the Christmas tree for five consecutive years. I’d like to say that we were progressive non-traditionalists who scoffed at commercialised pagan rituals, but in truth we were simply lazy. My mother, especially, believed that if something would only require undoing in the near future, there was no real point in doing it in the first place. (I suspect that this, along with being overweight, is the reason all her pants had elasticised waistbands.) I’m now wenty-two years old and I still have no idea how to make a bed. When I was a child, my mother furnished my bedroom with a mattress, a pillow and a doona. During summer, she would simply remove the doona and leave me with its cover. It never presented an issue until I began sleeping over at friends’ houses. Then I would secretly pack a sleeping bag and lie inside it on top of the bed, terrified of wrinkling the sheets. “Oh sweetheart,” my friend’s mother would say as she poured me an orange juice the next morning, “You didn’t have to make the bed!” Unbeknownst to her, I never unmade the damn thing.

My family has never really been into festivities. Last week I had a birthday, which was largely ignored apart from the household making the effort to eat a meal together. As a present, my parents agreed not to force me to pay for my own car insurance and registration for another twelve months. Two days later, I came home from work to find a book sitting on my bedside table. My brother had stuck a post-it note on the front reading: “Dear Annik. Happy thingy. Chris.”

As far as Christmas is concerned, over the years we all gradually began copying Chris’s method of purchasing gifts, tying the top of the plastic bags in which they were packed by frazzled sales assistants, and writing the intended recipient’s name on the front using a permanent marker. Then we stacked them in a messy pile underneath the coffee table and prayed that the cat would not urinate on top of it.

A month before my 18th Christmas, my father came home one day with a fibre-optic tree. “There!” he said, propping it up in the corner of the lounge room and plugging it into a power point, “Now is anybody feeling enthusiastic enough to flick a goddamn switch?”

The sad thing is we weren’t.