One of my favourite images of Christmas is bogus. And it has been bugging me for years. It is of one of those great Yuletide cliches. As confected as a Richard Curtis movie. Snow may be lying all about, deep and crisp and computer-generated, but inside the house all is warm and jovial. There is a roaring flame-effect fire. Streamers stream, baubles glisten and some fiend has put Wonderful Christmas Time on a loop. Tipsy aunts are leaning against the kitchen counters and children are running round and round for no apparent reason. Suddenly the doorbell rings and everyone rushes to open the front door. In comes Uncle Jamie holding a pile of presents reaching up to his chin.
In Love Actually, that moment was played out in detail with Colin Firth as Uncle Jamie, but the same cliche is there in White Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life and even in Dickens' A Christmas Carol where first Scrooge's nephew and then the old man himself arrive with armfuls of presents and bonhomie. In Dickensian Britain and its modern incarnation, Curtis Land, it is a given that people are always arriving to spend Christmas at each other's houses. It's an expectation reinforced by all those American films about driving across country to spend Thanksgiving with your folks.
This makes Christmas very hard for those who have no family or friends descending on them this festive season. We may not actually like our family – in fact, we probably remind ourselves annually that there are more family arguments and even homicides at Christmas than any other time of the year – but if we're on our own, we feel their absence acutely. I know I have. And endless repeats of Love Actually and the Fezziwig scene in A Christmas Carol only make this worse.
But the fact is that more and more people are spending Christmas on their own or with one other person, or just with the cat. We live further from our families. We remain single longer. We have children later. We get divorced more often. So there are fewer and fewer teeming households out there for Uncle Jamie to arrive at with his pile of presents. In any case, he has probably ordered you something from Amazon that will be delivered ready-wrapped by post, or bought you shares in a goat. Yet those of us without a house full of guests guffawing under the plastic mistletoe tend to feel bad about this, as if we are the only ones left on our own this Christmas.
When I was a child, my mother's family still kept the traditional British Christmas going. All her cousins – plus their husbands and children – would congregate in the front room around our piano. There was singing, parlour games, party hats and card games, and a reverential break while we all sat and watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. There were even illicit kisses swapped between cousins who had uncorked an ancient bottle of Drambuie. My father – one of the husbands who married into this family – used to refer to it as "that dreadful annual knees-up" but he enjoyed the company and there was always a loud cheer as Uncle Jamie (Uncle Alfie, in our case) turned up a little worse for wear.
In my family, among the current generation, no one is stirring this Christmas. Everyone wants to be in their own home. The same goes for our friends. Some people are willing to be hosts, but no one wants to get in the car and be Colin Firth, standing on the threshold of someone else's house with an armful of presents. And maybe this is as it should be.
Why shouldn't we enjoy being at home on our own at Christmas? The problem is that people feel isolation acutely at this time of year. It's almost as bad as not having a date on Valentine's Day. We are haunted by the belief that everyone else is down the Queen Vic, swapping gifts and boozy hugs or piling into Old Fezziwig's to join him and his family for the best communal Christmas ever.
But the truth is, far more of us are going to be on our own this Christmas than ever before. And is this really so awful? I'm going to be holed up at home with an unhealthy amount of food and drink, books I want to read and movies I want to watch. My wife will be there and so will two very important cats. No one has invited us to be Uncle Jamies this year so each of us will probably spend much of Christmas Day post-prandially asleep. But my feeling is that this is to be celebrated. Christmas is the one wonderful still point in the year when the whole world (or so it seems) relaxes and puts its feet up. Why get in a car and descend on someone else in the name of Richard Curtis?
I speak from experience. Many years ago I was Uncle Jamie. Convinced that a long lunch with my parents and then-wife was not enough to make for a truly happy Christmas Day, I bundled us all into the car and we drove to see a friend who had said that our families really should meet up over the festive season. No children running round and round, no festive music, no tipsy aunt, no cries of "It's Uncle Adrian!" greeted our arrival in the hallway, but a rather tired family of five who were clearly aghast at being invaded by us.
I have also experienced Christmas wholly on my own. One year, post-divorce, having opened my presents to myself, I was joined by my young son, dropped off for the afternoon by his mother, and together we watched a video of Raiders of the Lost Ark in my flat. Much as I loved my boy, I found it hard. I couldn't help contrasting the Dickensian "knees-ups" of my childhood with the two of us sitting on my sofa, reciting the Indie dialogue we knew off by heart. I remember looking out of the window and seeing a family of three walking a dog and thinking, I'm sure you'd like me if you met me – I wish I could share Christmas with you.
The truth is that most of us don't want to be alone – and we certainly don't want to be alone at Christmas – but that doesn't mean we should feel the need to be in the middle of some midwinter bacchanalia. Judging by the number of newspaper articles on how to endure your own Christmas party – and to survive others – there is a big expectation that the festive season is all about socialising. But this need not be so. This year, enjoy being on your own with a significant other, two-legged or four, but don't lament that you're not at Fezziwig's tonight because no one else is, and that is the true wonder of Christmas.
Of course, anyone who has seen Love Actually too often (as I have) will know that in fact Colin Firth looks at the assembled group of family and friends and says: "Sorry." He realises he is in the wrong place and leaves to go and find the one person he wishes to be with at Christmas. And the last words we hear are, "I hate Uncle Jamie."
