Family Christmases when I was growing up were an unadulterated nightmare from start to finish. They usually started with my mother practically handing out scripts for how she wanted everyone to behave, and an atmosphere of brittle jollity laced with sheer terror as everyone knew it was all going to go to rat shit again.
My sister hated opening presents in front of the giver and handled it by being rude and belligerent. She would hand back at least one present saying "I don't want it". My brother would be a nervous wreck and reacted by being silly and winding people up. My stepfather would turn into Victorian Dad and get progressively angrier and more uptight as the wrapping paper mess mounted. He would sit hunched in the corner (in a full Santa suit and beard my mother dressed him in) cutting crosses into the sprouts and occasionally roaring at someone to shut up or stop being bloody stupid.
Christmas dinner was an uneasy interface between my mother's desire to do "family Christmas" and both parents' ingrained conviction that talking/frivolity at the table is WRONG. So we would pull the crackers, put on the hats, and then eat in silence. If I close my eyes I can still see my mother's grim, furious face with a sheen of sweat and a fucking paper crown sitting on top of it. Usually by the time dinner was served there had been at least one major bust-up so at least two people would be either sulking or in tears. The only conversation would be titbits like my stepfather standing up and announcing "I'm going to put these sprouts back in the microwave PigeonsMum - they're RAW"
After dinner, if we were really young and there were toys to put together/batteries to organise/decals to apply, my stepfather would be ordered to do it while my mother sniped from the sidelines and whichever unfortunate child it was watched with a suitably grateful demeanour, or else. Something would get broken. "Easy come, easy fucking go".
Games. Oh sweet Jesus the games. Charades would involve my stepfather repeatedly doing "A Touch Of Frost" because he quite literally didn't know anything else and had been drinking on the sly all afternoon, and my mother making increasingly cruel jibes about him having had a stroke and somebody should call an ambulance. Card games would involve my stepfather accusing people of cheating and having a full-blown tantrum about the rules. Any game between two of the children would be shut down because it was noisy and "bloody stupid". My mother would start to unravel because we weren't conforming to the script. There would be screaming, throwing of objects, pronouncements of "I don't know why I bother, you've never brought me anything but fucking heartache, any of you" and there would be hissed arguments about who "ruined Christmas". The day would conclude (in the small hours, usually) with somebody either storming or being thrown out, suitcases emptied out of upstairs windows, taxis screaming off down the street, my mother thundering around the house banging doors and blaming whoever happened to be in the way.
Merry fucking Christmas 