Bad-tempered crowds, incessant ho-ho-ho-ing, cabin-fever with family you hate. If you’re struggling for survival this Christmas, Faith Bosworth has some tips to help you through…

Does anyone actually like Christmas any more? Call me the Grinch, but really I am so over it – especially since I grew up and it stopped being all about me. And also, when people started giving me self-help books as gifts.

It’s just a stressful time, especially when you’ve got the credit crunch scratching at the door, demanding to be fed with your lifeblood. Choosing what to buy people and then finding the money to pay for those gifts, what a hack.

For me, it comes down to the family. I love my family when I’m talking to them on the phone from the other side of the globe. When the distance between us is the difference between two hemispheres, it’s not even unusual for me to shed a tear of nostalgia at the memory of my brother pushing me into a gutter and breaking my arm on Christmas Eve.

But then I come home and I watch everyone biting back the gay jokes, because there’s actually a real living homo in the room, and I listen to my stepmother’s soliloquies on woman’s biological destiny as a mother and strangely, I just start to change my mind.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Don’t all act like you love Christmas now. Okay, I like the mulled wine, the trees and the street lights but I HATE the carols, the crowds and the constant stress.

Lucky for you, while I’m sitting in this puddle of negativity, a heart beat from attacking my stepmother’s stash of meds, I’m also balancing it with a certain bit of positivity (the self-help books advise this, so do the Buddhists and loads of other emotionally evolved people) and coming up with some coping strategies. So, in no particular order, my advice on how to survive it all:

1. Don’t give in to the nostalgia and just boycott the annual family Christmas. Stay with your friends, drink wine and make a nut roast, it will probably be awesome (not every year because then you’ll just be a bad person but I think everyone can have a year off from the family spiel every once in while).
2. Unashamedly drink through it. This is what hip flasks are made for.
3. If you’re not that type, you could start a rigorous exercise regime or a research project on the day at that you arrive ensuring that you spend loads of justified time out of the house.
4. To make things easy on your pocket, convince your family of the ethical value of giving gifts bought from a charity shop.
5. If there are kids in your family, hang out with them. They’ll love that you’re totally unlike other girls they know and are happy to give them piggy back rides and educate them about the nastiness of playground sayings like “that’s so gay”.
6. Make straight jokes and bring up gay trivia constantly. They’ll feel awkward, you’ll laugh, it will be great.
7. Get your jollies with a holiday fling or several one night stands or swingers parties or whatever it is you’re in to. You can repent and reform in the new year.