After the quiz, we play this accent game. One person is given a movie quote. They have got to say it in a certain accent, and then the others have to guess the accent. My uncle Mark’s the funniest. He’s just so bad. Everything sounds Welsh.
He’s like, ‘No, it’s Jamaican.’
‘Then why do you sound Welsh?’
Loads of funny things always happen at my nanny’s house on Christmas Day. One year my mam was sat on the edge of the couch and when she moved, the whole arm of the chair came off. She was like, ‘Oh my God.’
‘Prop it up, prop it up,’ I said.
So she got loads of Argos catalogues and propped it up. Then when everyone came and sat down, my mam said to my dad, ‘Sit there if you want.’ So he sat down, leaned on the arm and it fell off.
He got the blame. My nanny went mental at him. She was like, ‘Mark, what have you done?’
‘I don’t know my own strength, Christine.’
My mam and I were just looking at each other, thinking, ‘We can never discuss this.’ Except when I put it in this book.
Then at about eight o’clock on Christmas evening, we go back home and just chill on the couch. We end the day with a kebab or a Chinese. They deliver kebabs and Chinese on Christmas Day. That’s why Bishop Auckland, our town, is known as ‘Bish Vegas’. Maybe because it’s so glamorous, or maybe because it’s got a lot of slot machines!
Boxing Day is just as much fun. Normally everyone comes round our house, and my mam does a buffet with lots of drink. We have pies, sausage rolls, vol-au-vents. We have a sort of open house policy where people just turn up. It’s really nice.
Of course, a lot of the food is frozen, but my mam will say that it isn’t. She’ll tell me, ‘Oh, I just took these sausage rolls out of the oven.’
And I’ll say, ‘Yes, but you’ve just put them in the oven from the bag.’
‘Well, no one needs to know that.’
‘I think they’re going to know that you haven’t been up this morning at 4 a.m. making your own pastry. Mam, we know you!’
I have lots of favourite memories from Christmases past. One of the best ones was when my grandad was pretty drunk. He was like bouncing up and down on a wired fireguard and he was singing ‘Yellow Submarine’. But instead of ‘We all live in a yellow submarine’, he was singing, ‘We all live in a green tambourine.’
He got everything right – except the colour and the object! He really didn’t realise, but we all started joining in anyway: ‘We all live in a green tambourine.’ I always remember that because we were all crying with laughter.
I also have very fond memories of lots of family games at Christmas. Sometimes we play on SingStar, and that always causes arguments. When people lose, they go, ‘Well, I should have got better marks than that!’
And I say to them, ‘It’s just a game. It’s for fun and it’s for kids.’ These people are all forty plus, so they should just calm down.
However, drink and games do not always mix very well, especially when you’re playing Trivial Pursuit. That always causes rows. Oh my God, I remember once we were playing and my uncle Daniel literally threatened to leave. He was like, ‘Well, if people aren’t going to start playing fair, I’m getting up and I’m walking out.’
After that, it was a bit awkward. We were like, ‘We should probably just stop playing.’ It wasn’t really in the spirit of Christmas.
Another funny aspect is because we all take a load of presents round to my nanny’s, we all end up going home with the wrong presents. We sometimes even end up with our own presents that we’d given to someone else.
We just put all the presents in different bags. At the end, you’re like, ‘I’m sure I had a £50 gift card from Next.’ But you never see that again. You wind up with a toast rack instead.
On a more positive note, you can also end up with fifty selection boxes of chocolates. That’s one of the things I love about Christmas. Normally chocolate bars are 70p each, but at Christmas time selection boxes are a quid from the pound shop and so you get five bars at 20p each. Woo hoo!
Christmas is also an excuse to eat your own bodyweight in Ferrero Rochers. If it was happening in April, everyone would ask, ‘Why are you eating a whole box of Ferrero Rochers on your own?’ But if you do it at Christmas, no one bats an eyelid. They’re like, ‘What’s that? Ferrero Rocher? Can I have one? Can I have a whole packet?’
At any other time of the year, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that is just pure greed.’ But at Christmas, no one cares. You can eat five selection boxes on the trot and half a litre of Baileys, and no one judges you. It’s the only time of the year that that’s appropriate. In fact, it’s encouraged. It’s almost the law. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing Christmas wrong, in my eyes.
Looking back, my all-time favourite Christmas present was a Cabbage Patch Kid because I had just wanted one for so long. When we lived in Shildon, Santa used to come round the streets and ask all the kids what they wanted for Christmas. It was honestly amazing.
So you’d hear a bell and there’d be Christmas music, and Santa would suddenly come into the street on a float. All the kids would be stood outside waiting. Once you could hear the bell, you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, he’s coming, he’s coming!’
One year, I met Santa in the
