It is one of the most fascinating parts of this very special time of year that everyone has their own set of preferences, the private rituals and precious little details that make all the difference. In fact it is a tribute to the richness of the season that however we choose to pass the time, wherever we go, however we celebrate, we all have our own answer when it comes to what part of Christmas we hate the most.
Perhaps you hate Christmas parties the most. Or the desiccated canon of Christmas pop music. Maybe what really makes Christmas the season of hate is the air of familial strangulation, the resentments and absences that can lie safely dormant most of the year but which must now, because of adverts, movies, and the tyranny of familial completeness, be gouged out into the light, or at best papered over with heartsick gaiety. Perhaps Christmas is simply a more personal experience. You might focus on hating a certain type of food, your own diluted essence of ancestral Christmas loathing: Battenberg, Florentine biscuits, mulled wine that tastes of furniture polish.
The one thing that seems likely to stay off most people’s list of Christmas hates is football, which remains the best thing about Christmas by a mile. Football and Christmas: it’s worth saying it again. This is just a brilliant combination, a shared blend of warmth and escapism that speaks to the basic idea of the sport in this country as a spectacle, a spree, a beano.
They go right back together, too. Just as the idea of Christmas as a shared holiday with crackers and trees and chortling benevolence was born out of the spread of Victorian prosperity, so organised football was a product of the same forces, the emergence of working-class leisure, train travel, the half-day factory holiday. Right into the 50s, football matches were still being played on Christmas Day, and even now football lurks happily at the edges of the most gruelling of holidays, a breath of escape and renewal.
This coming week there is, as ever, a grande bouffe of festive football just waiting to be crammed into our dribbling maws. Matches will be played on 10 of the 12 days of Christmas, a total of 147 league and FA Cup games spawning what is a remarkable feat of mass mobilisation, with at least two million journeys – West Ham to West Brom, Cardiff to Colchester, Manchester to Yeovil – across a frost-bound, fog-prone rail and road network that always seems to creak at the edges a little more at the end of another year.
Inside the grounds there are still those shared Christmassy bonds. The terrible, mawkish poignance of the Santa-hatted fan. The songs, the ritual winter football food, the ceremonial foul-mouthed bile. Plus the fact that the natural physical state of Christmas is also the perfect condition in which to enjoy football. Here are two activities with the rare quality of being more, rather than less, entertaining when drunk, stuffed to the gills, or wall-eyed with hangover.
Even the players seem unusually noble at Christmas, kept apart from their families, emerging from their hotel rooms into a great burping cheer of second-hand eau de Christmas, and performing for the crowds like fond, absent travelling dads.
Football managers, too, have something festive about them at this time of year, an air of the department-store Santa Claus as they stand marooned on their touchlines, beards askew, cheeks ruddy, all doomed hope and spent promises. Steve Bruce is perhaps the most obviously Christmassy of the current lot, carrying with him the hopeful, hangdog look of a man perpetually on the verge of dashing off to ferret through the aisles at Debenhams, sweating at the lingerie racks, whirling around in search of perfume.
By contrast Louis van Gaal has an agreeably punitive quality, the kind of corrective northern European Santa Claus you can imagine delivering an instructive two-hour pre-dumpling sermon to the local orphanage before handing out a single festive tangerine to each wincingly grateful boy.
This isn’t just nostalgia of course. The natural synergy between football and Christmas is now a triumph of marketing too. Just as Christmas is basically a really great brand, so the Premier League sets out to make every match, every super Sunday, feel like Christmas morning, a brilliant fit of grand, illusory thrills and velvet-gloved coercion. So much so that when Richard Scudamore finally leaves the Premier League after a hugely successful tenure it would come as no surprise to hear he’s been poached not by Pepsi or Nike or the global giants, but by Christmas plc.
At the end of which here it comes: a perfect fit of old and new. Other countries may function best with a winter break but without Christmas the English season would lose a significant part of itself. Plus Christmas itself would be diminished, not least because the best bits of football offer such obvious relief from the worst bits of Christmas.
Christmas is family: football is the opposite of family, a gathering of rude, loud dissonant parts. Christmas is horribly claustrophobic, an experience analogous to being processed headfirst through a Victorian sewer gummed with cranberry sauce and tinsel while a well-meaning aunt crams custard into your nostrils and the music of Cliff Richard drowns out your screams.
Football, by contrast, is a matter of escape and open air, a loosening of the bonds that is, even now, pretty much the opposite of the DFS Sofa warehouse Boxing Day sale. And really, if Christmas football is a reminder of anything, it is that while the trappings and the trimmings may be up for grabs, that deep, festive, peregrinatory soul remains just about undiminished.
