Christmas is a time for sharing, and what better thing to share than stories of families behaving badly?
Because no matter how appallingly loud, obnoxious and irritating your loved ones are, take cheer in the fact that someone, somewhere, is likely enduring a family Christmas worse than yours.
My own family — Royal by name, but certainly not by nature — could fill Santa's sack many times over with anecdotes of yuletide antics.
So in that spirit of sharing, and in the belief that one person's embarrassment is good for someone else's amusement, here's a small selection.
Like the time my cousin Adam and I conspired to slip assorted alcoholic beverages into the glass of our younger cousin Nick.
Only when he slipped slowly beneath the table to lie amongst the spent Christmas crackers, with their lame jokes and crappy crepe paper hats, was our plot uncovered.
That was the day I learnt that the essence of a conspiracy is for it to remain secret.
There were culinary disasters too.
Such as the year my father found a recipe for making Thousand Island dressing using vanilla ice-cream.
The result was memorable, in much the same way as green cocktail onions and stuff in jellied aspic are.
Surely it's high time the 1970s were prosecuted for crimes against good taste and common sense.
But the stand out winner for Christmas shockers comes from the early 1990s.
Even though '70s food (and my father's cooking) had long been banished, the day started badly thanks to the turkey.
Cheapskate dad insisted we use the no-name knock-off barbeque kettle, rather than his new, well-known American branded one.
I get people being precious over their cars, but really, a barbeque kettle?!
Unfortunately the size of the bird required to feed the ravenous hordes exceeded the size of the device meant to cook it.
Curious about why a stream of profanity (along with a dull thumping noise) was coming from the side verandah on Christmas morning, my mother poked her head out the door to find me beating the poor fowl with a rubber mallet.
The aim was to flatten it a bit, especially around the breast bone, so the kettle lid would fit. That it was necessary to do this explains the swearing.
I'm pleased to say it worked and, what's more, the bird was uncharacteristically moist and tender. It must have been the rubber mallet effect.
Not that we got to fully savour the triumph-against-adversity-turkey, because halfway through lunch my aunt decided to share a story.
After paying my dad out about his dyed (and thinning) coiffure, my aunt announced that she too was losing her hair.
But not the hair on her head. We really hoped she wouldn't specify exactly where, but she did.
This unexpected, and unwanted, revelation had the effect of dividing the table in two.
The younger generation blanched and lost the will to eat, while the oldies shrieked with delight, pouring themselves another completely unnecessary round of drinks.
That was the day I learnt the meaning of the phrase 'too much information'.
And so on to the presents.
I'd discovered a photo of mum from her horse riding days. Or in the case of this photo, her days of coming off the horse she was meant to be riding.
What a great gift this would make I thought, and so had the photo copied, enlarged and framed to give to the relatives.
It was a hit with everyone, except The Mother. All these years later, she still frowns darkly when she sees it.
Nevertheless, as mentioned before, 'tis the season for sharing and this particular snap deserves a wider audience — whatever the personal cost.
My raucous, unruly, and quite ridiculous family — we all outdid ourselves that Christmas.
Our collective bad behaviour is one of my happiest memories because, as it turned out, it was our last Christmas together.
Before the next one rolled around, age and illness had carried off my grandmother, while an accident killed my co-conspirator cousin, Adam.
Another photo also features strongly from that day. It's of the cousins playing up to the camera, just before we sat down to that lunch with its various trimmings.
As Charles Dickens, who knew a thing or two about bad behaviour at Christmas, wrote: "there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour".
