The day I Ruined Christmas

“Put the Knife down, Sam.”

I brought the two bottles of gin to Christmas dinner, with every intention of sharing them. 

Despite, or as a result of, not knowing me very well, my boss had kindly invited me round - along with any other teachers stranded overseas for the holidays. An invitation I honoured, only in the sense that I arrived.

Santa hadn’t found me in Spain. My Christmas spirit was at an all-time low. There’s nothing less festive than waking up alone in a puddle of evaporating piss. I separated my skin from the waterproof mattress and started drinking.

As the seasonally-appropriate breakfast beers went down, I found the lowest of low points: Christmas morning porn. The 25th of December is the least sexual day of the calendar year. Our systems are too full of love and cheer and pigs-in-blankets for any fleshly considerations. If you ever find yourself masturbating on Christmas day, your life has gone dismally wrong. The act has the moral weight of penance. Jesus Christ, this is exactly what you deserve, you horrid little man. Merry Christmas.

Without the natural intervention of conversation, boozing is far more efficient. By the time dinner came around, I was neither merry in spirit nor state.

As my boss ushered me in, I pushed the bottles of gin into his chest. He was a gloomily-handsome man who delighted in making sobering points, which, in my mind, were always undermined by the length and looseness of his arms. Every team meeting was like getting chastised by a dreary marionette.

Like all authority figures, the guy took himself, and his job, far too seriously for my liking. Nobody took themselves, or their job, more sillily than me. 

The living room was a jolly-enough assembly of teachers making the best of the muted occasion. All the superficial elements of Christmas were there, decorations, paper hats, a mean-spirited drunk, but without my family, or so much as a friend, the bubbly atmosphere made me violently homesick.

The evening would take the usual format: ramming home cherry-soaked meats under the long-forgotten guise of celebrating the son of god’s birth.

Ever the gracious guest, those eight euros of communal gin found their way back into my possession. There was goodwill in the air. My will was the morose exception and was gathering wrathfulness with every lap of the icebox.

For me, Christmas games have always been a matter of life or death. 

During my least-favourite colleague’s turn, I pulled a large blade from a kitchen drawer. Like an accomplished fencer, I encouraged her on at knifepoint - which did completely throw her game off.

In retrospect, I see the flaw with my threatening-a-new-colleague-with-a-kitchen-knife-on-Christmas-day bit was, for those not in on the joke, everyone else, it could come across a lot like threatening a new colleague with a kitchen knife on Christmas day. Any humour relies on the audience knowing that you would never actually stab a coworker over a game of charades. Unfortunately, we weren’t on that level yet.

“Sam, put the knife down.”

My rapier wit was clearly too advanced for these fools. Like all great jokes, the premise required a drawn-out explanation.

My organism was mostly gin by this stage, the mopiest liquor in grandfather’s cabinet.

Even so, the last memory of that Christmas was a cheery one. All of us sat around the table laughing at our tiers of mismatched furniture. Everyone pitched in for the potluck spread. One guest brought the roast potatoes, another brought the stuffing and I brought, less traditional Christmas-table mainstay, the ruckus. 

The dinner began, as dinners do in others’ houses, with a polite pause. Nobody making the first move. Suckers. I fisted a clump of chestnut stuffing out of the serving dish and into my gob, spraying my compliments to the chef. 

Over the next few weeks, the rest of the evening was parsed out by colleagues profoundly embarrassed on my behalf.

Here’s what they could bear to tell me:

I finished the two bottles of gin. I was violently homesick in the bathtub. I kicked an old man called Keith in the kidney. I was doing a kicking an old man in the kidney bit. It didn’t land as I’d hoped - the bit, that is. My parting words of gratitude to my hosts were, “You’re all fucking white cunts!” as my boss jostled the only white cunt in attendance out the front door.

I’ve never been one of those factoid-guffing know-it-alls who can reel you off every last line of their address. So the short haul home took him hours. As far as I was aware, I teleported.

As is recommended, my true feelings about my superior were on a need-to-know basis. After nine pints and a litre and a half of gin, my stance on who needed to know what shifted pretty radically. 

While my boss kept me alive, I cackled through all the failings and flailings of his flappy-armed management style. 

You slack-armed fuck. Ha! You couldn’t manage a car boot stall with those arms, you charmless dangler. Ha-ha! You are a fucking floppy twat, aren’t you? Hey? ha. Aren’t you?

The next day I vowed never to spend Christmas away from my family ever again.

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