Christmas Day.

    The Snowman household was in its usual state of disorganised chaos but today the bedlam was multiplied tenfold. Whoever said Christmas is a time of relaxation with family and friends didn’t have to spend it here.

    Even before I started drinking I came up with a great idea to enhance the holiday spirit.

    I thought I’d dye my beard a nice electric blue colour.

    This seemed a good initiative from several angles: it would amuse small child, it would make me feel really groovy and it would piss off Mrs. Snowman beyond belief (I did it last year and she went ballistic). It worked perfectly, right up until the time I actually opened the packet.

    Unfortunately the blue hair dye reacted with the peroxide and it ended up green…and not a jolly seasonal emerald colour.

    It looked like a huge lump of hairy snot had congealed on my chin.

    My beard scared the shit out of small child who screamed every time she looked at me and rather than feeling even slightly funky I felt like a complete idiot. The only plus point is that it really pissed off the wife.

    Talking of the wife, she was incarcerated in the kitchen making lunch. Well, she actually started cooking the turkey yesterday evening because for some reason she’d bought the biggest one available in the entire northern hemisphere. It was about the same size as a baby brontosaurus and way too much for a single meal. I have a feeling we may be eating several versions of turkey for the next couple of months. I can look forward to turkey curry, turkey risotto, turkey stew, turkey sandwiches and turkey pie. By mid-January I’ll probably have sprouted fucking wings.

    And so to breakfast, which this year consisted of a bowl of corn flakes, half a box of chocolates, two mince pies and a large glass of Southern Comfort.

    As every other sensible person in the country was gently waking up, Mrs. Snowman could contain herself no longer and dived for the presents. A huge pile under the Christmas tree had taken about three hours to wrap. It took the wife just under a tenth of a second to rip all the paper back off again.

    She was, for the most part, content with her gifts and spent the next hour admiring several new items of jewellery, clothing and electrical equipment which will probably find a permanent home in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

    My personal haul this year was, however, largely predictable.

    Three pairs of socks (all the wrong size), five DVDs (all duplicates of ones I already have), a tie and monogrammed handkerchief set (with the wrong initials), a specialist coffee set (I don’t drink coffee) and for some inexplicable reason a book on Japanese cookery all attracted my attention with scaled levels of puzzlement. One or two other items were considerably better received and on the whole everyone was happy with their gifts as I got down to the serious business of drinking.

    Lunchtime was fast approaching as the level of the Southern Comfort bottle headed downwards and I shakily took my place for the arrival of the food.

    I’m not sure how the table managed to take the weight but eventually it was all brought out and systematically devoured. At any time of the year I wouldn’t dream of piling my plate so high that I have to stand up to see who’s sitting opposite me, but at Christmas it is not only acceptable but practically compulsory.

    After I finally managed to cram in the last roast potato and see my stomach expand to the size of an airship, Mrs. Snowman asked the inevitable question:

    “Would anyone like any more?”

    I guess that would depend if she was keen on seeing my pancreas explode.

    After congratulating the wife on a wonderful meal, I politely declined her offer to spontaneously detonate and decide on another glass of wine instead.

    But it wasn’t the wine that was going to cause the problems.

    Imagine what will happen to the digestive system of an ox if it eats several tons of brussel sprouts, swede, carrots, bread sauce and potatoes in a single sitting. Now imagine what will happen to an over-indulgent wife, a mother-in-law (who managed to get most of the food into her mouth at the first attempt), a brother-in-law, surrogate daughter and husband and a small child. Not to mention your semi-drunk reporter.

    Well, nothing for about three hours, then…

    Fartquake.

    That other traditional Christmas evening activity was performed with astonishing enthusiasm. A whole range was executed to such a level that all the downstairs windows had to be opened although small child overdid it when a squelchy one indicated she’d crapped her diaper. After the infant was carried at arms length to a separate room to be changed, I opened the super-large tin of individually wrapped chocolates to find they’d all been eaten except the hard toffee centres in the orange foil wrapping. Why do they bother putting those things in there?

    Anyway, it wasn’t long before the annual argument broke out over what to watch on the television. Mrs. Snowman wanted some dreadful soap opera (no fucking chance), mother-in-law requested an Andrea Bochelli concert (possible but still very unlikely), brother-in-law decided on a re-run of the Cricket World Cup (quite probable) while my choice veered towards either Pulp Fiction or a fascinating documentary on Pablo Escobar.

    We finally agreed on a compromise.

    Mrs. Snowman and mother-in-law were banished to the bedrooms while brother-in-law and myself opened another couple of beers and flopped down to watch the life story of a Columbian drug baron.

    Eventually after the rubbish television had confined itself to the shit pit of history, wife and mother-in-law rejoined us to watch the standard Christmas horror movie. Ironic really, all they needed to do was set up a video camera in the corner of the room and broadcast the day’s events. That would make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like The Sound of Music.

    Astonishingly, I managed to play one of the freerolls today although the guy that knocked me out obviously wasn’t familiar with the idea of seasonal altruism and went all-in against my A-K suited with Q-3 off and hit trips on the turn. I hope he enjoyed his Christmas dinner…and chokes to death on a turkey sandwich tomorrow lunchtime.

    And so the curtain is slowly drawn across another Christmas day as your reporter sinks peacefully into a beer glass and figures out how to explain an unforeseen situation to Mrs. Snowman in the morning.

    I inadvertently shut the cat in the kitchen and the little bastard ate a large part of the turkey that the wife had left out under a protective blanket of tin foil. At least I won’t be subjected to turkey kebabs for another year.

    Merry Christmas everyone.

Starting bank:  $0