A guide to surviving even the most obnoxious Christmas parties

You go round to a friend’s house. They’ve invited you over for Christmas Drinks, or as it’s also known “Hey, Why Don’t You Pop Round For A Drink, And Bring A Bottle Of Bubbly, Ideally The Expensive Stuff That Can Legally Be Called Champagne According To International Trademark Agreements” Drinks. You walk into their house and hand them some cheap bubbly you brought from home – the kind that cannot legally be called Champagne because it’s not from the Champagne region of France, it’s closer to the Cranbourne region of Frankston. The friends look at the bottle and go “ohhhh lovely” but they don’t mean it, then they put your bubbly in a dark corner of the kitchen where nobody has ever gone before. Now they humiliate you by offering you a glass of proper Champagne and your bottle is left unopened for the rest of the visit.

One day they will donate your bubbly to a school raffle where it will be dumped inside a “Basket of Bliss” gift-hamper. That’s OK: that’s where you got it.

You go round to a friend’s house. They’ve invited you over for an End-of-Year Get-Together, which is also called, a “Hey, Why Don’t You Pop Round And See How Many Christmas Cards I’ve Got On My Mantelpiece, I’m Really Very Popular” Get-Together. You walk into their living room and there’s Christmas cards everywhere – on every ledge, on every shelf, strung across the room on huge lengths of twine like laundry hanging between Bangkok apartment blocks. Then they say, “Let me get you a drink”, and they leave you there alone to contemplate what a sad, worthless nobody you are, because you only got four Christmas cards this year, three of them from local real estate agents wishing you a happy holiday season and a free property appraisal.

But don’t despair, look close at your friend’s cards: a few are Christmas cards from last year and up the back, old birthday cards from the ’90’s. Cheaters.

You go round to a friend’s house. They’ve invited you over for a Holiday Season Catch-Up, or as it’s also called, a “Hey, Why Don’t You Pop Round And We’ll Tell You About All The Wonderful Things That Have Happened In Our Wonderful Lives Over the Past 12 Wonderful Months (We’re So Blessed But We Never Take It For Granted, Never!)” Catch-Up. They sit you down and tell you things like, “We’ve been meaning to renovate our kitchen for years but we’ve always chosen holidays instead, but this year we managed both a reno AND a holiday! How good is that?” And you have to smile like you are happy for them, but it’s a struggle (it helps to think about baby sloths in a bathtub, awww, their wet fur is sticking up, awwww).

At some point, they will take you to see the new kitchen, which looks exactly like the old kitchen, but you must feign excitement saying, “Wow, a drawer for cutlery! I hear cutlery-drawers are the sizzling-hot new kitchen trend of 2017! Sizzling!”

You go round to your friends houses for all these drinks and get-togethers and catch-ups, and you take comfort in the fact that you don’t have to do this again for another year – and hopefully by then there will be a rapid escalation of The South China Sea Dispute and you’ll be busy fighting in a war, or incinerated. It’s a reassuring thought that you can hold in your heart, that helps keep you going.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.