What’s your family tradition?

Perhaps a recipe for Christmas pudding, handed down through generations and festively set on fire, a blue and white flickering light, at the end of the dinner? Or maybe a Scottish fry-up first thing in the morning, with tattie scones, black pudding and the good bacon you’ve been buying from the same butcher for years?

Perhaps you’re a matching Christmas jumper or pyjama family? Or, conversely, do you all dress in your Sunday best and wait until after the Christmas meal before you tear open presents with a glass of sherry?

We had traditions in our family, too. Always a bag of chocolate coins, a handful of nuts, a few satsumas fragrancing our Christmas stockings. Always the grown-ups getting too drunk and someone having a row; the pressure and expectation of the day spilling over in the most destructive ways.

It might not surprise you to hear that, aside from satsumas and chocolate coins, I’ve not wanted to bring many of the traditions from my upbringing over into adulthood. Indeed, when I estranged myself from my family in my mid-20s, I had to learn entirely new ways of being.

Of all the things that were painful and difficult without them, like birthdays, graduations, heartbreaks – the things you would naturally........

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