Christmas lunch is an event akin to a cultural tradition. Not so with Christmas dinner, which rarely gets mentioned in conversations about all the shenanigans over the holidays.
We’ve all seen it: the trio of football fans made up of two men and a woman, smiling at each other and leaning in toward a passing stranger, going through a litany of things:
“He came to watch Scotland beat Italy yesterday! That was funny.”
“He played in that C-level football team in Lagos and they lost all their games in the first half!”
“She wore that terrible dress. That might go in her memoirs!”
“He was watching Jimmie Akiku last year, and I don’t remember him winning a game!”
It’s a shame when they all get away, but aside from the unusual seating arrangements at the bar, what you might never see them on television is what’s going on at the table. In a survey commissioned by the National Eating Disorders Association, 70 percent of Britons under 45 named Christmas dinner as one of the top pressure points for relationships — ahead of parents’ expectations, their closest mates and partners. They cited things like a child’s birthday, Christmas cards and guilt-induced demands for presents, booze and food, as the main factors involved.