How escaping the UK and going abroad on holiday saved our family Christmas

The weather outside was frightful. Thick fog bear-hugged the A40. We were in a car somewhere outside Oxford on Christmas Eve, although we could have been ticks inside the fleece of an unshorn sheep for all I could see outside the windscreen.

I hadn’t learned to drive until my early thirties. With the ink on my pass certificate still drying, one obvious idea had come to me and my partner Helena: this year, we had the freedom to drive around to see every member of our respective families. No need to risk the stress of delay-ridden trains, or to squeeze ourselves and everyone’s gifts onto National Express buses like human Buckaroos. Christmas was saved!

Call me green, but Christmas-time driving is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever willingly put myself through. Nobody on the roads seems to want to be there. Perhaps a more seasoned driver would relish the reflex challenge of an Audi, brake lights ablaze, materialising out of nowhere through the fog in front of you, or of wresting back control after encountering the strange weightlessness of a car on black ice. But to me, Swindon Drift somehow lacks the requisite mystique of a Fast and Furious franchise instalment.

By the time we arrived at our first stop, I discovered that the body does fun things when extremely tense for a few hours. And by fun, I of course mean weird. The blood vessels beneath my right eye were doing the rhumba, and my belly had become a whirling dervish. Starting off at that level of stress doesn’t equate to a relaxing family time.

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Our arrival signalled the emergence of “the box”, which is always kept in the garage, filled with crisps, fancy biscuits wrapped in foil, and continental raisin- or marzipan-based cakes that nobody eats at any other time of the year (and which my parents always inexplicably keep strictly off limits until Christmas Eve). You know the forced festive fun is in full flow when you’re covered in dusty stollen sugar. And yet I had no appetite, knowing that I’d offered to drive Helena to her sister’s that evening, then come back to my parents’ house. Two hours each way? In that Valhalla?

By the time I was done, I was exhausted, baseline anxiety off the charts. In the interim, everybody had gained that shiny alcohol glow, or had already left on their own daunting drive somewhere else. We’ve never managed a family Christmas where all itineraries align for more than 12 hours. I overcompensated by drinking too much, too fast, and mining an old family faultline in which I’d always felt like a misunderstood outsider (you know the one), making too big a deal of it, and then sulkily retiring to bed in disgrace.

There’s nothing worse than waking up on Christmas morning with a belly full of regret (and a head full of hangover). With both, you might as well stay in bed. But I still had to visit my sister, and Helena’s sister, then onward to see my grandma, followed up by Helena’s parents. Separated parents. So many stops. So much stress. Put that car in the bin with the dismembered wrapping paper, I beg of you.

Now, that was a particularly unhinged year. But no matter how it pans out, I always seem to tumble out the other side of Christmas completely shattered. It’s not a holiday, it’s an endurance test. An anti-holiday. A form of travel that narrows the mind.

After going full Grinch, I made a solemn resolution that year: perhaps the best gift I could receive for Christmas would be a real break. When you’ve contemplated murdering your family for the third Christmas in a row, you know it’s time for a change.

Fast-forward to Christmas 2019. Helena and I, much like rebellious teenagers choosing a university, travelled as far away from home as our budgets allowed. California, baby! Nothing says “happy holidays” like a man with half his teeth missing in a Death Valley ghost town threatening to set off a “firecracker” larger than a stick of dynamite. Joshua Tree, Vegas, Zion. The driving was exceptional, as were the vistas: a giddy tonic to the ghosts of Christmases past. We headed into Mexico and got engaged in Taxco, an old silver mining town in the mountains.

Then Covid happened. It was a reminder that family won’t always be there – and nor will we. So, when Christmas finally wasn’t cancelled, we forgot our great solution and decided to visit my parents on Christmas Day, when the roads would be quieter.

Cue the car’s battery deciding it was time for a holiday. Nothing the RAC mechanic did could revive the ionic flatline. Apparently, you’re supposed to drive your car every week, otherwise the battery dies; climate be damned, we have batteries to charge.

Two days later, as the car purred around on its brand new, expensive battery on our way home following another near-family-mass-murder Christmas, Helena and I plotted out the perfect Christmas blueprint. And we think we’ve finally cracked it. We still do the family rounds, but the get-togethers are scattered throughout late November and early December before things become manic. Then, by the time everybody has lost Whamageddon, we’re on our way somewhere new, where the weather outside’s delightful.

Each get-together this year has been a more relaxed, less expensive, low-stress time to connect, and still festive enough to fit the bill. No, “the box” didn’t make an appearance (only on Christmas Eve!) but with that lower baseline of travel anxiety, we were one of those fabled families that all got on well with one another. Which is what we are, really – as long as we never, ever, ever try to meet up on Christmas Day.