CHRISTMAS for women is a special sort of hell followed by a special sort of magic.

Which probably explains why by the time we get to Christmas Day itself, most women are prone to looking terrifying around the carving knife and crying at John Lewis ads about penguins, sometimes simultaneously.

The trouble with Christmas is that it brings out both the worst and best in us. We want it to be perfect.

We want to look fabulous in our party dress (harder than last year), we want the food to be legendary (M&S cheating is not cheap), we want our presents to be exactly what everyone wanted (we are the only people who can be bothered to go the extra mile even if it is out of stock), and we want everyone to get on with one another for four days (ridiculous).

I have had so much to do in the run up that my Christmas to do-list has run into three pages.

Last year I tried to order all the food online to avoid the pre-Christmas supermarket hell and spent a good hour ordering it all faffing on with fresh custard, and turkey gravy, and organic sprouts.

With every click and addition to basket I felt the calm coming over me, like a dose of temazepan, I got to the check out feeling elated, but then discovered that the only slots left were at 4am on Boxing Day.

Other women, cleverer, more sorted women than me, had bagged the ones that worked probably months ago. I was worse off than when I started.

Worse still, we want the house to look like an ad from Good Housekeeping. On top of all the shopping and cooking and wrapping, and making costumes for concerts, we make it our job to ensure that the house looks at its cleanest, shiniest and most perfect that it can feasibly be.

We obsesses about anything red or silver or gold, we faff on with baubles and spray paint, and getting things out of the loft and finding the brass polisher, and stocking up with logs and cleaning the curtains and then of course the garden needs to look nice and the lawn must be cut. It never stops.

I am in a particularly bad place in the run-up this year, on this score. It’s bad, actually it’s really bad. The builders are in.

Oh yes. Take that sentence in for a minute.

Some of you now will be realising that your pre-Christmas hell is actually a party compared to mine.

The builders are in for the run up to Christmas. And we are now into the countdown and they are starting to disappear to other jobs, no doubt placating other hysterical women who “want it done for Christmas”.

On top of the usual madness I am tracking sofa and carpet deliveries. There will come a point – very soon – when I have to chuck in the towel and accept that Christmas is not going to be perfect. It’s going to be a compromise.

In order to retain some sort of sanity I will have to cut corners, put the old curtains back up and make the best of it. It might even involve some cardboard at the windows with Merry Christmas scrawled on it instead of curtains.

I’m sure the solution to Christmas for many women might be just this. Irrespective of builders, cut corners, be lazy, buy a disposable oven tray, do three vegetables not five, buy one table present each for the grown ups and drop the others. Be lazy.

Do what your family have probably been telling you for years. Chill out, it doesn’t really matter.

You care about the cushions looking shabby, and the lawn needing cutting, but actually no one else gives a fig. They just want you in a good mood.

What a shame you can’t buy a giant Pot Noodle turkey dinner. Just make Christmas lunch a kettle snack and be done with it.

I could down the sherry and be the best fun I have been in years. Bring it on.

  • Judith is now a visitng reasearch fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing. She lives in Stanton Harcourt