HOWZAT

Even if you manage to get the turkey into the oven without maiming yourself, it seems the bird can still get you back. Experts such as the Food Standards Agency (FSA) advise that many risk poisoning our families because we “splash harmful bacteria on the turkey”, and then undercook it. Although around 4,000 cases of food poisoning are reported each December, the FSA is convinced that the “real” figure must be about 120,000.

Vegetarianism offers no escape to safety either, with recent reports about pesticide traces found on “Christmas fruit and veg”. Spending time with your family involves other alleged health risks. This year’s big poster campaign, “Another Boxing Day”, pictures a woman cowering before her violent partner’s fist against a background of jolly decorations. It is being organised by the Tory party and supported by Refuge, Women’s Aid, the NSPPC, and the Police Federation. We are also being warned that Christmas is a boom time for depression and suicide among those who feel excluded from the festivities. A couple of years ago the Samaritans sought to raise awareness of seasonal depression using the slogan “I wish the baby Jesus had never been born”.

This year campaigners have warned that the stress of coping with the holiday season is “the secret killer at Christmas”.

No doubt Christmas is a stressful and unhappy time for some, and we all know that spending several days in close proximity can bring problems to the surface. But this is not the typical Christmas experience today. Millions of us relax, enjoy and let rip over the holidays without doing serious damage to ourselves or others. Yet many seem determined to take the worst-case scenario as something approaching the norm. The downbeat tone is summed up by the claim, from the charity Allergy UK, that many people are now allergic to Christmas itself: “For some people it can make life a complete misery.” (Unlike all this doom-mongering, presumably.) “Even going to the pub can be difficult as there might be peanuts on the bar.” So if the turkey doesn’t get you, the peanuts will.

When one supposed problem is piled on top of another, with advice ranging from the banal to the bonkers, it is clear that the real cause of concern is not any specific health and safety issues. All of this expresses a wider worry about what “ordinary people” will get up to if left to their own devices. You get the sense that these experts and authorities see it as dangerous to have us all unbuckling at once, letting our hair down en masse (especially near a naked flame). That is why we must need their wise advice and guidance.

The Safe Christmas advice industry seems to view us a nation of fools and village idiots who cannot cook or cope with anything without its help. Either that or we are an irresponsible menace. If hell is seen as other people, then the seventh circle of hell today is other people at Christmas, when even your true love is presumed likely to give you 12 STIs, a black eye, or counterfeit vodka.

Some might see this sort of thing as evidence of a Nanny State. But I always think of Christmas miserabilism more as the ideology of the Granny State, since it is based on that old saying, “Better safe than sorry”. We have become familiar with an official safety-first approach to life through the rest of the year. Instead of Christmas offering a respite, this deadening state of affairs now seems to get worse over the holidays.

Whatever happened to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet? (Not to mention go back to work.) Christmas comes at the same time of year as the old pagan festival of Saturnalia. One of the main attractions of that Bacchanalian rave-up was the overturning of everyday conventions, and the appointment of a Lord of Misrule to preside over unrestrained merry-making. Maybe we should bring him/her back to counter the miserabilists — although we would soon be issued with guidelines on how to have a Safe Saturnalia, and the perils of contracting STIs from your turkey.

YULE-BE-SORRY-YOU-DIDN’T-LISTEN TIPS

DON’T light a match or cigarette near a flammable Christmas pud.

DO turn the oven on; turkey tartare is not to everyone’s taste. But when you put the turkey in, remember to take your head out.

DON’T allow your guests to have sex on the coffee table, or copy their buttocks on your PC.

DON’T encourage binge-drinking or high-fat foods: leave Santa Claus juice and a carrot, not sherry and mince pies.

VET all men in beards offering your children gifts.

AVOID giving knives, forks, spoons or any other potentially dangerous cutlery to children. Or adults who have been near alcohol.

AT the pub or office party, make sure your friends have soft drinks (somebody’s got to tell the taxi driver where to dump you). Don’t drink and drivel.

CUTTING down a real Christmas tree can cause global warming; artificial trees release toxins into the environment. Decorate that Brussels sprout tree instead.

AVOID retail rage and adding to the consumer debt mountain. Take the Green Party’s advice and give second-hand or home-made gifts.

WHEN eating, drinking, partying, shopping etc, remember Mark Twain’s warning: take care when reading health advice, or you could die of a spelling mistake.