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My small and functional family have always adhered to a traditional Christmas event while observing the modern British vogue for thoroughly excising any Christian content from Yuletide(I trust you appreciate the irony of my using this old Norse pagan term).Christmas for many Britons today is a celebration of family and togetherness, and without dwelling on a more involved exegesis of the evolution of the Christmas tradition in secular Britain, this is what our Christmas has become. My mother,father and sister all live in my home city of Portsmouth while I live in London,and more often than not this is the one holiday of the year when we are all together.This is chiefly the fault of a neglectful brother and son.I make no excuses.I am a terrible person.

So every December 25th of almost every year since I moved to London I travel home to roost, albeit a little too briefly for my mother. The one exception in recent years was when I spent Christmas in Melbourne with my friends. Never again. How can sun,sea,sand,leggy blondes and cheap seafood hope to contend with grey skies, dry turkey, family arguments, alcoholism and a terrific array of bowel problems caused by quite stupendous excess? Obviously it can't.Back at the drizzly homestead the Moore family keep their annual vigil. We hug and shake hands, and the conversation is briefly effervescent. Booze flows. And then dinner. The gargantuan dinner with its vats of booze that must see us yearly that much closer to the Reaper's unwanted attention

Actually that was a little unkind with regards to my mother's Christmas dinner. It is rather good, though Turkey's propensity for dryness and my mother's inability to take culinary hints from her wayward son have caused it to require a good dose of gravy over the years. But with lunch I am reminded of what is a unique family tradition, one specifically passed down from father to son. The brussel sprout gag! A Moore family classic. Well it runs like this. At some time in the distant past, before I was born, my parents were having guests for Christmas dinner. The long and short of the anecdote is that the sprouts were so undercooked that they were inedible. My father being a gentleman mocked my mother mercilessly for this. And for every single Christmas since. By my reckoning it has run for some 36 years. When I was a child I can distinctly remember my anticipation as the dinner came in piece by piece until, the sprouts arrived, pungent and smirking. I would look at my dad, he'd wink and say; "Are the sprouts cooked dear?". Genius. Better still, the mantle has now passed to me. As the male heir it is now my duty to question the edibility of our yearly sprout repast. A duty I take very seriously.

It is perhaps neither a memorable or noble family tradition but it is certainly one that cements the Christmas holiday in my heart. Yes we gather to be together, sometimes for only one day a year. And yes it sometimes feels a little like British Christmas by the numbers, with precious little of the gravitas of its historical or fabled origins. But it is an annual union of a sometimes slightly awkward and disparate family, a union that forges in the formulaic mirth of our mother's culinary exasperation.

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