As you get older it is very easy for Christmas to lose its magic. I remember the first year it dawned on me that it was not a magical old man that sneaked all those presents into the stocking at my feet, but in fact my sneaky parents. I wasn’t heartbroken, I was just profoundly confused, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all those years my significantly older brother helped me construct booby traps to catch old Mr Claus in action. Every year, Christmas had been an elaborate charade to deceive me into dreamy delight. 

I’ve gone through the motions of ‘it’s capitalism and greed’. I’ve experienced the guilt of celebrating a Christian holiday with absolutely no interest in religion during the other 364 days of the year. There are those teen years where you watch your presents shrink in size with each passing year: the Sylvanian Families Manor House is replaced by technology, then gift-cards, and finally the judgmental face of Her Royal Majesty looking up at you from a crisp banknote, accompanied by that heavy gut-feeling that your relatives have finally given up pretending to know who you are – the charade is over, let’s all just do bank transfers this December and get it over and done with.

And yet, as I crawl slowly but surely into my twenties, a miraculous thing has happened: I am the Grinch that rediscovered Christmas (far less catchy film title, I know). I experienced enlightenment, a moment of pure clarity and wonder as I discovered the true meaning of Christmas. And best of all I can sum up this festive reawakening with three convenient ingredients: glitter, fluffy-ness and pigs-in-blankets.

Forget presents, turkeys, Starbucks’ Gingerbread Latte, the birth of baby Jesus, and other meaningless drivel. These, my dear noel friends, are all you need for a season of wonder and delight and I’m about to prove why.

1. Glitter is genuine fairy-dust. Haven’t you ever wondered why twelve years after you spilt glitter all over the living-room rug, it is still there? Or why after a night out with a friend wearing a glittery scrunchy, you somehow wake up with glitter embedded in your cheeks and chest? The answer is evident: glitter is magic. It defies human logic. Christmas-time is a special time of year where glitter comes out to play in every form possible: dresses, socks, cards; they even sell a glitter spray at Body Shop that’s only purpose is to douse you in glitter to your heart’s content. Then there’s the glittering of fairy-lights as you stumble bleary-eyed from the pub, their ethereal quality hypnotising you, as you follow that shining string of LED lights to your very own Bethlehem, or at least the nearest bench. Truly magical.

2. Fluffy-ness – this specifically is not the dictionary-accepted 'fluffiness'. Instead, this is a noun I have created to encompass all things fluffy, wooly and snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug. As an eternally cold creature, I relish the joys of jumpers being the height of fashion. Kitsch Christmas sweaters with cute animals and crazy patterns suddenly turn every stranger into a huggable sack of fluffy Christmas cheer (hug strangers with caution) and – added bonus – no one knows if you ate an extra mince pie (or six) before you rolled yourself to the pub, as the baggy jumper hides all. Fluffy scarves and hats turn everyone in to big, loveable Jigglypuffs whom we can only judge by their eyes, mulled-wine slurs and mince-pie-chubby movements. Many people see Christmas as materialist and artificial, but I would argue that it is the one time of year where we truly judge people purely on their character, because their bodies are an unidentifiable mass of voluminous fluff.

3. And finally we come to the Pork de résistance, our dear porcine pals, Pigs-in-blankets. Christmas is the one time of year where it is acceptable to wrap meat in more meat and serve it as a side dish to meat. Each little sausage is like a tiny saviour, born to forgive our sins, wrapped in a bacon blanket, in a Yorkshire pudding crib, watched over by a mothering slab of turkey and with three wise vegetables (I’m thinking sprouts, carrots and red cabbage) gathered round bearing gifts of gravy. Did I just compare a Pig-in-Blanket to Jesus Christ?

And so, I implore you, do not despair if you feel Christmas has become a capitalist paradise, a sad attempt to shop our sorrows away in the cold winter months. Put on a fluffy jumper, douse yourself in glitter and eat obscene amounts of pig wrapped in more pig. Because these are, I insist, the true joys of Christmas.