How To Cope With A Solo Christmas is a headline that turns up this time every year, studded among the 10 million other headlines about the “easy” way to cook a Christmas dinner for 35 people, and how to buy the perfect present for every person you know.

Christmas has become a fixed idea in people’s minds, a kind of checklist of stereotypes forged over the decades by Charles Dickens, Hollywood, advertising and cookery shows. The chaotic kitchen, the warm glow, the awkward racist relative, and, most of all, the family: the idea that Christmas should be endured at least as much as enjoyed is as tenacious as the assumption that children are an essential component in a fulfilled life.

I have had many big family Christmases and, no question, they can be wonderful. But throughout my 20s I often chose to do Christmas on my own, and I am here to tell you that a solo Christmas is awesome. One Christmas Day was spent on a beach in Goa, lying in a hammock and re-reading Kathleen Winsor’s bodice-ripper, Forever Amber.

There is, of course, a difference between choosing to spend Christmas on your own and having aloneness thrust upon you.

Family Christmases are wonderful, but I opted out because I needed to break out of the familial role I constructed for myself as a child, and few occasions make you fall more easily into those roles than Christmas. Really, the holiday should be about rest, recovery and happiness, and sometimes being alone is the best way to find that.

Now I have a family of my own, solo holidays are off the table. But when I think of that night in Goa, emotionally wrung out, I know that was my most pure Christmas.