Christmas.

The word alone fills most parents with a sense of dread.

The credit cards take a battering. There are often in-laws and step-families to keep sweet. Television is a awkward combination of animated “classics” and 1970s re-runs pulled from dusty broadcasting shelves (that most of us haven’t heard of, let alone stand a chance of getting excited about). Finally, far from being a cliche, those dinner table arguments are all too real when the wine box starts to feel a little lighter at 3pm.

Yet when you’re a blogger, it’s somehow even more of a bitch.

December is your busiest month and you’re exhausted by the 25th. You’ve spent the intervening weeks either reviewing a bunch of tat for Christmas Gift Guides or fending off emails about a brand new educational app for preschoolers that would “make great content for my readers” but there’s zero promotional budget (the app must be actually positively ground-breaking then given the PR exec that’s emailing me is presumably doing so out of sheer love for the product and nothing more).

So you’ve wound up doing review after review, with some left spilling over into the New Year. Fed up of telling your readers to buy this, buy that (if, in fact you have any readers left!) you’re full of regret and self-loathing about the amount of work you took on, and ready to regain control of your blog in January.

But you did get some awesome toys to review.

In fact, you found yourself gloating mid-December that your blog has more than covered the children’s Christmas presents. Then comes the realisation all those toys have been photographed and played with way before the big day and you can’t bring yourself to re-box and wrap them lest you look like the tightest parent at nursery. So you supplement the ‘blog toys’ with ‘bought toys’ and end up drowning in a cacophony of batterified noise whilst you’re trying to watch Downton Abbey.

Then there’s the Christmas Dinner.

You’ve been blogging about it before the day; table decorations, recipes, dinner games… and then it dawns on you that you might actually have to practice what you preach. Your readers will be expecting some dazzling table shots, and the family all clad in Christmas jumpers, and handmade crackers complete with mini gadgets that would put M&S to shame. So you get up at an ungodly hour on Christmas Day (as in before Father Christmas has even checked his sleigh into storage for the next 365 days) and prettify everything; the table, the dinner, your home, your children and lastly (always lastly) yourself…

So out comes the camera.

But then your youngest is tired, your husband is pissed off that you’re still working and your in-laws are bemused that you’re insisting this most sacred of days is opportune for a David Bailey-style photo opportunity. So, your photos are lack-lustre and slightly out of focus, and you’ve ruined the atmosphere before even one pig in blanket is devoured.

Then comes the inevitable write-up.

You feel you simply have to say a word or two about your Christmas Day on the blog. If you launch straight into a review of your new NutriBullet you’ll subliminally plant the seed that your Christmas was crap and not worth commenting on. If you dare to bring up New Year’s Eve without as much as a picture of your kids surrounded by wrapping paper, you’ll subliminally plant the seed that your Christmas was crap and not worth commenting on. Yet if you overdo it on the Christmas piccies and make out your Christmas went without a hitch, you’ll make everyone else feel their Christmas was crap and not worth commenting on. (>A Silent Sunday pic is your best bet by the way. No one takes the slightest bit of notice of Christmas porn after Christmas so best not to put too much effort in).

So here’s my Christmas write-up.

It was emotional.

Bring on the reviews.