As the ghosts give Scrooge a tour of his past, present and future, they stop by the house of Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit. Here they find Bob’s wife, two older children and the angelic Tiny Tim, with his crutch and iron frame. Goose is served with mashed potatoes, apple sauce and “hissing hot” gravy. “There never was such a goose,” the narrator tells us, and the bird is stripped to the bone. The only bum note is struck when Bob proposes a toast to Scrooge, “the Founder of the Feast”. Meanwhile, the man himself watches outside, and even he starts to crack a little Photograph: Public Domain
Alan Ayckbourn’s play is more than 30 years old, but its depiction of awkwardness and dysfunction never ages. He actually described Season’s Greetings as a “rosier” look at the festive period (compared with Absurd Person Singular), and it’s true there are log fires, excited children (unseen) and mistletoe in the home of Neville and Belinda Bunker. But there is also lust, gluttony, a surreal puppet show and a gunshot. Christmas is “a gift to a dramatist,” said Ayckbourn. “You’re always looking for a reason to stick a group of people together who can’t stand each other, aren’t you?” Photograph: Tristram Kenton
“All I wanted was a day like Nigella’s,” says a sobbing Denise (Caroline Aherne). For their first crack at Christmas lunch, Denise and Dave (Craig Cash) host both sets of parents and Twiggy (Geoffrey Hughes), recently released from prison. The conversation is suitably wide-ranging: wetting the bed and Elvis dying on the toilet. (“Strange: all those number ones,” says Jim, “and it was a number two that killed him.”) On the menu are six carbonised roast potatoes and a turkey so enormous that it doesn’t fit in the oven. “I could put one of the legs in the toaster if you like,” offers Denise Photograph: BBC
Louisa May Alcott’s novel, an advocation of virtue over wealth, has a cockle-warming Christmas message. The girls wake up early, but instead of stuffed stockings, find different-coloured books under their pillows. Their mother then tells them about a poor woman with six hungry children and no fire – will they sacrifice their breakfasts? Of course they will, and they pack up their muffins and cream. After putting on a play, the girls are surprised to find a feast has been laid on, courtesy of old Mr Laurence. There is pink and white ice cream, cake, fruit and “distracting French bonbons” Photograph: Public Domain
In this special, Geraldine (Dawn French) accepts three separate invitations to Christmas lunch. There’s triple helpings of turkey (“meat and 16 veg – that’s always been the way in Dibley”), multiple Christmas puddings, a pasta starter and a fish course, plus an inspired sprout-eating contest between David (Gary Waldhorn) and Geraldine. You may know how she feels as she crawls on her hands and knees between appointments and declares: “If I ever actually meet Delia Smith in person, I am going to strangle her with my bare hands and stuff cranberries into every available orifice.” Photograph: BBC
No one takes Christmas more seriously than Clark W Griswold (Chevy Chase). It starts with driving out to the middle of virgin forest to find a tree, and then involves stapling thousands of fairy lights to the roof of his house. This particular festive season has been somewhat fraught – Clark almost kills himself on a runaway sled; Eddie (Randy Quaid) plus family and dog Snot turn up uninvited – so a lot is riding on the Christmas lunch. It looks perfect: the turkey is bronzed and enormous, and finally everyone is laughing and harmonious. Then Clark starts to carve… Photograph: Rex Features
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel – the sixth of the Little House series – is set in South Dakota in 1880, when Laura and her family are stranded for seven months in blizzards. When Christmas day comes round – with no trains getting through – the children have to make do with threadbare presents and watery soup. But the family make up for it when the snow thaws and they re-stage Christmas in May. This time there’s freshly made bread, cranberries, mashed potatoes and a huge turkey. Plates are piled up once, then again. “Lord, we thank Thee for all Thy bounty,” says Pa, before starting to play the fiddle Photograph: Public Domain
An episode entitled “A Very Ozzy Christmas” is well named. The lunch starts off civilised enough: the serving dishes are antique silver, the glasses crystal, and everyone compliments Ozzy on his gravy. But it quickly descends into a typically Osbourne affair. Kelly walks out after suggesting that Jack either has “a stick” or “a dick” up his “ass”. She then calls her mother “a twat”; Sharon corrects her: “That’s Mrs Twat.” But there is one moment of family harmony when one of Kelly’s friends, Jessica, makes an aside that she prefers Sharon’s hair when it is black, not red. “That’s rude,” protests Kelly. “Really fucking rude" Photograph: MTV
Enid, the matriarch of the Lambert family in Jonathan Franzen’s novel, does not want much: just to bring the unravelling clan together for “one last Christmas” in St Jude, the midwestern town where they grew up. “Does that sound like it might be fun to you?” she asks her daughter, Denise, now a chef in Philadelphia. From the start, it seems a doomed endeavour. The wife of Gary, the eldest son, refuses to go; Chip, the middle son, is in Lithuania and doesn’t want to attend either. And when they do reunite in St Jude, the children have no choice but to confront their father’s accelerating dementia Photograph: Public Domain
If you are having a horrible Christmas, you can always switch on EastEnders for reassurance that it could be worse. Dirty Den handed Angie her divorce papers on 25 December 1986; later Sean Slater went mad and kidnapped a baby. One year, a video of Max getting fresh with daughter-in-law Stacey on her wedding day was screened to the entire Branning family. But for gruesome, the scene in 2001 in which Trevor pours gravy all over Little Mo’s Christmas dinner and then makes her eat it off the floor plumbed a new festive depth. The Broadcasting Standards Commission later decreed it inappropriate pre-watershed viewing Photograph: BBC
