A Very Messy Christmas

So it's Christmas next week, which means most of you will be heading home to spend time with a couple of people you genuinely want to see and—more likely than not—about nine people who are as fun as inflamed facial herpes on a first date. But they're your family, so you have to put up with them. You know what helps in situations like that? Alcohol. Which is mostly why these Christmas horror stories came about.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

PUBLIC PARTY

My office Christmas party a couple of years ago was the exact kind of oppressive, suicide-worthy affair you'd expect from a suburban stationary supply office. Everyone there was called Linda or Allen and their grey, sullen faces reminded me why death isn't always a bad thing. There was one girl, though—Katie—who brightened up my days. We'd been exchanging flirty emails throughout the day, every day, for months and used to grab lunch together, but never hung out outside of the work environment. Maybe it was that new lease on our relationship that the party afforded (or, more likely, the buckets of alcohol we'd got through) that caused what happened next.

She came outside with me for a cigarette and, the next thing I knew, we were making out in the doorway. No one else in the office smoked because they were all fucking bores who got hung up on things like cancer and lung disease. So we knew we had the corridor to ourselves. I hiked up her skirt, pulled down my trousers, and got to work—then everything was over as fast as it started. We sidled back up to the office and spent the rest of evening drinking bad mulled wine and slowly dying inside.

The next morning, as I walked through the door, I witnessed my co-workers being more animated than I'd ever seen before. As in, they were talking to each other, someone was smiling and I think I even heard a laugh. Before I could question what had happened, the room turned to me in a rapturous applause and I knew instantly what was up. The print-outs of myself and Katie all over the office confirmed my suspicions. Weirdly, we didn't get fired or even reprimanded, but the meek, shitty attempts at jokes that followed the party were enough to convince me to leave and forge my way along the path of unemployment.

THE PERFECT WAY TO RUIN A DAY

It's custom where I come from to go out and get as wasted as you possibly can on Christmas Eve. I don't know why—it's seems kind of counterintuitive, considering you then have to spend the whole next day drinking again and eating the hugest meal of the year—but whatever. Anyway, one year—a year when my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and young cousins were staying at my house—the pub closed and my friends and I hadn't had enough, so I had the great idea of going back to my garage and doing a load of the MDMA we'd pre-bought for New Year's Eve.

About a gram in, one of my friends suggested we go inside and soak up the good vibes from the presents and Christmas tree. Of course, that seemed like an excellent idea, so that's what we did. About ten minutes into doing that, though, looking wasn't enough, so we decided to open one present each and re-wrap them immediately. Fool-proof.

Because opening presents is exciting and because MDMA makes exciting things twice as exciting, the volume of our voices instantly went up as we savaged the wrapping paper, waking everyone in the house up. While we were jumping round and maniacally digging into more and more of the presents, one of my friends gasped. I turned around to see my entire extended family watching as myself and six of my gurning friends ruined Christmas for everyone. I've never heard my mom scream as loud as she did, causing one of my cousins to start crying and my grandma to well up.

I spent the next three hours trying to salvage what I'd done with the dregs of wrapping paper my mom had left, then locked myself in my room, slept through Christmas lunch and waited until the evening—when I could hear my grandpa singing "Fairytale of New York" (meaning everyone was suitably drunk)—to sneak down and join in proceedings. Moral of the story: Don't take loads of drugs and ruin everyone's presents, duh.

CHILLY BAUBLES

I was out one Christmas Eve at the only bar-cum-club my hometown has to offer, and bumped into a girl I'd hooked up with a couple of times at school. You know when you just know something's going to happen with someone? As soon as we saw each other, I knew this was one of those times, so didn't waste a minute, went straight over and kissed her before even saying a word. It worked—obviously, I'm a total stud—and we were soon getting ready to leave for her house in a taxi.

Sitting in the back seat, she pulled my trousers right off and started giving me head. Amazing, I thought, until she sprung her head up, looked me in the eye with the most bemused expression I've ever witnessed mid-fellatio and started saying, "No, no, this isn't right. We can't do this. This is Christmas. This is a family thing."

Before I could even work out what was going on, she dumped me off on a snow-covered roundabout—dick hard, boxers saturated in pre-cum—with sleet starting to pour down on top of me. I stood there, confused, for seemed like an hour, until a young couple stopped their car and lent me a phone to call my parents. Let me tell you know, a drunk, half-naked son wearing solidified boxers on an icy roundabout really isn't the ideal Christmas present for any parent.

A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE

I'm from Australia—yeah, yeah, yeah; fuck me, right?—and, a couple of years ago, I decided to spend my first Christmas away from my parents and stayed in London with a couple of friends in a similar position. We actually did everything pretty well. We got all the veg sorted, bought a family-sized turkey, nabbed a little tree, and bought enough alcohol to drown a herd of rhinos. By around 4PM, that stock was fast running out and, upon realizing there weren't any shops open, we decided to go to the park instead.

My least-drunk (only nine beers, rather than 14) friend drove the four of us down to Kennington park, where we attempted to skate the icy bowl and figured it would be a good plan to drive the car on to the grass so we could blast some music out of the speakers and use the headlights to illuminate what we were doing.

I'm not sure if it was the screaming, high decibel trash metal or strong smell of skunk that first attracted the police's attention, but it was obviously inevitable—something we managed to put to the back of our heads until the sirens started wailing from the other side of the park. Pulling up next to us, the two police sidled out of their car and walked their way over to us, shaking their heads the whole way. Collectively, we thought we were fucked. This is it, I thought. My first Christmas away from home and I'll be spending the evening in a cell. Great.

Standing directly opposite me, the larger policeman started talking: "Look, I know it's Christmas day and a time for celebration, but you really can't be behaving like this in public. Heavy metal music and alcohol are one thing, but drugs? That's overstepping the mark, I'm afraid." I thought that was it, the rest of my night would be spent filling out paperwork and sitting in a cold cell rather than drinking more and throwing up. But the guy carried on, inexplicably, with a very good piece of news. "Look, it's Christmas. I can't be bothered to deal with you today, I'd rather spend the evening with my family, but just promise me you'll go straight home and stay inside."

All four of us hurriedly agreed and said our thank yous, before—bizarrely—the two police officers let my clearly intoxicated friend drive us all home. It was a true Christmas miracle.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

This is gonna beat any other pussy story your weak-ass readers have told you, trust me. To start off, my uncle is a fucking psychopath. He's the kind of prick who would glass you for treading on the back on his loafer in a pub, or something—a real mean asshole. My cousin's husband—my uncle's son-in-law—is the exact opposite: a gentle soul who did a degree in sociology and listens to Zero 7 to unwind.

Anyway, as the day wore on and more and more alcohol was consumed, conversation started getting louder and more aggravated—mostly over nothing, but increasingly angry nonetheless. A discussion about soccer players and their wages started, which is always difficult territory with my uncle. He was suggesting that soccer players deserve a higher wage than nurses because their job takes more dedication, training, and skill. My cousin's husband—very diplomatically—suggested that yes, maybe it makes sense that they get paid more because there's more money in the industry, but do they really deserve it?

I could see my uncle's blood boiling. The more logical and pragmatic his son-in-law was getting, the more he couldn't take it, scanning the room for some distraction and grunting through gritted teeth. I think the final straw was when my cousin's husband said, "soccer players don't offer anything of any real value to anyone," because it was then that my uncle grabbed the carving knife and cemented it directly through his son-in-law's thigh.

The whole room erupted into varying forms of hysteria—screaming, crying, rushing around, throwing towels at the poor guy's leg to stop the bleeding—for what seemed like hours. Once the madness had died down a little bit, the son-in-law pulled down his trousers to reveal what was really a superficial wound. There was a lot of blood, but no lasting damage, thankfully. Weirdly that experience brought the two men a lot closer together and I haven't heard a peep of debate come out of either of them since.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

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