When I was a boy, one fixed point in the Gooch family Christmas was the Boxing Day walk, an opportunity to get out of the house for a couple of hours and “blow away the cobwebs”. We’d walk down the lane to where the local steam railway ran through a belt of woods and then on to the beach, a huge flat expanse of windswept sand facing the Channel — which at that time of year is generally a moody slate grey under iron skies. Back home in the warm, there were leftovers and a chance to open more presents, my mother having wisely prevented us from unwrapping them all on Christmas Day itself. Sometimes, if we stewarded our haul carefully, we’d still have gifts waiting three or four days after the “main event”.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised what a shrewd move this was on my mother’s part. It prevented us from concentrating all our excitement into a narrow window between 7am and the Queen’s Speech, and helped us to view Christmas as a season, not a single day. Traditionally, of course, this was very much the case in England. The 26^th December — St Stephen’s Day, the “feast of Stephen” mentioned in that glorious old carol Good King Wenceslas — was not the beginning of the end of festive cheer, but only the second day of nearly a fortnight of feasting, jollity and celebration, culminating in the Epiphany on the 6^th of January.  

The BBC made a programme a few years back called A Merry Tudor Christmas, with Dr Lucy Worsley, introducing the audience to what the Twelve Days Of Christmas would have involved in late medieval England. She waxed lyrical about wassailing, game pies, dances and the raucous revels of Twelfth Night, when the normally rigid social order relaxed a little and Lords of Misrule from among the common folk were permitted — both metaphorically and occasionally literally — to tweak the noses of the gentry.