This year I have a chance to reclaim Christmas as a day to enjoy

My son spotted the problem in a flash: "That's AI: that's fake."

I'd been delighting in the little video of a penguin rescued by Antarctic researchers from a snare of discarded plastic, and I leapt with the bird as it jumped in apparent delight at its liberation from garbage. But my son stripped the sentiment bare in seconds.

The snow was wrong; that foot was wrong; the penguin looks like this here but like that there and the light's all different at the end. I couldn't believe him: we scrolled down, and there was the little addendum noting that the video was in fact made with AI. I was galled. How did I not spot the fake? And why was it so sad to me that it wasn't real?

I find it hard to spot the fake at Christmas time. So much of what we expect and accept — the fake snow, the fake trees, the fake Santa — is central to the ideal of Christmas we all chase. A projection of the made up and the unreal. That's precisely its charm.

I hang delicate glass Nutcracker soldiers I don't understand on my tree, and it is topped with a star for a religious story I no longer believe. How can Walking in the Winter Wonderland be my favourite Christmas song as I battle 40-degree heat at the market, queuing for prawns that were frozen on trawlers two weeks ago?

So much of what we hope and expect from Christmas is performative, and springs from the presentation of a perfect family holiday that inevitably is unattainable. It's hard to pick the fake when everyone is so desperately in search of the real.

I'm being a bit of downer here, right?

Christmas has never been my day

The trouble is that Christmas has never been my day. As it is for so many others, family dynamics have always made Christmas day tricky for me.

I've gone missing for many of the Christmases of my youth: inventing other plans with friends so I could stay in bed all day with a novel and vegemite toast.

One year in my 20s, all my mates and I escaped to the wild coast of Apollo Bay in Victoria for two weeks, renting a huge house with Jarrah floors that creaked with every footfall. While most in our group returned home for Christmas lunch with their families, my closest friend and I spent the day doubled over in laughter while we prepared an evening feast that they dashed back for, the inevitable southerly change whipping in, blowing the champagne out of our glasses on the verandah.

As I became older, and started preparing my own Christmas days, I found the safest place to be, as it so often is, was the kitchen. I do the work of the day: the prepping, the cooking, the serving; making sure the glasses are washed and dried and back in rotation; making the sauces for the mains, the dressings for the salads, whipping the cream for the desserts. You can while away the whole day here, with just a few minutes at the table for dinner, and avoid all the sticky, strange feelings that the day brings on.

Why can't I make it the day that I want it to be, rather than wishing it away to get to the true glorious calm of Boxing Day?

I lost my mother this year, and with my father gone this will be the first Christmas I've had without them. I wonder if I might finally be able to make the day mine without needing to lose myself in the work of it.

I will try...

There's a mad little nail bar at my local shopping mall that sells tiny boxes of fake nails, as long and pointed as a raptor's talons, in phosphorescent colours, and encrusted with decorations. They come in boxes like pinned butterflies, and I gaze longingly at them, my chipped nails and oven-burnt wrists shamed by their anime glossiness.

I'm thinking of buying a set and applying them on Christmas Eve, so that when, the next day, the trestle table needs unfolding or the meat needs carving, or the glasses need rinsing, or the limes need juicing, I can hold up my hands, waggle my step-monster fingers and say, "Can't. Nails."

My best friend tells me — no, she fairly yelled at me as she gave me the lecture of my life — that for just once in your bloody life can I please just sit down, pay attention to nobody's needs but my own and have a lovely Christmas day?

And so, this year I will try. In sorrow or in happiness, I am freed from a family legacy of complicated Christmases, and I feel I have a chance to reclaim a day for myself. I'm going to start with anchovies on buttered toast and maybe even a glass of champagne, as our son unwraps the knockout I-win-Christmas present that we've bought him.

I'll walk our dogs in the cool of the morning, without the worry of the looming Christmas day drama, and I will eat only what I want: porchetta from the spit with a salad of watercress, shaved fennel, rocket and Gordon Ramsay's wicked honey-mustard vinaigrette (1 tbsp each wholegrain mustard, Dijon mustard, runny honey, lemon juice; 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper); and several glasses of sparkling burgundy, because it is even an Aussie Christmas without it?

Then I'll dance my old Christmas sadness away

The riding instructions from my dearest friend are only to prepare and place the food that I have elected to make, then sit down and get merrily drunk with my brothers and sisters all afternoon. And to provide the dance list for when we push the furniture back. 

That's when my stick-on nails will really come into their own: I can flash them wildly like some exotic bird as I dance, finally dance all my old Christmas sadness away. The nails will be fake — but the feeling of true connection, of a little bit of joyful peace, will hopefully be very real.

This weekend, we have tales of others who share my ambivalence about Christmas, and of the man who wears the crown who might have been hoping for a little less Yuletide scandal than he's getting.

Have a safe and happy weekend; have the kind of Christmas that also brings you peace and have a genuinely restful break if you're able to, and I'll pop back into your feeds on next weekend with some long summer reads for what looks like being a long hot summer.

If you're going to a fire-prone area, please go in with a fire plan, and if you'd like a little more of my company before I return in January, pop this pink thing in your bag.

If you're looking for a Christmas movie, now that we've all finally got Love Actually out of our systems, my favourite also happens to be one of the greatest films ever made — Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Just like the best Christmas chocolate, it's bitter but sweet and is quite perfect. You'll need this many drinks for it.

And if you're after a Christmas song — did you need to ask? There's only one — here's the story and the beautiful song itself. Go well.

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.