It’s late December 1982 or thereabouts, and I’m standing in a Suffolk church before hundreds of people, wearing a cassock and surplice, with a churning stomach. This year, at my prep school carol service, it’s my turn to sing the opening solo to ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. The trouble is, the solo is sung acapella – the organ will give you the opening note, but if you go a semi-tone off-kilter halfway through before the full choir come in with ‘He came down to earth from heaven’, there’ll be the most awful discordant balls-up and everyone will know.

Luckily it went off well, my final note dovetailing neatly with the choir’s opening one, and the ensuing relief made this the best school carol service ever. But then carol services – the end of the autumn term – were always amazing. Perhaps it was being at an old-style prep school, where the gap between boarding school life and home was a lot starker than I imagine it is today. The food was vile, the mattress you slept on stuffed with horsehair, and teachers were still allowed to beat you with anything from gym shoes to cricket stumps.

If you had a real tree, the smell of pine needles, mingled with that of satsumas and burning candles would mark you for life

At Christmas, it all felt different. A tree went up in the great hall, the headmaster’s wife was a little less hawk-eyed than usual, there were Christmas entertainments and a Christmas party. There were even comic playlets put on by usually draconian members staff who, on this occasion, gave in to their longing to cross-dress before an audience of infants and allowed you to laugh at them.

When the carol service – the gateway to the holidays – came round, you’d had a kind of atmosphere overload. The mothers turning up to church in winter coats, wearing expensive perfume, were like everything you’d been deprived of for about three months. If your father was a smoker – as was mine – the smell of exhaled Silk Cut on the car-ride home would make a tobacco addict of you for life.

At school we wore shorts 365 days a year and would loiter by radiators like alkies round cooler-cabinets. At home, in the Christmas holidays, you’d have a hot water bottle or even an electric blanket. Christmas also meant television, which old-fashioned prep schools didn’t go in for in the golden age of TV. You’d watch anything, voraciously, when you got home, and you took what the BBC or ITV were good enough to give you.

Then there were the decorations. If you had a fake tree, assembling it was part of the fun. If you had a real one, the smell of pine needles, mingled with that of satsumas and burning candles (or better still, extinguished ones) would mark you for life. It was a scent combination you’d carry around inside you forever, crying out, in adulthood, to be recreated. Almost as good were the drinks parties your parents threw around Christmas. Cigar smoke would blend with the fumes of wine and sherry, flooding the house with Essence of Adulthood, beckoning you to grow up and join it. It’s a smell which, like certain atmospheres, has now vanished from our world for good.

But all this, as you grow up, is what you lose. A moment comes, around the 14-year-old mark, when Christmas shocks you by feeling like any other day. You no longer believe in Santa Claus, and the presents relations give you, harking back to the child you no longer want to be, say more about them than you. They think you’ll be thrilled with Buckaroo or Etch-a-Sketch, but inside you’re dreaming of cigarettes, Zippo lighters and baseball boots. I remember in the late eighties a 16-year-old girl I knew called Haley, sitting in a Chelsea café on Boxing Day, distraught because her cheapskate parents had given her a plastic Filofax. ‘But I wanted a leather one!’ she kept repeating. They’re words I’ve never forgotten. In those moments where you beg life for A, and instead get B, that phrase ‘But I wanted a leather one!’ always seems to sum it up.

Later on, Christmas gets worse. As you rebel against your family in your late teens and twenties, it becomes something you await with a kind of dread. Will you be allowed to get out of it and be with people you’ve chosen, and if you do, what will it cost you? Does your mother have that ‘Christmas instinct’ you’ve read that mothers have, and is she choking back hurt and abandonment under her blithe ‘You do what you want, darling. There’s always next time’? How many months of the new year will memories of the Christmas family argument poison? And will seeing your immediate relations simply bring home to you how little progress there’s been, for any of you, in the last twelve months?

Hating Christmas is cool, you decide, a form of rebellion, like despising musicals or refusing to shave. When in one novel (Patrick Hamilton) you find the phrase ‘the evil and madness of Christmas’, you seize on it gleefully. In my twenties and thirties, I had some truly dismal Christmases in which the more it felt like any other day, the more successfully it had all gone off. The absolute low point was a 25 December spent alone in Bilbao, where the only open restaurant was a stand-up shawarma takeaway with no alcohol licence. This was touching bottom in my drive to dodge Yuletide. At least the Moroccan servers were jolly.

Thankfully it’s all just a phase. Those who say ‘Christmas is for the young’ aren’t quite right – it’s for the middle-aged as well. Finally admitting you like Christmas is like owning up to being an Abba fan – it may be uncool but it’s a sign of maturity, and perhaps a late-stage embrace of the people you grew up with. As writer Julie Burchill put it: ‘When our hormones kick in, all we want to do is get away from our parents and be with people like us. Too late we realise that, if we’ve been lucky enough to be blessed with good parents, they’re the only people like us we’ll ever find.’ Often, this applies to one’s wider family too.

These days I love everything about the season. When I missed the switching on of Christmas street lights in my Suffolk town this year, I felt a slight regret – why not enjoy the ritual? I like the cold streets and warm shops, the feeling of build-up in December, even the torpor and lull of a Christmas afternoon. The last months of the year now seem like a slow homecoming, before January and February spit you back into the world outside.

Of course, the ‘Christmas feeling’ probably hits you no more than one year in ten – last time for me was nine years ago, in a Hertfordshire Sainsbury’s, buying chipolatas and stuffing to the piped sound of Paul McCartney’s ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime’. But annually, I remain hopeful. Anyone who wants a last-minute soloist this year for ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ need look no further. My voice may have dropped an octave – and at 53, I’m no choirboy – but my number is in the book.