CHRISTMAS these days is a tug of love, not so much between the in-laws and the blood relatives as between two warring camps: the family, and those who know how to have fun, ie your friends. At this time of year, when everyone is trying desperately to cling to some kind of pleasure, the stylish option is to rent a big property in the middle of nowhere and crowd it out with friends, with whom you can indulge in the same kind of thing you have been indulging the rest of the year.

Friends are a clear winner in the Christmas stakes. A recent report, titled Not Driving Home For Christmas, suggests four out of 10 of us will be scoffing our figgy pudding with friends, not family. Even if we do go home, it will be for as short a stop-off as possible, arriving just in time for the turkey and bunking off as the last speck of brandy butter is licked from the bowl.

After all, family is hell. We know that, don't we? More often than not, the family Christmas is caricatured as a test of endurance: a long telly-dinner shared with monosyllabic semi-strangers, a desperate cocktail of boredom, argument, tedium and excess, only lightened by the Queen's Speech or Eastenders special. It is the nightmare Christmas of before, the past that we enlightened folk have dispensed with in our Friends-style existences. It is, therefore, unfashionable to admit, as I did last year, after turning down an invitation to join a big festive gathering of friends, that you might actually like it. The idea that I actually wanted to go to my parents', catch up with brothers and cousins, gorge myself with Mum's apricot and sausage stuffing, play humiliating forfeits then retire to the fold-down bed in the living room, was met with bafflement. Could I not bring myself to admit that I didn't like the hell of a family Christmas? Did I really have that much of a problem saying "no" to my parents?

I'm not saying I have the perfect family, or that our gatherings don't include moments of Royle-family style horror. An ex-boyfriend once likened the excruciating birthday party scene in Mike Leigh's Secrets And Lies to one of my family's get-togethers and warned me not to introduce any future partner to my relatives too soon.

Yet the rejection of the family Christmas says a lot about the very limited parcel into which we currently fit the idea of enjoyment. That box contains friends, booze, sex, drugs, and foodie food. "Fun", in other words, is the sole domain of the fancy-free singleton. Meanwhile family is relegated to the tedious domain of history and routine. It is at best a duty that we manage to cope with.

Shouldn't we expect more? One of the things that has made our family festivities more rather than less fun over the years, has been the gradual dispensation of the pressures of Christmas in favour of simply finding ways of enjoying ourselves together.

When my friends returned from last year's bash with their photos, I did feel a pang of regret. By not being part of this crazed, wigged carnival of fun I had excluded myself from their urban family of friends. I was just a distant relative, who, in the the tug of love, had allowed blood family to win. But then my own Christmas snapshots revealed a carnival of sorts; the kind of family hell that is worth the long drive home.