WILL it be turkey or goose? Beef or pork? Or if you’re not into meat, mushroom pithivier or the ubiquitous nut roast?

Whatever you tuck into on Christmas Day, the vast majority of us will be getting frazzled in the kitchen, getting frazzled with fractious kids in the living room, biting our tongues with awkward aunties, and drinking far too much plonk before yawning our way through the plethora of repeats on the telly.

Or will we? For it seems that many of us will do anything to avoid being part of the Yuletide bonhomie, for part of the day at least. Some of us will even file our tax return online, so intent are we to avoid the festivities. Or we’ll apply for a personal loan of astronomical proportions, no doubt while under the influence of champers.

We’ll also buy weird and wonderful things over the internet – one year there was a flurry of activity on eBay for brooches and pearls after the Queen sported both when delivering her Christmas message to the masses.

And if we’re feeling saucy – and I don’t mean of the cranberry variety either – some of us will visit an online sex shop and buy a selection of luxury amorous-inducing toys, spending far more on them than any other day of the year while we’re at it.

We might even get to pull our own cracker of fun amidst all the wrapping paper and mince pies – apparently, more than half of the men and well over a third of the women surveyed by an online personal pleasure site snuck off for a bit of naughties, coming up with the most feeble – and therefore transparent - excuses in the process. Such as just needing to nip back home for something they’d forgotten, or heading off for a post-dinner ‘nap.’ Yeah, right….

If you’re not busy trying to sneak off for a bit of nooky, many of us (almost a million, in fact) will be hurtling out to the corner shop in the hope it will be open to buy – wait for it – batteries. Not that they’re for something smuttily unmentionable of course.

No, these are batteries that we forgot to get to go with the toys we’ve bought for the kids, whose delight at what Santa has brought them is quickly tempered by a distinct lack of electronic get up and go.

And if we’re not rushing out in a panic buying batteries, we’re out hunting for petrol. According to car breakdown call centres, year after year motorists are constantly shocked and surprised that petrol stations have the audacity to lock up their pumps for the day, especially as they only find out when they’re about to run out of fuel…

Some of us though – maybe a full tank of petrol permitting - will not be at home at all over Christmas, and a staggering one in three households who are in absentia will take elaborate precautions to prevent being burgled while we’re away.

We will, for instance, place cardboard cut-outs or dummies behind the net curtains, and grease doorknobs or ice steps in the hope that would-be burglars will be dissuaded from robbing us of our comfort and joy over the festive season.

Though even burglars give themselves time off for good behaviour, with crime statistics showing that the number of burglaries on Christmas Day drops by more than half.

But if they’re not hard at work on December 25, there are plenty who are. Getting on for a quarter of a million of people will be working on Christmas Day, around 75,000 of them in the NHS. Which is a good job considering that around 80,000 of us will have to interrupt the festivities because we’re in need of some form of emergency treatment.

Typically we’ll stab ourselves with knives or scissors trying to open presents – I reckon it will be trying to get our hands on the goodies through that horrible moulded plastic that surrounds virtually every electrical gadget on sale these days – or we’ll trip over toys or electric cables for new gadgets.

So injuring ourselves apart, while we’re doing weird, wonderful – and frankly, sometimes odd – things on Christmas Day spare a thought for those who aren’t able to do that because they’re doing their bit looking after our keeping things ticking over for the rest of us.

And a salutary thought – many of them, often those on relatively low pay, will have been asked by their bosses to work on Christmas Day and legally can’t refuse to do so. And there’s no automatic entitlement to extra pay or a day off either….