There is one largish chunk of pudding, wrapped in foil, now sitting in the freezer, for dessert in July. The dishwasher's been hard at work since 6am and is just completing its 11th cycle and no, I am not kidding. The washing machine is mercifully silent for the first time in a week, doing overtime with tea-towels. I bleached and line-dried the table cloth and its matching napkins for their annual outing but as a sign of self-reflection, I recognised I didn't want to be deranged on Christmas Day so I paid for someone else to iron them.

Top tip for those of you about to buy machines of any kind, say a dishwasher, choose one that takes just an hour from start to finish. Mum's silver can't go in the dishwasher anymore anyway. Too worn. I'm frightened I'll give someone nickel poisoning (and I don't actually know what lies beneath the silver plate, maybe it's nickel).

The sheer physical labour of Christmas still surprises me. The carrying, the washing, the folding, the chopping and pouring. The whipping and grating, and that's not only the relatives. The house, which has looked perfectly clean for 11 months now, now requires sparkling windows and gleaming floors. My actual mother-in-law could not give a toss about the state of the house but my inner fears say she might.

The sheer boneweariness also stems from standing on your feet in a kitchen for days on end, being slowly poached in the sous vide of an Australian summer if you live near the coast, or baked in our inland blast furnace. Sure, come at me with your cold seafood salad. Any day but Christmas Day. In this house, the only prawns we eat on December 25 are the ones we cook on the barbecue, after hours of peeling and deveining. My personal best is 25 minutes per kilo and it's more haste, less speed, as I try, just this year, to avoid the piercing pain of prawn antlers. I imagine that around the nation I'm in lockstep with thousands and thousands of women and men, at the sink, peeling, peeling, prawns, potatoes, pumpkin.

But the tiredness I feel today is nothing like it felt when the kids were small. Then, we'd fall into bed at 2am after hours of preparing the house for another important visitor, Santa. Unfortunately, it is not true that he brings all the gifts. Instead, he brings the spirit in sleigh loads and it's up to parents everywhere to remember to put the bike pedals on the right way, to stuff the stockings. These days, we are in bed by midnight; and the alarm of childhood excitement doesn't go off any more. Which is good because Christmas was the one day of the year when my kids would bound out of bed, unstoppable. This time, they arrived about 10am but I was up early anyway. In all the books about raising children – and amid all the lies about raising children in those books, another thing you never read about is the funny heart piercing feeling about seeing your own adult children after a short absence or a long one. Even as adults, you still worry about them.

And so here it is, and the lunch is over and people have begun to drift home or to their other families, kisses on both cheeks, see you again soon. There were no raised voices, no tears, a slight hiccup with the kris kringles but no irreparable harm, although who knows, years from know it might rear its head, that lost gift of 2017. The gifts went down well, especially with me. Those sneaky heart piercers snuck into the house in the dead of night, removed drawers full of photos, which had been there for 20 years, and turned them into four albums. I've never had the time to do that, nor has their darling father. Christmas reminds me always how time rushes.

But, almost as bad as in years gone past, I have absolutely no cash left until payday. The $50 notes have flown out of my wallet faster than Harry Potter's snitch and even as I go over the spending, I can't exactly remember how much I spent on the scotch fillet or the chicken. And it's been so long since I made the pudding, I couldn't put a figure on it. Anyhow, every year someone cracks the joke that the pudding is priceless, as if someone who shares my last name hasn't heard that joke a million times.

On the plus side, there is a fridge full of leftovers.

I already have a slight hangover although I'm not even sure if hangover is the right word. It's the fuzziness you get after a week of trying to finish all your work, fix the house, cook for a bunch of people you don't see very often, eat in a day what you would normally consumer in a week; and all of the feelings that come with that. Especially the feelings. I no longer have a reason to worry about money but that, for me, is another Christmas leftover.

Exertion, exhilaration, exhaustion, running at you. We could we do it differently. But we won't.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.

Twitter: @JennaPrice

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