As we quietly keep it together around the double-glazed ham on Sunday, it's worth remembering, if nothing else, family continues to inspire some of the best TV shows out there.
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Followers of The Mosquito Coast on Apple TV+ know all about this and only true fans have probably hung around as season two slogs its way through the jungle towards climax.
The series follows the high-tension peregrination of an American clan on the lam because of the sins of the father (and mother).
The four leads are superb. Justin Theroux plays deeply flawed patriarch Allie Fox, Australia's Melissa George gives the performance of a lifetime as his wife, Margot, (seething as if attending a never-ending Christmas lunch) and their kids are played by Logan Polish and Gabriel Bateman.
Polish is especially good as daughter Dina (she even physically resembles George), the stand-offs between the saturnine teen and her father genuine highlights.
Despite everything thrown at them (drug cartels, tropical diseases, daggy secondhand t-shirts) and the maniacal disposition of dad, the Foxes have remained an unbreakable nuclear unit and Theroux followers may even catch glimpses of similar themes traversed in his breakout HBO series, The Leftovers.
The Theroux DNA runs deep in The Mosquito Coast. Justin also serves as executive producer and the series is based on the taut 1981 novel by his uncle, Paul. The show also takes a number of cues from the 1986 film version of the book, which had Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren playing father and mother Fox.
It remains one of Ford's best, if not most underrated, roles and I still remember an interview from decades ago during which he sung the praises of his young co-star, River Phoenix (who would go on to cameo as a young Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade).
It's well worth revisiting the Peter Weir-directed film version of The Mosquito Coast and while you're at it, catch Ford and Mirren reunite as husband and wife some 30 years later in new series 1923, another show all about family.
1923, streaming on Paramount+, is from the Taylor Sheridan stable, the creative force behind the hugely popular Yellowstone series and is a sequel to Yellowstone prequel 1883, starring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
Sharing the same time and place and aesthetics as Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, the new addition to the Yellowstone universe transports us to a Montana under biblical siege from drought and locusts.
Ford plays dynastic rancher Jacob Dutton and Mirren his wife, Cara. In full brogue mode, Mirren, all shotguns and leather and long, sensible skirts, steals every scene and it's a delight to see her and Ford battling the frontier together again.
The Yellowstone conglomerate is now expert at delivering the kind of soapy substance craved by audiences looking to get hooked in the teeming streaming oceans and 1923 doesn't disappoint.
As we visit the violence inherent to the Duttons across two continents, we're in Steinbeck and Hemingway territory. The narrative of brewing range wars in 1923 brings to mind Michael Cimino's turgid cinematic disaster of 1980 Heaven's Gate (now being reappraised as a misunderstood masterpiece) and the plight of the First Nations people is represented through the Catholic Church's brutal circuit-breaking of race and culture.
As ever with Yellowstone lore, it's the empyrean acres belonging to the Duttons and their steadfast connection to the land which is the source of all the delicious drama - they own it, everyone else wants it.
"You have a whole mountain range to yourself," a greedy shepherd (played by Game of Thrones' Jerome Flynn) tells Ford's wizened cattleman.
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"I have what my family fought for," Dutton says. "Do you want to fight me for it?"
Yes please.
So, this festive season, when the grog's flowing, the bellies are aching and everyone's getting on each other's nerves under those flimsy paper hats - perhaps turn to the one thing that keeps families together each and every Christmas.
Telly.
