The greatest gift you can give friends at Christmas? Don’t force a festive hang ...

There’s a ridiculous importance attached to who you manage to see ‘before Christmas’, writes Sophie Wilkinson. Put that to one side: to fight off post-lockdown isolation, we need to make a real effort to see friends IRL throughout the year

Of all Christmas’s excesses – the booze, the one-and-done wrapping paper, the Boxing Day sandwiches – there’s one that truly highlights the moral decay of our society: the clamour to meet up before the big day.

The refrain of “We must see each other before Christmas” comes earlier every year, and with it the dreary misconception that if we don’t do a Scrooge-like tour of friends past, present and future before the clocks strike 12.01am on 25th December, lifelong connections will combust.

The superstition dictates that a good friend must see you before Christmas, when you’ll knit together in mutual adoration, a gaudy festive jumper of goodwill to bind you forever. Whereas a bad friend, recognising that December’s busy and January’s lonely and it’s actually only a couple of weeks away, will suggest meeting up later next year.

Even though December obliges Britons to rush around plunging £2.46bn into the economy by way of shops, markets, pubs and fairs, 60 per cent of the liveable day is in bleak darkness and you can’t get yourself a table at a Christmassy pub since all the TikTokers sent them viral, we’re still apparently meant to scrum through the hordes and wedge into crammed spaces just to talk about… what? How busy we are in the run-up to Christmas?

January’s reset is also tricky. According to YouGov, Brits’ most common New Year’s resolutions for 2025 boiled down to issues of personal finance (21 per cent), personal health (45 per cent) and personal growth (12 per cent). Lurking towards the bottom of the table, with only 5 per cent, were resolutions to spend time with friends and family.

‘Algorithms may feed us hundreds of happy faces a day, but who are we actually engaging with, in a real and breathing sense?’ (Getty/iStock)

I understand that, after a month or so of trying to do other people’s thinking for them – the presents, the dinners, the drinks, the careful plate-spinning of managing complicated family dynamics – many will want to pull focus to themselves. But how do we become better people without becoming better connected?

In 2025, we have seen where disconnection from our fellow humans can lead us. Young men in balaclavas lining up for the chance to sleep with the porn star Bonnie Blue, psychotic breaks triggered by AI bots, a father and son gunning down Jews on a Sydney beach. Charlie Kirk being shot in the very throat that he used to say the most offensive – and yet not justifiably fatal – words. A former Royal Marine ramming his car into a parade of football fans.

There’s much debate around the causes of the so-called “male loneliness crisis” and how much the phrasing attempts to whitewash the bare bones of male violence. But too much life lived online afflicts us all.

We’re nothing like those monsters, we like to think. However, loneliness is a continuum, and with our scrolling habits and lazy affinities for quick online-dispensed bursts of dopamine, are we truly investing in the long-term joys of shared humanity? Algorithms may feed us hundreds of happy faces a day, but who are we actually engaging with, in a real and breathing sense?

It’s not always easy to see friends, especially new parents or those who’ve moved away in search of a home with stairs. Socialising can be costly when you factor in poor weather and rising train fares, and so we end up using WhatsApp as a substitute for real connection.

But when we spend more hours typing to friends who live only miles away than actually hanging out together, we might as well be in lockdown again. Because what is the point of Christmas togetherness if we can’t carry it with us into the New Year?

Surely, the best gift we can give each other is time, marked in diaries, this January.