Christmas Day was yesterday. This was written before Christmas Day. Who knows how that went?Well, I know. Because I am organised, and totally enslaven to ritual.
While the rest of the family and extended family will have blundered about all day, staggering from one cockup to another, each disintegrating stage fuelled by present-opening fatigue, cheap bubbly, excess food and cheap bubbly, I will have glided through the whole ''shebacle'' with a benign zen acceptance of all that Christmas Day was and ever will be.
We had 19 scheduled for Christmas dinner. For months I had been slaving over the Christmas cracker poems and jokes that annually light up the table like a cheap Taiwanese Catherine wheel. Now in 2012, they are no longer the savage merciless ribbing I dolled out in 1992 and 1995.
Oh, 1995, my, what a dolling out that year was! People left the table sobbing, waving raised fists of promised retribution, fire in their eyes. But I am old and feeble now, tolerant of weakness in others, I seek only to bring goodwill.
People say Christmas crackers are cheap, why spend hundreds of hours making your own? They are right. When I factored in the price, including the massive amount of extra food we had to eat to provide enough toilet rolls for the cracker inners, plus the now excessive price of snappers, up 1900% since 1995, our crackers costed out at $74.20 each. Stadiums are cheaper than this.
I employed the grandson Rowan to help with the jokes. Six year-olds are interesting. They laugh like drains and are inordinately funny, but their sense of creative humour is still growing.
''What's black and white and flies?'' he asked, as I sat expectantly, pen poised above paper.
''I have no idea,'' I replied.
''A magpie,'' he said. And he laughed like a drain.
''No, Rowan,'' I said.
''That is a fact, not a joke.''
This was cruel, but they have to learn. He bent his head slightly sideways, his stock response when I say something that is clearly the outpourings of an idiot. He didn't say anything, just kept his head on that motionless questioning angle, like a horse by a fence awaiting more grass.
And it suddenly hit me. It WAS a joke. This is the new humour, this is the new generation, their minds working so fast, even double bluff passes by in a millisecond. Our generation would have had a side-splitting answer ending in aeroplane, followed by chest-beating ''raucoustomy''.
But not the new kids on the block. Reared on digitalism and sugar, they have moved beyond anything we will ever understand. Our time is over.
''That's brilliant, Rowan,'' I said.
''I get it now. Lucky I have a huge brain, eh!''
''You do not have a huge brain, granddad, you are smartless,'' he said.
Smartless? Quel blimming horreur.
It was time to show the boy I still had comedic moxy. That I was smartful.
''What bird can open a lock while weeing at the same time?'' I asked.
''No idea,'' said Rowan.
''A key-wee,'' I replied. I fell to the ground trying to hold my sides in, then rolled off towards the setting sun in a rollicking tsunami of hysterical guffaw.
Rowan's head went back on a motionless angle.
I later tried this one out on Judith, who heads a high school art department, a woman with a keen brain and an effortless awareness of pun. Judith said it wasn't funny at all. I gave it one more run, on Violet, a recent university graduate, her mind as fresh as fresh pasta. Atrocious, she said, it won't just be children who throw tantrums at the table over this one.
I do not know if key-wee produced adult tantrums yesterday. I still think it's the finest Christmas cracker joke I have come up with in 43 summers. And that without a whit of double bluff, just sheer naked wit. Damn the young and the horses they rode in on. They may enjoy Christmas Day, but they are years away from understanding what it really is.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
