Christmas can be a time when emotions run high. It is certainly a period for many of us to take stock of our lives: our careers, our relationships, our families. It can bring great joy but it can also be a trial. This year we asked 12 different women, from all walks of life, to write about their own, unique experience of Christmas.

When I was growing up, worshipping at the altar of Kevin McCallister, I'd watch Home Alone after school and think, 'These people have lost their minds, thank fuck I don't need to do Christmas'.

See, I can't tell you what it's like to have to budget to buy presents for your entire family, I don't know what it is to live with a tree in your house, and I'm a fan of Brussels sprouts because I've only ever had them in moderation and they've never ignited memories of a disruptive family meal, a hangover or unfunny Christmas cracker jokes. This is the truth: I have never celebrated Christmas.

Sure, I've sent Christmas cards to people in the past, I've participated in Secret Santas (I tried to hijack one, once, in my politically correct secondary-school years and re-named it Mystery Moses) and I once volunteered at a Christmas Day Salvation Army soup kitchen. I'm not a total monster. But I'm Jewish. Not black hat-wearing, ultra orthodox, won't-drive-a-car-on-a-Saturday kind of Jewish. Just highly neurotic, believes in G-d smiting me down, loves to exclude themselves from good times due to heightened self-loathing kind of Jewish. I'm the kind of Jewish that sneers upon the erection of a Christmas tree in a fellow Jew's house. We don't have to appropriate someone else's culture, we're culturally obese already.

The closest I come to celebrating Christmas is the annual tradition we have at home in Glasgow. We move dinnertime to 2pm due entirely to boredom. We invite my best friend – the only other Jew my age in Scotland – over. We eat salmon because my BFF is a pescatarian. Then we discuss the Holocaust because it's the only topic of conversation my dad and my BFF have in common.

There are no decorations or tinsel, very little noise and ZERO alcohol. To a passing dog-walker, our house looks like it's either on the market, or someone's just died. After dinner we watch the Queen's Speech, my BFF and I retreat to my bedroom (at our mutual age of 30), and we watch the same films we watched on Christmas Day when we were 9 (i.e., Titanic and Spice Girls: The Movie; sometimes we swap Titanic for Romeo + Juliet, but we always watch Spice Girls: The Movie).

Sometimes my mother puts chestnuts in the oven because they're on offer at ASDA. She's still not perfected the art despite being a champion cook – able to massage a brisket, grill a lambchop, boil a hen, and bake an entire apple crumble from garden-grown apples simultaneously and with her eyes shut. So yeah… salmon, Leonardo DiCaprio, a faint whiff of royalism and blackened chestnuts is what Christmas is about for me.