Harry glanced down at his shirt front to look at the colourful stingray chasing a board-shorted Santa across his broad chest. ‘It’s my new Mambo shirt. I thought it was kinda festive?’ he said, the wind taken out of his sartorial sails.

In silence my family trailed our matriarch through the house and out onto the big, rolling, billiard-table-green lawn, which stretched all the way down to the bright-blue bay. Harry caught my eye and rolled his orbs behind his mother-in-law’s back, but once we’d joined the clan under the patio awning it became obvious that Ruth’s antagonism wasn’t aimed solely at us. It seemed the whole family had entered a hard-hat area.

When Amber presented her famous pavlova, a huge and impressive pagoda of strawberries and passionfruit, the meringue whipped into curlicues and covered in creamy foam, Mum adopted the sort of pained expression that made me think she was trying to suck her face out of the back of her skull.

‘Pavlova? Again? It’s become quite your signature dish, hasn’t it? I was rather hoping for something more special for one of the lord’s holiest days.’

Amber wilted like a perm in a sauna and put her magnificent pav back into the esky.

Scott was Ruth’s next victim. ‘Oh, look who’s just arrived. That feisty champion of the common man! So, how’s the pro-bono work going? Of course, you couldn’t indulge your do-gooding side if your wife didn’t work so hard. A wealthy wife is quite a labour-saving device. It’s obvious you hit it off because you have so much in common: Amber owned a waterfront home, and you wanted one.’ Our mother laughed, to make out she was only joking, which she clearly wasn’t. ‘I now pronounce you Man and Mansion. That’s what Father Gallagher ought to have said at the altar. Prawns, anyone?’

Ruth was obviously ‘coming the raw prawn’, as our Dad, a lover of colourful Aussie vernacular, was wont to say. Even decades on, our sadness at losing our darling dad in a car crash was a constant hum, like tinnitus. It was just always there. The loss was felt even more intensely on Christmas Day, because he’d been the cheerful buffer between mother and daughters.

The food started curling in the heat as soon as it hit the table – ham, turkey, salads – and tempers were running nearly as high as the temperature. As Ruth handed around platters of oysters and seafood, her fuchsia-painted lips slapped together in a wet percussion of rebukes to all and sundry. Emerald and Alessandro were her next victims.

‘A caftan, Emerald? What a sensible idea for someone as big-boned as you.’

‘I’ve actually lost six kilos, Mum, thanks to Ruby taking us on that cru—’