For others it's all about the tastebuds. The holiday spirit comes alive in the kitchen and can be found in the rhythmic stirring of a pudding, in the sweet taste on your tongue of your mother's brandy and cinnamon panacotta or as you cut the ham and asparagus on toast into its mandatory fingers. Triangular or square sandwiches just wouldn't seem right - it's all about fingers with ham and asparagus.

For some, Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas if you didn't have that same, predictable fight with your sibling about what you're doing with your life and when you're going to get a real job and stop spending your money on books/shoes/travel/ Robbie Williams concert tickets/attempting to vote people like Monica out of the Big Brother house.

For many of us though, nothing says Christmas more than watching a certain Christmas movie. We grab a bag of chocolate almonds, pop in a video and watch for the umpteenth time It's A Wonderful Life or Home Alone or How The Grinch Stole Christmas or that Christmas episode of the Brady Bunch where Carol loses her voice and can't sing her solo in church. So Cindy goes to see Santa and instead of asking for something for herself (like a doll or, I don't know, maybe a speech therapist), she lisps that she wants him to restore her mum's voice.

Mike is sceptical - typical architect. But then on Christmas morning Carol wakes up humming Oh Come All Ye Faithful. There is a Santa Claus after all!

This year, my gift to you is some useless trivia about your favourite Christmas flicks. Store these gems in the back of your mind, and next time you're drunk on eggnog or trying to make small talk with your heavily botoxed third cousin who has the personality of Spam, you can throw these into the conversation.

Last year's big Christmas movie was Love Actually - the romantic comedy which starred Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth and Liam Neeson.

Regardless of whether you've seen that movie two or ten times, I bet you didn't know that the "airport" footage shown at the beginning and end of the film was real. That's right. Apparently director Richard Curtis sent a camera crew out to Heathrow Airport for a week with the instructions that they were to capture on tape families, friends and loved ones greeting one another. Every time the crew captured appropriate footage, they had to ask the people for permission to use them in the film.

And I bet you also didn't know that the idea to have the band suddenly play All You Need Is Love at Peter and Juliet's wedding came from Jim Henson's funeral (which Richard Curtis attended). Apparently all the puppeteers brought their Muppets to Henson's funeral and they sang a song.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas - the big-screen adaptation of the famous Dr Seuss book - was a worldwide success in 2000. But did you know that it took three hours for Jim Carrey to have his prosthetic make-up done? And his latex Grinch costume was so confining and painful to wear that Carrey had counselling from a Navy SEAL who taught him torture-resistance techniques.

The 1990 film Home Alone starred Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, an eight-year-old accidentally left home alone for Christmas when his parents and siblings fly to Paris without him. Some people (Okay, me) saw that film five times at the cinema, which is probably why Home Alone is in the Guinness Book of Records as the "Highest Box Office Gross - Comedy" since it took $533 million internationally when it was released.

But did you know that Kelsey Grammar was supposed to play the role of Kevin's mean-spirited Uncle Frank?

Perhaps your taste in Christmas flicks is a little darker and the new film Bad Santa starring Billy Bob Thornton is more your cup of tea. Did you know that the title role of the drunk, vomiting, pants-wetting, con-artist Santa was offered to both Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson before being given to Thornton?

And if you think Thornton plays a realistic drunk, that's probably because he's admitted to being genuinely intoxicated during filming. And as a Christmas film, Bad Santa holds the record for profanities - there are 243 swear words in total. And that's not even the "uncut" version.