One of my favourite things about being a kid was this time of year, when we’re all on what is best described as a collective holiday. Few things thrilled me more than leaving school on the last day of term and knowing that everyone around me was experiencing the same heady thrill at our imminent freedom. The only thing that was better was waking up the next day and knowing that, instead of staring down the barrel of a double chemistry lesson, I could go round to my friend’s house and she’d be home, too, and then we would spend all morning – all day – playing Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link. I know what you’re thinking and, yes, I was quite a rock’n’roll 15-year-old.

So one of the biggest shocks to me when I started working was that there wasn’t, actually, any collective holiday; you just had to grab your two weeks here, your two weeks there, if they hadn’t been baggsied already by your colleagues, that is. Because it turned out that, as an adult, the point of holidays was not sharing them with the people you spent all day sitting next to, but snaffling the time off before they could. Then, when you leave the office, instead of jumping up and down with the people around you, you have to slink out apologetically while they make resentful half-hearted waves from behind their computers. Being an adult has its compensations – the independence, the sex, the fact that you don’t have to ask permission to watch TV – but it sure comes at a helluva cost.

Except this week. The week between Christmas and new year – Betwixtmas, if you will – is the one time adults can experience that collective holiday. Even if you have to work – and I’ve done my Betwixtmas shifts on this paper – there is still that sense that the world is on holiday, and that’s what counts. This is the week when it is completely acceptable to sit on the sofa all day watching daytime TV, substituting wine and chocolate for actual meals, and the best part is, everyone else is doing it, too.

When you stay home from work sick, the initial thrill of bunking off when everyone else is working tends to wear off – in my experience – by mid-afternoon. At that point, you just feel fetid: the rest of the world has been out achieving things and frolicking through the streets, while you’ve lain in a tissue-strewn bed watching Cash In The Attic. But with Betwixtmas, there is no fetidity, only the satisfying knowledge that you are following the natural order of things by watching Flog It! for the fourth time in five days.

And I’ll especially welcome Betwixtmas this year. I think we all will: for the past two and a half years there has been – and I realise there is some irony in me writing this – just too much news. As an American-Brit, watching both my countries collapse in on themselves like dying stars has felt like watching both my parents have nervous breakdowns amid an acrimonious divorce. It’s tiring.

On top of that, it’s been an odd year for me on a personal level. Despite being paid to be an opinionated person, I am very much not a confrontational person in real life. Or I wasn’t, anyway. But certain recent developments have really put the fire under my butt, or radicalised me, to use the pleasingly retro phrase: Trump, Brexit, the resurgence of antisemitism, debates about whether gender or biology play the more important role in women’s lives – all things I’ve fumed about on this page over the past year. These are also things I’ve been fuming about to friends and, unusually for me, over which I’ve briefly fallen out with some of them.

Falling out with a friend was once my greatest fear, up there with chronic pain and being forced to become an actor. It’s hard, when you feel strongly about something, not to simply assume bad faith in those who feel otherwise, as arguments on social media prove daily. But when you fight with friends, it’s different. You know they are good people, and you learn that you see some things differently – and that’s OK. It’s not the gotcha-type arguing of Twitter; instead there has been frustration, quickly followed by sadness, then anxious text messages and real-life hugs.

In many ways, I think this has been a positive experience: I’ve faced the fear of upsetting people I respect and care about by standing up for things I believe in, and I have survived. How about that for overturning my gender role of being feminine and acquiescent? On the other hand: man, arguing with colleagues and friends is draining, and while I care about all those subjects as much as ever, I am looking forward to a week off from thinking about them. I just want to sit on the sofa, eat stale cheese and ingest rubbish TV, thinking contentedly about how, whatever our differences have been this year, we are all doing the exact same thing right now. As a stroppy Jew, I might not entirely get Christmas – but I do know that this time is my kind of peace on earth.