Christmas Fun. Fun, Fun or How to turn your fabulous imagination into big Christmas bucks by Derek Duggan

The one thing all writers have in common is the ability to use their imagination. Authors use this on a daily basis to imagine characters, stories and, mostly, what it would be like to make a living out of writing. Most people in the street would never have imagined that little boys like to be penguin pimps at Christmas and that the general public would find it cute, but a writer did. And then the shop the writer imagined this for went on to sell millions of cuddly little penguin sex workers.

Christmas sees massive book sales, of course, because there are so many people out there who are too lazy to buy a real present for friends and family. The market becomes flooded with celebrity titles making it difficult for the everyday author to break through. But maybe it’s an opportunity. Perhaps we should employ all that imagination laterally. There are other areas we could move into.

There’s nothing that people enjoy more at Christmas than sitting down after the disappointing meal and falling out over a game of Trivial Pursuit. Why not cash in on this tradition by inventing your own game? You could bring in familiar elements, like celebrities or well known TV shows.

For example, make some cards up with the names of random ex-footballers, ex-politicians and people who’ve slept with Hugh Heffner and shuffle them before dinner. Everyone picks a card and the ones who get Ant and Dec get to laugh at the rest of the guests while they try to force down the boiled to fucking mush sprouts and the dry as monkey jizz bird meat. During this round the person with the Slept with Heff card has to scream before every bite and the person with the Got voted off another reality show in the first round card has to try and get off with the person who has the Girl from Ireland nobody’s ever heard of card. The winner of the round is the one who compliments the food in the most sincere manner when it’s all gone. After dinner whoever’s got the Ex-model card has to go around in a bikini. Another rule is that if anyone needs a shit they have to do it in a lean-to at the bottom of the garden (except for those with the Ant and Dec cards, of course, who can shit in comfort). Endless hours of Christmas fun there.

Depending on your family, another game you might like to try is The Jeremy Kyle Game. This game requires a minimum of nine players – seven male and six female – a high horse and two Christmases – and it guarantees two Christmases you’ll never forget. On the first Christmas you draw cards. The person with the Jeremy Kyle card must go home at this point. Everyone else has to get absolutely hammered, switch the lights off, put on blindfolds and then shag the first person they stumble into. On the second Christmas, the person with the Jeremy Kyle card sits on the high horse and reads out the results of all the paternity tests and then the rest of the players kick the shit out of each other. Think of all the money someone like Hasboro would pay you for that.

Perhaps you’d prefer something a little more sedate, so why not invent something like The Jeremy Clarkson game? This could be good if you’ve got a Nan that makes taxi drivers look liberal. There could be lightning rounds where you have to see how many ethnic minorities you can insult in one minute or how many racist nursery rhymes you can recite. The winner is the person who goes on the news the next day and gives the most contrite apology.

If you’d like to try your hand at crafting a board game you could do something like The Kim Kardashian Road to Happiness game. Divide a board into one hundred squares and put a task on every second one. When the players land on a square they must do whatever is written there. For example, if they get the Make a reality TV show about absolutely nothing square the other players have to follow them around with their phones filming everything they do for six months. If a player completes a task successfully they get a small bottle of refined human fat which they can inject into their posterior. The winner is the person with the biggest arse at the end.

But these are just starting points. Don’t let your fabulous imagination rust away to nothing over the festive season – make your own games up, and who knows? Maybe next year everyone will be playing your game and you’ll be raking in the cash.

Merry Christmas everyone. Glad I could help.