By the Gavin and Stacey finale, the drinks wreckage littering our front room on Christmas Day looks like Smithy’s pre-stag. Empty bottles of wine, lager and fizzy rose are liberally dabbled with cocktail tins and cider flagons, in a heap that might usually have our Xbox’s camera colluding with Alexa to order an emergency Amazon stomach pump. Yet I peruse the pile with the clarity of Smithy’s wedding day. Because these were all non-alcoholic beverages, and I am on a mission to have a happy – but definitely not merry – Christmas.

How did I get here, to my first ever dry Yule? Generally, all I want for Christmas is booze. Well, note to Musk: one of the major flaws in the human body, hopefully solvable by technological enhancement, is that it isn’t synchronised with our digital diaries. It doesn’t know that we’re scheduled to be getting out-of-body drunk at Gina’s festive Bring Your Own Bathtub Death Gin party next week, and to hold off any major mechanical breakdowns until the new year. And so it was that the odd internal thump, bump and twinge insisted that I stop drinking for a while, just six weeks before Christmas. Dry January? Make mine a Desober.

Thankfully, there is help at hand. Alcohol Change UK, the people who brought you the Dry January challenge, also have plenty of advice for going alcohol-free at the most chunderful time of the year. They suggest keeping focus on your reasons for wanting to stay dry as a means of motivation, and getting friends and family involved (also known as the Killjoy Method). They also recommend using community-based tools such as their Try Dry app, to avoid feeling as though you’re going it alone and to track your progress in terms of money saved and calories unconsumed. Imagine it as a Couch to 5k but you’re being chased the whole way by sclerosis.

“Alcohol is everywhere we look over the festive period,” says the charity’s CEO Dr Richard Piper. “That’s because alcohol companies spend millions of pounds linking it to seasonal moments, as they see the entire festive period as an opportunity to drive huge sales. This creates an environment which glamorises and normalises alcohol, particularly over the festive and New Year period, suggesting that it is ‘essential’ to these seasonal moments.”

Dr Piper points out that the run-up to Christmas accounts for the largest proportion of alcohol sales across the year. “As such, it can sometimes feel like an endless drinking session, with party after party and lots of excuses to crack open a bottle. Yet alcohol can lead to arguments, forgetfulness, risky decision-making, anxiety or feeling rubbish at a time when we want to be enjoying ourselves. With such a great range of alcohol-free alternatives in shops, pubs, bars and clubs nowadays, we can enjoy all the spirit of Christmas, with none of the negative effects.”

I’m a lifelong red wine drinker recently driven into the arms of Madam Stella by the fact that, post-Truss budget, it’s now insane to drink wine in pubs. So there was one clear course. Non-alcoholic lagers. I’d always scorned the very concept before – who’d want to drink that stuff for its piquancy of urinal cake and fistfight? But several friends insisted that non-alcoholic lager has come a long way from the tastebud atrocities of Kaliber. As I began sampling the many and varied options, from kick-free Guinness to sting-removed Peroni 0.0, I came to realise that this was simply the taste of a night out. Without the added tang of Tube station escalator floor plate.

As the booze-barren beer became my regular order at festive gigs and gatherings, I quickly discovered that the lager buzz was at least partially psychosomatic. I still entered the mild, relaxing dream-state of the second pint, even if the spell was broken whenever I went to the bar to order another zero per cent-er. Perhaps we need an Angela-style codeword, so our brains don’t catch on?

Friends congratulated me for my strength (with, admittedly, a pitying undertone), or quietly outed their own pint as an alcoholic eunuch. I discovered that Gen Z regularly indulges in a thing called zebra striping – alternating alcoholic drinks with their non-alcoholic counterparts over the course of an evening, or on a nightly basis, to alleviate the effects. As if the point of socialising was no longer a communal charge to blackout oblivion through a Jagerbomb minefield.

As the weeks progressed, I got quite a taste for the guilt-free swig. Some subliminal alcoholic tendency tweaked, I began drinking de-hooched lager at home, which I’d never have done with the hard stuff. Was I becoming a problem non-drinker? But as Christmas Day approached, the prospect became increasingly daunting. A 6am start without a conciliatory cava? Comprehending the King? Eighteen solid hours of familial engagement, celebrity Widow Twankys screwing up toddler-level quiz show questions and Mrs Brown’s Boys, without the slightest cerebral anaesthetic? The best I could do was to stock up on the widest range of non-alcoholic options possible, binge the lot over the course of the day and try to trick myself into a coma by Call the Midwife.

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Drinking only non-alcoholic drinks for the entirety of Christmas Day, it turns out, gives and takes. I can confirm that there is exactly the same sense of decadent celebration to popping the cork on a bottle of Nozeco Rosé before 10am as there is with the punchier stuff. But confusions immediately arise. “You really can’t tell the difference, can you?” my mother-in-law notes, downing her third glass before my wife points out she’s on the 13 per cent bottle for everyone else. Long day incoming.

The de-alcoholised Cabernet Sauvignon I crack open to accompany dinner isn’t quite as convincing, tasting more like adult-orientated Ribena. This may be down to the fact that, such is the minimal demand for the stuff at my local off licence, the best before date is March 2022. But the post-dinner slump, I discover, is nothing whatsoever to do with booze and, undeterred, I forge onwards into an afternoon of no-alc cider and mocktails – a white peach daiquiri and a strawberry and orange blossom nojito.

The advantages swiftly stack up. I may be the only person in the room unable to see the hilarity in Josh Widdecombe dressed as a penguin on Strictlybut I’m also the only one liable to survive the traditional Christmas TV drinking game of taking a swig every time footage of a royal engagement doesn’t include Prince Andrew. Plus, I’m in the perfect state to understand the complexities of my daughter’s new zoo management simulator video game and to spot the best-hidden TV gags – Gromit’s favourite album, I’m here to tell you, is Walkies on the Wild Side by Rou Lead. Booze-bereft bubblies, ciders, lagers, cocktails and wines – if I’d stepped out of Tesco with the alcoholic equivalent, I’d have walked straight into an intervention. Christmas begins to feel noticeably richer sober.

It all aligns with Dr Piper’s approach. “Despite what alcohol companies might try to make us believe, mindful and merry can co-exist,” he says. “There’s no right or wrong way to drink over the festive period. The truth is, alcohol is entirely optional at every event and on every occasion, and we should never feel we ‘have’ to consume it.”

By the arrival of Gavin and Stacey, at a point in the day that I’d usually be deeply regretting that 12th glass of rioja and prawn ring chaser, I find I’m the only one of my boggle-brained family capable of predicting a plot twist used in barely 97 per cent of romcoms. But (spoiler alert; you’ve already seen it but probably don’t remember) I also feel like the only man in Britain in a fit state to make a death-or-glory coach dash to Southampton for a corn-on-the-cob. The next day, I’m amazed to discover both that Boxing Day (get this) has a morning, and how much more I got out of a crisper, more engaged, booze-free Christmas. No shame, no pain, no terrifying black spots and a sense of having enjoyed, rather than alcoholically endured, the whole thing. Maybe, in future, I’ll have one Christmas on, one Christmas off. We’ll call it Santa striping.