It’s the season to be jolly. All those brightly lit stars and Christmas trees in the malls and shopping areas signal the beginning of the festivities, tempting us with the promise of happy times. And amidst it all is that epitome of jolliness — Santa Claus. The ho-ho-ho’s echo and we make the festival a prolonged period of overeating, overspending and everyone brimming over with laughs.

Our household has never been an exception.

In our childhood, we had a full house. Just our own family was enough to fill the rooms with people and noise and if we had a few aunts and uncles and cousins visiting as well, there was happy chaos. The adults reminisced about their youth, forgetting old promises and spilling the beans about each other. In allowing ancient secrets to finally be told, they realised how unnecessary all the secrecy had been and the sound of hilarity would reach us in the ‘children’s room’ we had been packed off to. To be able to be heard over the uproar within was some feat and one or the other of the cousins would rush off to eavesdrop: How could our parents have a better time than us? How could they guffaw when they always told us to curb our over-exuberance? We had to know what they were doing to make all that laughter happen. Of course, the eavesdropper would return bursting with the secrets that had been overheard — and share them with us so that the next round of hooting came from our end.

It is therefore natural that in adulthood, too, Christmas is the time — most of all — for laughter. Siblings and their spouses and children get together over the traditional sumptuous fare and as we try to sample and relish everything, we regurgitate embarrassing tales of the past that are now a part of the family’s folklore. It is normal for everyone to crack up with laughter and go into loud bursts of mirth while imitating the victim of the moment whose behaviour has proved rib-ticklingly funny ...

“You’ll choke,” someone cautions.

“Don’t laugh so much,” warns another, “or you’ll be crying soon ...”

“Nonsense,” says a third. “Laughter is therapeutic. Why else do they have laughter clubs all over the city? Today’s mirth will see us happily through until next Christmas ...”

So, nobody sobered up — until this year.

This year, new research told us that laughter can cause headaches, get our jaws dislocated, make hernias protrude (did we think it was all that overeating?), aggravate lung difficulties, result in cardiac problems and cause several unpronounceable and unspellable medical syndromes as well.

Uh-oh! Did this mean we needed to re-think our family traditions and cast aside the usual merriment, we asked ourselves? Was it time to sober up?

It was a long time since the family had been together and we thought it important to celebrate the fact of the reunion as well as the festival itself. Everyone was a good deal older than the last time we had met. We were not merely adults, but seniors — a far cry from the giddy-headed kids from the ‘children’s room’. We could be happy — but circumspect; we could enjoy ourselves without going into paroxysms of glee that could leave us incapacitated. Besides our neighbours were inches away from us. Regard for their eardrums and dread of all those medical disorders should make us keep the laughter quotient down.

But how could we spend the day together in ridiculous solemnity when, in most cases, laughter bubbled over on sight? How could we attack the roast and its accompaniments with ponderously long faces? How could we make polite small talk when we had never done it before? We were, after all, family.

And laughter — like charity — begins at home.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.