Once upon a time, on a cold and clear Christmas night way up north, two sisters were sitting and knitting. It rhymes and that is a wonderful thing.

These two sisters had grown up in this house, then left it and braved embarrassments and breakups and other painful things, but now all was well and they were smiling and guffawing. For it was Christmas night and they had been drinking a bit, and to top it all off, there were two hunky men lounging by their side. One, the artist, was drawing and the other one, in elf slippers with jingle bells at the toes, was eating and tweeting.

Now, the sisters were confiding in each other about painful things that adult life had brought their way, things too raw to share with anyone else, and this is what they said:

‘I felt a pick-pocket’s hand in my backpack’, recounted the younger one. ‘Turned around and said in Spanish, ‘They call me the police!” She hung her head over her craft and continued, in a barely audible whisper: ‘He froze because my Spanish was so bad.’

The shared hurt of saying a ridiculous thing in a foreign language gripped the elder sister’s heart, for she too had blurted out outrageous stupidities in foreign tongues. (The hunky men at this point admitted nothing.)

The elder sister contemplated the gravity of what she was about to confess to, then began: ‘I was going to a procedure and was given a hospital gown to wear. I didn’t know if I should remove my underwear or not, why don’t they tell you? I didn’t remember the French word for bra. Instead I boomed through the curtain: Qu’est-ce que je fais avec la brasserie? What do I do with the restaurant?’

With this, the hunky artist ran out for an e-ciggie and the hunky tweeter ran for a long gin drink.

Upon the artist’s return, he surprised everyone with his own sad story. ‘I was out partying in Leeds’ he recounted gloomily, ‘and asked a guy, ‘Can I bum you for a cigarette?’

At this moment the hunk in the jingle bells elf slippers strode back into the room, which was good because all needed cheering up. En route from the kitchen he had heard this poor chap confess his spectacular cock-up and in a sudden surge of solidarity, he went for it, too:

‘I was hosting some Ukranian officials and some Cypriot ones, and thought I knew how to say cheers in Ukranian’, he wailed, ‘So I lead everyone to say that all evening – only to learn it means let’s f**k.’

At this, the sisters fainted and the artist ran for the bus station. The elf slippered hunk went back to tweeting, and the night was again peaceful and bright.

Sweet silence reigned over all lands where during daytime, so many people screw up so badly, and still live to tell the tale. And that, my dearly beloved, is also quite the Christmas miracle, innit?