MR PORTER explains how to survive (or avoid) the annual family video chat.

Who says technology has improved our lives? Where the holiday season used to be a succession of obligatory phone calls with increasingly distant relatives, punctuated by a few blissful moments of peace where you hastily rammed chocolate coins down your throat, now it’s the same, but with HD video.

Yes, even your ancient, technophobic honourary auntie has got herself an iPad Mini and, though she still can’t face going to the cinema, because she thinks all the explosions are just too lifelike, she’s somehow worked out how to use Skype, or FaceTime, or Google Hangouts, and wants to see your face. No, everyone’s faces. Cue an interminable game of laptop pass-the-parcel, when you’d rather be doing whatever it is you’re really supposed to do at this time of year. Pulling crackers, maybe. Or spinning a dreidel. Things like that.

Of course, there is an upside – the increasing reliability of video chat means that even though your family might be spread across the world (often in a futile attempt to get away from each other), you can still have a sort of quasi-heartwarming virtual-reality feeling of being all together during this most mawkish of holidays, just by pushing a button and aiming one of those awful front-facing cameras up your nose.

Having said that, there’s a fine art to achieving that Dickensian festive feeling of oneness with all God’s creations without sacrificing too much of your hard-earned time off. Read on to discover how to excel during the 12 days of FaceTime without becoming an all-out grinch in the process.

It’s the happiest day of the year, but it’s also the most boring. Your relatives have time to kill, and will happily do so by extending the obligatory video chat into an hour-long event, in three acts, with no interval. Make sure the whole thing is more of a tasteful vignette by arranging to speak shortly before a major event, ie, 15 minutes before Christmas lunch is ready, or perhaps 10 minutes before your annual winter walk.

You might not have much to say to your deaf auntie Sue, but you can certainly fake pleasure at receiving the large butcher’s knife she popped in the post for you because, well, who doesn’t like chopping up stuff? So save the opening of the gift for the video chat and give her the benefit of the live reveal – such complicated manipulations of the viewer’s emotions are what shows such as The X Factor are based upon.

Often, in the lull in conversation that occurs when you’re talking to someone you barely know through long-distance static, it can seem easier to talk to the toddler or baby on their knee. This constitutes a frying pan/fire, situation. The child is too busy looking at the computer, and you will consequently look like you are bad with children. Just wave and be done with it, and say something pleasant to the grown-ups.

The best way to survive a festive video chat is not to have one at all. But there is a slightly more gracious way of doing so than point-blank refusing. Given that we all have smartphones, you can pre-empt the whole thing and send a video message that covers all the basics: everyone is happy, everybody loved the present, everybody is having a jolly time. It’s a rather ruthless approach, but, hey, it’s a ruthless world.

_Looking for a last-minute gift idea? We have the technology _