Our guide to keeping yourself entertained over the holidays.

It’s Chriiiiistmas. And often it’s booooooring. Endless train journeys hoicking presents to ungrateful children. Or, if you’re really unlucky, endless car journeys packed with presents given to your own ungrateful children. All anyone with an ounce of sense wants to do with a week away from the office is sit in the dark by himself. With a drink. If one has the luxury of sneaking moments of solidarity, then the week between Christmas and New Year can be enormously culturally productive. That doesn’t mean going to Cineworld on Boxing Day to see Bumblebee. Here then, for the idle festive in-between period, is MR PORTER’s guide to cultural distraction, a surefire way to avoid relatives who want to talk about Brexit, Trump, Call The Midwife or the state of relations between the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex.

Best for: fulminating that your parents didn’t buy a Brillo box for $1,000 in 1969

An afternoon at the Whitney is one of the nicest ways to spend time in New York. Doing it while everyone else is on the other side of the country visiting parents is even better. The gallery’s blockbuster exhibition this year is, somehow, Mr Andy Warhol’s first major US retrospective since the famous MoMA show of 1989. Featuring 350 works including some of his most famous Pop Art (the aforementioned Brillo boxes, current RRP $3m; the Campbell’s Soup cans; the Coke bottles) and some lesser-known pieces, such as a moving series of line drawings of Mr Truman Capote from 1952. Art, consumerism, great views of that famous skyline from the balcony – what better way to enjoy your time alone on 27 December? (Open every day except Christmas Day.) See also: Andy Warhol And Eduardo Paolozzi at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (daily except Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day until 2 June 2019).

_Best for: positioning yourself as the power behind the throne of your gluttonous father when it’s dessert time _

Slinking away from dinner to read Wolf Hall is so 2011. Hardcore misanthropes mainline the hard stuff: 750-page academic biographies. Ooh, that’s the ticket. It was Wolf Hall that brought Mr Thomas Cromwell to modern mainstream consciousness. A political fixer of the highest order (think Mr Rahm Emanuel rather than Mr Michael Cohen), the story of Mr Cromwell’s rise from the mean streets of Putney to the side of Henry VIII is, naturally, a fascinating one. This book is the result of six years of research and is a dense read (Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch is an Oxford don), but for Cromwellistas eagerly awaiting the third Mr Cromwell novel by Dame Hilary Mantel, The Mirror And The Light, it’s an intense fix (Dame Hilary herself named it her book of the year).

Best for: futile attempts to affect being with it with younger relatives

Loved by teenagers, verbose of album title, a little too popular – there’s a lot to put one off listening to The 1975, but their third album (a fourth, Notes On A Conditional Form, follows next year) is a genuine rarity – a mainstream guitar band plugged into the zeitgeist and doing something interesting with it. Just as interesting as tracks such as the really rather excellent “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” is singer Mr Matt Healy, who manages to talk about the difficulty of growing facial hair and his own heroin addiction within a matter of lines without coming across as crass.

Do say: things similar to the above to your niece while nodding sagely.

Don’t say: have you ever given Blood On the Tracks a spin?

Best for: refuelling long-forgotten arguments from the early 1990s

The late Mr Sam Shepard’s modern classic True West is the story of two rival brothers who spend most of the play arguing, fighting and upsetting their mother. Perfect preparation for that game of Monopoly. Mr Matthew Dunster’s revival stars Mr Kit Harington, freed from Jon Snow’s beard at last, and singer/actor Mr Johnny Flynn, last seen in the underrated Netflix romcom Lovesick (née Scrotal Recall). The story of screenwriter Austin (Mr Harington) and his wild-at-heart drifter brother Lee (Mr Flynn), True West may be Mr Shepard’s telling of the battles between different parts of his own ego and the decline of the American west. But it’s also a really good reminder that brothers can be awful.

_Best for: snapping you out of that warm, fuzzy and slightly draining festive torpor _

Sure, Christmas can be a tense affair. But thankfully, even the most awkward gatherings tend to avoid actual bloodshed. Ms Lizzie Borden is known to most as history’s most famous patricidal killer, the prime suspect in the double axe murder of her father and stepmother in Massachusetts in 1882. Thanks to Mr Craig William Macneill’s new film about Ms Borden, that impression ought to change. Ms Chloë Sevigny plays Ms Borden and Ms Kristen Stewart the young maid whose arrival in the household leads to the event that caused Ms Borden’s eternal infamy. The premise isn’t exactly It’s A Wonderful Life, so you’re unlikely to have excess company on mass excursions to the multiplex. But if you’re feeling slightly more festive, why not pair it in a double bill with another life-upturned-by-maid story, Mary Poppins Returns?

Best for: avoiding the festive fare on the TV, at least before EastEnders comes on

Good Christmas films to watch at Christmas? Die Hard. End of list. Bad films to watch at Christmas? All the ones that are on telly that you watched either at the cinema two years ago, or rented 18 months ago. Netflix et al not only destroyed Blockbuster, but destroyed half the fun of the Christmas TV schedules. So, while everyone else watches Kung Fu Panda 3, sit back with Mr Spike Lee’s Cannes Grand Prix winner – his best film in years – released earlier this year. Somehow based on a true story, BlacKkKlansman is the tale of a black Colorado cop (played by the excellent Mr John David “son of Denzel” Washington) who builds up a relationship with a white supremacist by pretending to be white on the phone and sending Jewish colleague Mr Adam Driver for face-to-face meetings. Produced by the people behind Get Out, Mr Lee’s latest joint is, for these times, a fitting mixture of humour and sociological horror. A bit like Christmas dinner, really.

Best for: unleashing your sociopathic teenage self

Christmas as a grown-up may have some advantages over being a kid, mainly armagnac. But bitter experience teaches that there is no deeper pain than being stuck playing charades while your 12-year-old nephew is absolutely razzing someone on Fifa in the back room. Temper that with a Christmas present to yourself – the year’s biggest game. Not only has Red Dead Redemption been praised for the depth of its in-game universe and the ability to punch horses like a Geordie, it takes absolutely ages to do anything. So while away the mornings, mid-mornings, afternoons and so on with just you, your PS4 and a violent teenager from Madison, Wisconsin, in the newly released multiplayer.

_Best for: fuelling intelligent discussion in between your father-in-law’s 10-minute soliloquies on the folly of the Irish backstop (and/or President Trump) _

This year has not been short of thoughtful treatises about what the age of immediate information is doing to us. While the rest of the family is watching the _EastEnders _special, bury your head in Mr William Davies’s superlative look at the way in which emotion has interacted with political reason and how, across several centuries, that brought us the world we are now living in. One of the main culprits for events such as the latter, argues Mr Davies, is Facebook, the digital personification of feeling-led discourse. Something to point out when a sad-looking aunt queries why you’re no longer friends on Mr Mark Zuckerberg’s all-conquering (2.2 billion users a month) website.

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