Avoid the post-festive blues - remember the good times instead

Christmas may be over, but New Year's celebrations will delay the post-festive let down just a little bit longer.

As the Christmassy excitement pervading the air slowly filters out, we're all going to experience post-festive blues. There's no getting away from it. The trees will already have started being stripped of every gleaming bauble; that excessively frilly fairy simpering at you from the top will be confined to simper at the bottom of the box lid for another year.

The Sixth Form Christmas Social is over, pretty dresses hung back in the wardrobes, presents opened and sorted into the ones you want to keep and the ones you're going to pass on if you can remember where you put them. And as the last of the tinsel and fake, giant snowmen leering at you from every corner are put away, and even the most enthusiastic carollers have stopped bursting into Deck the Halls at every given opportunity, I can't help thinking that a time turner à la Harry Potter would come in useful.

We've all had more than our fair share of stuffed turkey, getting through enough to last till next Christmas. Girls have got through every single one of their numerous Christmas earrings, shaped like reindeer, Santas, bells and sprigs of holly. We've had people standing hopefully under mistletoe for hours on end with little luck. Our classroom looks surprisingly sorry now, devoid as it is of fairy lights and the "goth" decorations. These involved a load of posters announcing Merry Christmas to all in sparkling silver with angry black backgrounds because we couldn't find any green and red markers.

I had contributed a magnificent snowstorm, where I shredded sheets of paper into jagged little bits. The idea was to paste them all to the wall. I was covered in UHU superglue and had nearly fallen off the table after sticking up only five scraps. Just about 500 more to go. The brainwave was discarded but at least the "snowflakes" drew comments, though most of them, well, all of them, not expressing admiration but a bewilderment about why there were five pointy scraps of paper stuck to the wall.

It was, if anything, a musical Christmas. Our school's festive concert, "Music and Mince Pies", was an opportunity to play carols to an auditorium full of patient parents with cameras, ready to pounce at the first sign of their son or daughter, who would labour away with a pained expression and occasionally mouth: "Turn it off!" Once our performances were over, and we'd all bellowed out "let it snow" in different keys at a whole-school singalong. At the end, we got to the crux of the matter: the excellent mince pies.

The season brought with it, too, some traditional treats. Our Secret Santa scheme in school, where we anonymously presented a random member of the class with a gift, yielded people exchanging everything from candy canes to stuffed Christmas Grinches to pairs of socks. The best present I received by far this year, though, was an innocent-looking envelope with a pair of tickets to the ballet inside.

You don't get any more cliché than watching Tchaikovsky's ever-popular The Nutcracker at yuletide, which is what the Vienna Festival Ballet was to perform at Ductac, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai. We had turned up, inappropriately as usual, in jeans, only to be welcomed by a red carpet and crowds of people milling around in suits and dresses. Sliding abashedly into balcony seats, trying to stuff feet out of view where you couldn't see the scuffed soles, we plonked ourselves down. It was easy to lose yourself, though, as Tchaikovsky's timeless music surged around us, bringing with it all its raw emotions of passion, grief and ecstasy.

If there's anything teenagers like, it's a good, traditional, classic love story. All right, perhaps enjoying a story with characters called the Mouse King and the Sugar Plum Fairy isn't a mark of having achieved the pinnacle of emotional maturity, but the dancing, if not always perfectly coordinated, was anything but immature. We watched spellbound as the troupe, choreographed by Sheila Styles from Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, brought to life the charming tale of Clara, a girl who receives a nutcracker doll as a Christmas present, in a whirlwind of colour and movement.

The doll comes to life and transports Clara to a magical land, after they've defeated an army of delightfully evil mice who were bizarrely sporting giant furry heads with beady little eyes over their lithe ballet-virtuoso bodies. As the final curtain fell, Clara, having woken up from what had all been a dream, and the cast, including dancers from Arabia in sort of belly-dancing costumes, and the giant sticks of nougat, took their bows. The air seemed to be filled with a bonhomie you don't often get in the usually impersonal malls.

And while that might be what Christmas is about - reliving fairy tales, the soaring spirits and the presents - at least we don't have to return to real life just yet. The nightlong New Year's Eve parties await.

The writer is a 16-year-old student in Dubai