It’s the night before Christmas, and creatures are definitely stirring. There’s a curious rustling of bedsheets and the occasional muffled grunt. Not just in my house, but in homes up and down the country. Because there’s nothing more festive than a surreptitious wank.

Think of the children: not the young ones, obviously, but the grown-up children. Unmarried sons and daughters like me in their mid-twenties (OK, late twenties, fuck you) for whom Christmas marks a return to the family home.

The old traditions, like hanging stockings by the fire and leaving a mince pie out for Father Christmas, have been replaced by new ones such as getting tanked with the siblings on Christmas Eve then falling through the front door at one in the morning slurring ‘ho ho ho’ at the rest of the family.

We’re home for the holidays, and we’re sleeping on futons, sofas, floors or single beds that remind us of our young adulthood, when wanking wasn’t just a casual hobby but a heartfelt vocation.

Location, location, location

That’s how it is for me. Because of my parents’ selfish insistence on having lives that don’t revolve around me, my bedroom’s no longer my bedroom – there are no longer posters or books or piles of tatty clothes decorating the carpet. It’s now a tidy office, with my old single bed squashed awkwardly in the corner. But sweet baby Jesus it’s sexy – it’s sexy because it reminds me of being a teenager, with all the angst and guilt and fetid, desperate masturbation that went along with it.

I can’t lie in that bed without being reminded of the number of times I buried my face in the pillow and silently, subtly, frigged myself to an awkward and potentially embarrassing climax.

Not lonely, but alone

I guard my family Christmas quite jealously. No matter how in love I’ve been, or how hot for a particular boy, none of them has ever been invited home for Christmas. Not because I’m worried about tension or embarrassment, but because they might do something unconscionable, like suggest we open Christmas presents before lunch. My family traditions are important: without them I wouldn’t be festive enough to jingle a single bell, let alone deck the fucking halls. From the annual Christmas Eve piss-up to putting sprouts in people’s stockings to recreate the Bottom Christmas Special, my traditions are far too sacred to cast aside. And one of the greatest traditions of all is the week-long wankathon.

Teenage kicks

As I lie in my old single bed, fingers slickly rubbing my clit, the old images come back too. Here I think less about gang-bangs and spanking and more about formative experiences with the boys of my youth. I think about that time when a boy touched my tit in an alley, then proudly showed me how his erection pushed at the fabric of his jeans. I think about the first blow-job I gave, knees red raw from kneeling on the ground in the woods and arousal so deep it was soaking through my knickers. I remember the guys who touched me, the guys I touched, and the ones whose laps I’d sit on. As I edge closer to a shuddering orgasm I think of how they’d wrap trembling arms around me, letting me rub right up against their twitching erections.

I can remember these things anywhere, of course, but nowhere are they more vivid than in the bed I’m sitting on now. If I wanted, I could go back to the woods, walk down through the alley, and see the same things I saw then through fresh eyes. I could probably even knock on some doors and say hi to the 28-year-old versions of those teenagers. It wouldn’t be the same, of course. They all have jobs and lives and mortgages. Some of them even have families. I’m sure most of them have richer and filthier fantasies than having a horny, excitable me grind incompetently on their prick. I doubt all of them remember the times when they made me shiver by touching my nipples or the times they asked me, in croaky half-whispers to ‘just touch it. Please.’

But maybe some of them do. Perhaps somewhere fairly close by, in a street very like this one, one of the boys I knew back then is doing the same thing I am. He’s lying in the single bed he slept in at age eighteen, idly rubbing his now-grown-up cock and remembering how it felt when I touched it through his trousers.

So, don’t feel alone this Christmas, even if you’re single, or temporarily parted from your lovers. As you stare at the ceiling in a home that’s no longer yours, rekindle your affection for youthful masturbation and treat yourself to a lovely festive wank. Just try not to rustle the duvet.