If there’s one thing the Boyd family is good at, it’s quality Christmases. Some other things could have been better over the years, sure – three little fat kids, single-parent family topped up by family credit in a crappy town, etc – but we’ve been lucky with Christmas.

Mostly. Apart from the year we argued so much my brother head-butted a board game through the Christmas tree. And Christmas 2012.

By 2012, we weren’t three poor fat kids any more – we’d grown, we had dreams. Our main one had always been tied up with the family from Home Alone. We wanted what they had so badly (without the child abandonment and break-ins – just the trips abroad and crudites). Doesn’t everyone want to be the McCallisters? They are the silver tuna of Christmas families. So many rooms in that house and they don’t even want to stay in it. How posh and rich is that, how aspirational? Who puts a Christmas tree in every corner and then leaves? The McCallisters do that. And we wanted to do that, too.

Christmas is for wishing, and wishing is what we were good at. Pretending, too. Growing up financially uncomfortable gives you this little ache at the back of your throat that flares whenever you see something that reminds you how precarious stability is. It’s an adult awareness that comes too soon. Other children seem so alien when they beg, cry and whine at their parents for more – more things, better things; why can’t they have them, why aren’t things fair? In comparison, you become quieter, older; you don’t yell about things not being fair. And everything good is special, because there’s that little frightening knowledge you’ve got. But you grow up, and you get selfish – you want so much, you do stupid things to get it.

We booked a family Christmas holiday to New York, in a 4.5-star hotel filled with pine trees and red velvet ribbon. None of us could really afford it – I took a loan out to pay for my part.

We told each other it would be the best ever, because we weren’t the poor family who scrimped to get our school uniforms any more. We could be the McCallisters and spend $122.50 on pizza if we wanted.

Straight away, something wasn’t right with our Christmas dream. The tour company got the booking wrong – suddenly it was double the price we’d agreed to. We all separately decided not to think about it, and packed. The driver we booked to take us to Heathrow politely ignored us lining up outside his van and counting heads; we ran through the airport when we were two hours early. We got ready to talk about feeling “like a heel” for leaving the kids sitting back in coach, too (we were all sitting in “coach”) … but mum had a panic attack on seeing our seats for the flight and started crying.

The queue through airport security at the other end took hours, as though New York had heard how annoying we were at Heathrow and didn’t want to let us through (understandable). When we got to the hotel, our rooms were tiny – we just didn’t quite fit.

A low-level anxiety started humming through our giddiness. On an excursion to a bargain shopping village, my mum got sad about how we grew up and sat on a bench to cry. I slipped on a puddle of piss in the toilets there and took a header straight into it. An outing to Inside Park restaurant to eat potato and truffle oil confused our Findus-Crispy-Pancake-palates so badly we left feeling like frauds. Mum had two more panic attacks at the Planetarium and at the Museum of Modern Art. For Christmas Day, we decided to go and see The Hobbit, but the taxi driver dropped us off in the wrong part of town and drove away. We argued, we made up, we exchanged gifts in our tiny cramped room and danced to tinny Christmas music played through a mobile phone.

Eating McDonald’s we’d snuck through the fancy hotel lobby on the first night is my mum’s favourite memory of the whole trip. But that’s a Boyd pastime, not a McCallister one. Turns out we aren’t really $122.50-pizza people, or expensive-holidays-away people either.

New York at Christmas said goodbye to us with the gift of stomach problems on the flight home, in the car home, and the key breaking in the lock as soon as we got home. But it also gave us the important lesson that being yourself in your crappy town over the festive season is way better than trying to be cut-price McCallisters. Oh – and it gave me that huge loan to pay off in the new year, too.

• Phoebe-Jane Boyd is a content editor for an online media company