So, you have all the family home for Christmas. You’ve been looking forward to it for months. You’ve had the heating on in their rooms for a week. Now well-aired, you’ve changed all the bed linen and given the bedrooms a good clean up.

The fridge is full. There’s plenty in the freezer too. All their favourites are made – good cranberry and Cumberland sauce, plenty of stuffing, sponge cake ... the list goes on. You’ve even got in a supply of Terry’s Chocolate Orange because they like to crack them open in one go.

All’s set for a perfect Christmas. When they land in on Christmas Eve or the day before, there’s great excitement and lots of chat to begin with as you catch up on their young lives. But then it starts to go quiet as the smartphones and tablets appear.

Is there anything as demoralising as watching a room full of adults pay more attention to their electronic devices than they do to the living, breathing, live human beings sitting alongside them?

There’s no point making a fuss and ordering everyone to turn them off because it won’t happen. In my experience, the best thing to do is compromise. Let them at their phone but agree some family time too. Here are 10 tried-and-trusted ways of keeping the family feeling alive.

1 Watch a favourite film together. My lot are suckers for the three Home Alone and the no less than eight Harry Potter movies and they are all in their 20s. Try getting them to watch Casablanca or The Quiet Man and you are losing. There’ll be plenty of time to watch these movies when the young people have scattered after Christmas.

2 Go for a long walk together. You can target one of the family members from whom you might have heard less often during the year. There’s nothing like a good walk on Ballybunnion beach or in Killarney National Park to get the chat started.

3 Prise another one of your offspring loose from their phones with some work down the yard. It could be splitting timber for the house, getting lambing pens ready for next spring or tidying up the tool shed.

4 So as they won’t forget where they’ve come from or what paid for their education, organise a rota for all the family to milk the cows, feed livestock, scrape out cubicles or any of the multitude of jobs that still have to be done on a farm, Christmas or not.

5 Keep Christmas Eve for the family. Unless there’s a family tradition, the only place anyone is going to is granny and granddad’s or church.

6 Make sure you have a new pack of cards and rope everyone in for a round of gin rummy or 45. Nothing like it to bring out the competitive juices. The same goes for Monopoly or Scrabble. And if you really want to hear shrieks of laughter, then get them Frustration, which does exactly what it says on the pack. Every Christmas we get a new 1,000-piece jigsaw and rope them in to finish it in two nights.

7 Allocate decorating the crib to a different person each year – it’s even better if you have grandchildren around the place. Award effort and creativity with extra Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

8 Farm out sections of the Christmas dinner. After all, they are living away from home and haven’t poisoned themselves or others yet. One can take on the roast potatoes, another can be trusted with the trifle or why not let them make their own favourite dessert?

9 Christmas is not the time to talk careers, job prospects or exam results. Avoid stress points, there’s plenty of time during the year for all that debate. Nor is it the time to comment on the child-rearing abilities/general attitude or spending habits of your daughter or son-in-law. Drop it.

10 Make use of their technology skills by getting them to make a short video of everyone around the Christmas dinner table or relaxing after it. Better still if the video is made without anyone being aware that it’s happening. This is guaranteed to provide plenty of laughs in the future. And as we never know what the new year will bring, it will always be a reminder of happy family times together.

So, here’s to the season of goodwill and family togetherness. Remember, it’s all built around a little family who lived over 2,000 years ago. Keep that thought and you will sail through into the new year.