I promised myself that I would leave well enough alone and not touch the Christmas theme again. 'Enough has been said about Christmas in Asia, Tiffany,' I told myself - 'just leave it be.' Then everything went pear-shaped and fell a bit to pieces, and I was cranky enough to renege on my promise.

We made a special foray last night to go in search of a Christmas Eve dinner. We selected Mango Tree as our venue of choice - it's in the guidebook, but we'd enjoyed pretty great Thai cooking there on an earlier visit to Bangkok, so we were quite excited about going back.

Mango Tree is located right near Soi Patpong, so before and after eating your meal, you have to walk through a sea of touts all shouting at you in rapid-fire English, "Hey you! Pussy show inside!" This is not my preferred way to start and finish an evening out, but hey, sacrifices have to be made.

As soon as we entered the little backstreet courtyard in which Mango Tree is housed, my heart sank. Two bored-looking Thai staff kitted out in white chef's garb were standing behind a lit-up glass cabinet that contained a huge, dried-out turkey. They listlessly entreated patrons entering the restaurant to try the 'special meal'.

'Special' was not what sprang to mind when you saw this turkey, but even worse were the gloopy-looking vegetables and strangely-coloured sludgy sauces that rested next to it. Everything festered dully under the industrial-strength heat lamps they had trained on the meal.

Inside the courtyard (pleasantly sparsely attended last time we ate here), all manner of tourists were eating. Sunburnt, drunk and nervous about the food were the hallmarks of the clientele. Some people were eating their meals out of pineapples, which had been carved into little 'boats' for the food. Immediately, my travel snobbery was going haywire - it's too toursisty, too lame, too forlorn! I don't want to eat here!

Too late - we had a booking, and nowhere else to go.

Due to the mass influx of sunburnt people, we were told there was no room for us outside in the leafy courtyard, and we were instead shunted into the artically cold indoor seating area. Feeling completely pissed off, I sat at the table in a total funk.

The fact that a Thai man wearing a Santa suit and a scary plastic 'Caucasian face' mask that made him look like something from a Steven King novel was circulating among the tables and doling out lollies only lifted my mood slightly - this was a serious funk.

Things began to take a better turn when the food arrived; anything not in a pineapple seemed actually to be good! Spicy duck salad and grilled cottonfish wrapped in a banana leaf and served with sour chilli dipping sauce both delivered the goods. Still we were hungering for some vegetable action, and so we decided to try the following: 'crispy coconut, savoury herbs with bitter green leaves and tamarind sauce'. This description was enigmatic, but it sounded promising.

When the Miang Kham arrived, we were utterly bamboozled. This was no salad; in fact, it looked like a condiment set ...

The waitress took pity on us and decided to show us how things worked. With incredible dexterity, she grasped one of the 'bitter green leaves' (actually betel leaves) and folded it into a tiny cone. Into this went first a couple of peanuts, then the tiny, chewy, orange halfmoons of dried shrimp, a good pinch of just-browned coconut shreds, perfect cubes of young ginger and red shallot and tiny, weeny squares of fresh lime. Her hand hovered over the chillis that were nestled in the same bowl as the limes: 'You like make spicy?'

I figured I'd better not go there, as the chillis were whole and unadulterated. They are known in Thai as 'mouse-shit chilli' because of their tiny torpedo shape, and they are potent to say the least - definitely following the old rule that the smaller the chilli, the hotter it is! On top went a spoonful of the yummy tamarind sauce, which was very jam-like in its consistency.

Describing the taste of this mini-wonderland of Thai flavours is hard; as soon as you bite into the parcel, you are aware of the peppery freshness of the betel leaf on your tongue, the intensity of the limes as they burst between your teeth, the sweetness of the tamarind jam, the sharp, clean flavour of red shallot and the tang of ginger. But your brain is also registering the nutty crunch of the peanut, with the smoky, sweet coconut strands and the slight resistance of the tiny shrimp as you chew. Each bite releases more flavour, and twists the combinations in new ways.

Too good! Too delicicious! Add to this the fact that every item in every bowl is the perfect specimen of its genre. The ginger doesn't have even a hint of stringyness; its texture is like biting into a spicy, perfect water chestnut. The limes actually have their skins left on - but again, they are so fresh and so tender that the skin is fine and flexible and tastes divine. This, of course, made me foolhardy enough to take on the mouse-shit chilli ... the predominant thought in my mind was, 'I'll just see what this is like ... They're laid out here like candy; maybe I was wrong about them being super-hot ...'

As soon as I bit into and swallowed the chilli, there was fire searing straight down my throat where the opened-up husk had brushed the skin on its way down. Not good! Not good! It pretty much blew my head off, and that one was green. I hate to imagine what a red one would do to you. Kids, do not pop these casually at home - unless you are made of much stauncher stuff than I!

Mouse droppings aside, we polished off the lot!

With good food in my tum, I was feeling much better about the evening. We sat and chatted and perved on the other tourists outside who were being treated to a traditional Thai-style dance. All this while, I was aware of strange, raucous stirrings upstairs. Periodically, whoever was up there would yell 'ooo-ooo-OOH!' in a rising crescendo. Seconds later, the floor above us would rumble with the thunder of scores of feet being pounded up and down, in the way that you might stamp and holler at a big sports match.

Finding out that the toilet was up there, I had a legitimate excuse to go and investigate.

It turned out that the entire upstairs wing was devoted to a massive party of Thai office workers. They were 'doing' Christmas just like us. However, while we were downstairs eating out of pineapples and watching 'Thai-style' dances performed in a 'Thai-style' garden, there was a real, live 'Thai-style' party going on upstairs.

An entire room was filled with discarded wrapping paper and the detritus that accompanies the giving of gifts. Bags and boxes and toys and teddybears were everywhere.

The group had abandoned its tables and assembled around a huge TV in an adjoining room. They sat in a semi-circle (on the kind of chairs you see in Chinese restaurants at home), all facing the screen. A Thai karaoke VCD was playing, a few people had microphones, and everybody , microphone or not, was crooning along. The impromptu karaoke lounge was decked out in a flurry of Santa Claus pennant-style flags that gushed 'Ho! Ho! HO! and a Christmas tree winked in merry multicolour over in the corner.

And so, in the biggest city in the Land of Smiles, an unlikely band of revellers celebrated Christmas Eve - that time which is usually represented in children's tales as magical and transformative and ever-so-slightly surreal. As we have been taught to do, we all imagined a far-off land where the landscape is different and people wear funny things, and we hoped that denizens from afar might visit us in our slumber and bring gifts and specialness to our everyday lives.

At Mango Tree last night, a strange and wonderful time was had by all, everyone dining out on vivid dreams of the new, the different and the unusual.

Very happy Thai-style Christmas to you!