Write a story including the techniques of repetition, dramatic present, dramatic action, habitual time, flashback, foreshadowing, starting 'in medias res'

Uncle Hogarth was in the middle of a coughing fit when I came through with the entrees. Aunt Silvia, from my father's side, was rubbing his back and trying to keep him calm. He looked worse than usual.
I was thinking about it last week, when I was putting up the tree. I always do it about a week before. If I took my cue from the tv it'd be up in October. I recalled, as I sorted the ornaments out so that the colours would be evenly spaced, how half of them had come off the previous year when Uncle Hogarth had crashed into the tree during a musical number. It was practically a tradition, his pre-lunch sherry opening an afternoon of drinking that inevitably culminated in him challenging one of the children to a game of snap, or him launching into an impromptu and inappropriate song before falling asleep in the corner armchair. He is not, I am told - year after year by Auntie Bel - a heavy drinker in everyday life. He saved his merriment for Christmas. I've never minded all that much, in fact I think I even find it comforting. Since my parents died it has been this cast of oddball aunts and uncles that have kept Christmas familial. Familiar.
By the time everyone had some food on their plates, Uncle Hogarth seemed to have settled down. He was certainly in the spirit of things - first, as usual, to offer a cracker to one of my cousin's children, first to put on a party hat, first to set a record in target shooting with the party poppers. But his breathing sounded heavy throughout, and it worried me to think that for the first time he seemed old. He had always been old from my perspective, of course. Anyone over fifty is 'old' when you're a child. But now I noticed how wiry his frame looked, how dishevelled his face, how thin his hair. His smile, however bright, threw a hundred wrinkles into relief. I realised that, to an extent, I had been living as a child for the past twenty years, preserving youth through Christmas day. When one of them, these wonderful old maniacs, passed away, the illusion would die with them. It would be the last Christmas for all of them.