It’s P*ssedmas Time
’Tis the season for the Student Christmas, that fleeting moment between the end of classes, the start of revision and the threat of impending exams. All before the inevitable exodus of university students, broken by their first semester fleeing to the comforts of home and to any meal that it isn’t ramen.
Sorry for the profanity but there’s simply no better way to describe what my Christmas looked like in my four years at Dundee. It might even be putting it lightly.
“P*ssedmas” was an instant tradition. In my first year at university, I was struggling to adjust to living away from home, balancing my studies and looking after myself. What mental health? I am not overly nostalgic about my first few months of university except from the friendships I made in our “Penthouse”- the name we gave to the flats on the top floor of our student halls.
When I started writing down memory lane for this piece, I couldn’t help but read an article written by my wonderful friend, flatmate and fellow P*ssedmas survivor, Billi Allen. I couldn’t help but smile over her Dickens-esque opening:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of Echo Falls, it was the season of the student Christmas Dinner.”
Looking at these photos, I can’t help but remember running between two ill-equipped flat kitchens, serving burnt chicken and scorched veg. Or how we dragged 12 people’s worth of food up four flights of stairs and collapsed at the top before lugging ourselves to the kitchen to get cooking.
I remember how we wrapped the breakfast bar in wrapping paper because we couldn’t find a table cover big enough and the catastrophe that 12 people- three courses- and a freshers volume of booze left behind.
A dinner organised by a bunch of half-sloshed naive freshers, barely out of their family homes, was as good as you could expect it to be. But over the years, I have to say we got better even if progress was slow. We even matured enough to implement timings and stick to them! Waiting to drink until after we had prepped everything seemed to be the turning point. Not that we managed that until third year.
The dinners grew more ambitious and the menus more sophisticated. We moved away from breakfast bars and wrapping paper to white table cloths and martini glasses. Even if Tesco’s mozzarella sticks and cheesy bites did somehow worm their way into our line up once or twice.
Every year P*ssedmas dinner looked a little different. The venue constantly changed as we moved flats. A nightmare I desperately hope to avoid in the future. In 2018, we had our dinner in one of our flatmate’s rooms- the biggest in the flat.To those who aren’t familiar with the frustrations of student letting, it is very common for letting agencies to brand what is obviously a living space into a third or fourth bedroom to make more money out of students. Horrendous, right? You’re not wrong but that’s an argument for another day.
You’ll notice the company changed over the years as friends came and went. In our first two years, P*ssedmas was exclusively for flatmates. We didn’t want to subject our terrible cooking to anyone not bound by the flatmate blood pact. A precautionary measure that seemed sensible with a 70% chance of food poisoning.
Over the years, our flatmate family contracted from 12 to 6 to 4 as our former flatmates moved abroad, life took over and people moved on. We had got so comfortable in our little flatmate bubble, clinging to the safety of our childish nerf gun fights and late night trips to Tesco in search of Jaffa Cakes.
By 2018, we had to open our flat door to other people. And it was scary. We knew these people, we liked them and were even friends with them but bringing them into our sacred day made me feel like I was stepping away from the lost lamb I was at 18, when I had first found comfort and safety amongst a flock of just as clueless sheep.
Opening those doors, even just a little, felt like the closing of a chapter. It was like we were growing up and we were that one step closer to the outside world that we were sheltered against for the moment in our little flat bubble.
We talk about university being a microcosm for the outside world. As you get older, friends will come and go and the memories of the finer details of your youth, fade out into watercolour.
For the moments, the memories of my years at university and P*ssedmas dinners feel solid but just out of reach. But I doubt I am remembering half of the things that happened or even half of the conversations and as time goes on, I will remember less and less as I change and look back on my university experience differently.
Seeing these photos again, I am not thinking about all the stress I was balancing in the final stretch of the semester as we approached exams or if I had remembered to take the Yorkshires out of the freezer ( which I never in the four years remembered to do by the way but continued to buy them every year all the same) . Two things I am sure felt like the end of the world to me at the time.
Instead, I am reflecting on just how wonderful it is to be able to watch yourself and the people you care about grow up.
University is a microcosm for the outside world, that’s true, but it’s also like watching your life on fast forward. Ask any student and they’ll tell you that between the late nights and study cramming; the days, weeks, semesters and years blend together. It’s hard to keep track even when you are living through it.
By marking our calendar with a tradition like this, P*ssedmas day forever stands on its own. By documenting the day with photos and cringe karaoke videos which suspiciously did not make it into the collection, I can always come back to my friends, my student bubble and the age of Echo Falls, everything that was a part of me growing up.
