As stupid as Christmas is, it has its purpose.
I might be getting a fish.
Can’t deny it anymore, even if you were trying, christmas is hurtling towards your sanity and bank account like a rabid reindeer on a heady mix of mistletoe, constant bells ringing on TV ads, crap weather and ridiculously named booze. Half the country seems to be on amphetamines whilst the other half complains about the noise. The same bloody songs on the radio or playing in the shops, a list that increases every year by any record that has sleigh-bells in the back ground and/or screeching solo by choirboy/girl/Mariah Carey. Supermarkets will put the same food out as the rest of the year, but with a snowman or Father Christmas on it, and snow flakes, everything must have snow flakes on it and be red. The TV will get over excited and start trying to convince you that you will not be able to cope unless you panic and buy everything now, and in the sales after and your christmas will be awful if you don’t watch the dramas, where peoples christmas’s will be awful. Enough food will be stocked up to weather a nuclear winter, but the drink will run out by boxing day. It will be cold wet snowless, so they say, and you’ll probably be skint by the 24th.
Marvellous.
Once a year, once a year some idiots risk life and limb, and probably a few roof tiles and deck their house out like a Sinclair Spectrum loading Manic Miner, so to make one half smile, at least. When else would someone write out dozens of names on bits of card with a robin on it? Or take a tree, shove it in the corner of the front room, cover it in bits of plastic and chocolates, buy a new set of lights to drape over it, complain about it shedding needles and the cat climbing it/pissing in the pot, cover the rest of the ground floor of the house so that it looks like a cross between Narnia and secondhand christmas decoration shop, and ‘do it better’ every year? When else would you buy a present for your dog/cat/rabbit/budgie and hide it from him/her, and then pretend its from Father Christmas? Lie to a four year old child about a strange man breaking into the house and leaving suspect packages under the tree you keep complaining about? Eat sprouts? Drink Advocaat or wear a hat with antlers? When else would someone travel half way across the country/planet, through all conditions, at the worst time of year to do it, to see a person they probably don’t even like that much, so they can give them a bottle of wine/book voucher/handshake, then go home again? When else would a normally sane man, go into the high street of a town/city centre, perhaps on a saturday? Unless it was shopping for his loved ones. When else is the general populous content enough not to complain for five minutes, about 2pm on christmas day I would guess? It is the start of the darkest, coldest, wettest, time of year and it doesn’t get better for a month or two really, so we have this debauched festival of excess to lift the spirits, to take us past the rising of the sun into a new year, and to be grateful for the fact we can have a celebration of such joy and happiness despite the crap that goes on around us.
So eat drink, and please be merry, or at least stay indoors if you choose not to.
It is just not worth getting miserable about, and I think you are missing the point if you do.
Have a Grand Yule, Merry Christmas Happy Hanukkah or pleasant holiday period and may your New Year be full of fresh fortunes.
