Jingle all the way…

As someone in a marketing department once famously said of the build up to Christmas: ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year!’

Of course, if you’re a minor celebrity nobody has heard of since 2005 and you want to sell a gift set of an aftershave and yoga mat with a stencil of your arse on it, it most certainly is. It’s also grand if you’re the kind of sadist who enjoys the process of fighting your way through half the population of London in Debenhams, to buy something nobody wants for a price nobody sane would pay for it because for fuck’s sake it’s the 22nd of December and polite society dictates that you must present something for Aunt Deirdre to half-heartedly look at in between the waves of delirium generated by the interaction of prescription painkillers, merlot and gaviscon.

If you have failed to entirely take leave of your senses, though, the period before Christmas presents something of a trial. I say the period before because I actually quite like Christmas itself: you get to eat, drink, be merry and watch simmering family tensions gradually become icy family silences, as someone abruptly leaves the table to do some aggressive washing up just as Aunt Deirdre is slurring her way through telling us all about that lovely couple she met skiing last year…for the fourth time in the past hour. There’s something delightfully British about the dutiful awkwardness of the whole procedure which is somehow quite appealing.

So whilst I don’t hate Christmas, I’ve come to realise that I must, in some ways, much like an immigrant on a UKIP poster or Ed Milliband’s dad, hate Britain, or, more precisely, the way in which Christmas is presented in Britain.

This is because it seems to be the case that the ‘festive period’, as well as being the only period in which the DFS sale briefly abates in order to return with all the more ferocity on Boxing Day, elicits the latent British desire to make everything shit.

Christmas-themed TV is the first symptom, like that feeling of unease and slight fever that precedes a bout of prolonged vomiting and diarrhoea, it starts trotting out in early December with The X Factor producing another winner who will be famous only by comparison with whoever won The Voice and won’t be over until Doctor Who has saved Jesus on Boxing Day, along with help from guest stars Johnny Vegas and Dame Edna Everidge, who are both there for some reason which is presumably apparent to someone.

Meanwhile Strictly Come Dancing produces another celebrity final where you dimly recall having vaguely heard of one who wins (probably because they won The X Factor) but have no idea at all who the other two are (probably because they won The Voice).

Amidst this, Ant and Dec will spunk forth some sort of show involving eight year old children who look more bored to be there than whichever of Ant or Dec they are talking to, probably because they’re being asked to judge a sack race between Antony Costa and either Noel Edmonds or the one of the Bee Gees who isn’t dead, it’s hard to tell which. In any case, the whole show has the texture of warm mucus and mainly serves as a preamble to Sarah Millican evaluating which brand of mince pie makes her fart the most while Gary Barlow and Cliff Richard, sat at a piano in a giant two-person onesie, sing Silent Night and plot what they’re going to do with their agents the next time they’ve got a free afternoon and a black and decker workmate.

None of this is a problem, so long as you’re able to avoid TV for a month or get a rush job on a frontal lobotomy. Unfortunately, lobotomies have fallen out of fashion somewhat and avoiding TV involves spending more time out and about in society, which is even worse.

A great example of this is my home town, which is on the periphery of north-east London. Not in a gritty, urban sort of way but just in a bleak suburban kind of way. It looks less like Christopher Wren designed it and more like Christopher Biggens did, with a hangover and a tight budget…which could only be spent on concrete and nylon shell-suits.

This kind of town is good at doing bleak, and not very good at doing magical Christmas winter wonderland: it should accept this, get a tree and move on.
This year, however, in much the same way that Eamonn Holmes might decide to produce his own bikini calendar, my town decided to have a German Christmas market. This consisted primarily of a burger stall, a candy floss stall and a stand selling Ugg boots, but clad in wood like an Alpine cabin to make it look continental, as if this would successfully distract people from the fact that it was a burger van in between a Cash Converters and a Primark . The whole scene was reminiscent of if you had dressed up a gorilla as Miley Cyrus, set it on fire, and left its burning remains in between a Cash Converters and a Primark.

So why are we importing things to be shit at just because it’s Christmas? We’re shit enough at the stuff we already do, like running our economy and producing television that doesn’t make you glad of your own immanent mortality, without borrowing some traditions from other countries just so that we can be shit at those as well. It’s a bit like Joey Essex taking up playing the trombone because he feels that he isn’t putting enough of a shift in at being shit simply by his attempts to be a human being.

We need to reclaim the true meaning of Christmas in Britain: eating, drinking, opening presents and enjoying thinly-veiled family tensions, all whilst critiquing the quality of cracker jokes and attempting to avoid discussing UKIP with more elderly relatives who have not yet had the good grace to fall asleep in an armchair.

So my advice to you would be to stay inside, drink a great deal of wine and take as many of Aunt Deirdre’s prescription pills as you can get and it should all be fine…but for Christ’s sake don’t turn the telly on.

Merry Christmas.

(P.S. Don’t actually take any of Aunt Deirdre’s pills, especially not with alcohol…you probably shouldn’t let Aunt Deirdre do it either.)