I’m very much in the Bah Humbug camp, for the following reasons:
The Build-up.
Every group has it’s Christmas Nutter, or nutters – it seems the moment the kids go back to school after the Summer hols it’s “crimbo” this, and that. I will accept with everything going on in the world at the moment the usual ‘excitement’ has come later, and it’s milder – but this is an exceptional year, most years it’s 3-4 months of “Crimbo” nonsense. For some people that’s a quarter to a third of their life devoted to being a seasonal prick. I don’t want to deal with that for 20 years of my life (give or take).
Our retail over-lords go into Hyper drive. It starts with the pubs and hotels of course, they’ve got bookings to take – a Hotel local to me has taken the unprecedented step of devoting a large part of it’s massive frontage to Xmas, YEAR AROUND, but by August every pub and restaurant in the land has a cynical plastic pine tree in the entrance (Taking Bookings Now!) the Toy makers are next come September the airwaves are full of toys and every one of them is pushing out press releases that it’s wares are this years ‘must haves’ desperately hoping to create the idea of a shortage and that’s followed by the super markets pushing more calories than someone can live on for a month in the 3rd world for already over-weight people to eat in a day to whip us all up into a frenzied orgy of consumption.
The ‘Office Party’.
I know these can be good, but let’s be honest most of them are horrific, come September the boss hands it over to the shrill office dickhead – giddy with power they’ve dreamt up ‘secret santa’ – great, another thing to buy and another bit of crap I don’t need to store, for a bit at least. A night at the local hotel in dinner suits, why? Yay a hot, rented suit so you can look like an 80’s **** before you spend the night avoiding the dodgy looking £60 factory made, locally heated ‘special Christmas menu’ and trying to tread the line between the agony of dealing with this sober or the career suicide of drinking too much and looking like you’re having fun, only to return home to the full Spanish inquisition from the ‘other-half’. I for one *love* being punished for being punished.
The Expense.
When I was single, it was easy, I bought a few things for close family and that was it, I usually spent the day on my own waiting for it to be over. As a parent, though, the ‘parental guilt’ is hard to rise above, when they’re little you feel you need to buy them lots of crap, but by the time they’re in double digit ages they demand them, for their entire life to this point they’ve been told that Christmas means lots of stuff, trying to unwrite that as they get older is hard work. You could be brave, explain the facts of life to them and spend a few quid for something nice and leave it there – but they’re coming home with tales of ‘Stacy in year 5’ getting a Leer Jet for Christmas and ‘chatter between the Mums in the playground’ of Little Timmy getting **** all off Santa when Mum and Dad had a new Car 2 years ago. Couple that with the most effective advertising and marketing machines in the world telling you parental love ‘only’ costs £49.99 (batteries not included) and is made out of pink plastic and it creates a lot of stress and arguments between parents before one (usually Dads) cries, “I just don’t **** care anymore” and Barclaycard has a field day and that’s before the really snide one are posting up pictures on Xmas Eve of a pile of presents with a little star at the top – “oh **** me, that’s not a pile for the orphanage, that’s their Xmas tree, they must REALLY love their kids” fills you will guilt.
The Actual Day.
11pm Christmas Day “So this is Christmas and what have you done?” Really, no really, what did you do?
Rewind to when you were awoken at 6am, that’s okay in my book, but the OH hates non-standard behaviour so everyone must get up at the time we need to for work / school, weird.
the Kids are excited, there’s a moment of joy when they open something and say “wow” but you know you’ve bought too much, they’ve lost interest half way though, they cast aside that you spent half an hour of your life queuing to pay a pair of carbon bars worth of cash on without a second thought, because it’s gift number 17 and they’ve either got the only thing they actually wanted or they’re still trying to find it.
You’re not insane so you don’t ‘surprise’ your other-half, that’s never going to end well, so you buy EXACTLY what they HINT about, from the EXACT shop they HINTED it could be found, in the EXACT size, colour, shape or flavour they wanted and they act surprised, you don’t expect an Oscar will arrive in the post. They pass you your version, you think “I could have had this months ago if we didn’t have to swap” whilst grinning like an idiot.
Then it’s ‘Lunch’ which can be anytime between 11am and 8pm depending on your planning skills, the largest plate you’ve ever seen in your life groaning under the weight of 4 hours of labour for some mug eaten with all the appreciation of someone inspecting their own gallows because the kids have been eating Chocolate since 6am on the 23rd and the adults can’t LEAVE THE **** PEANUTS ALONE.
Afternoon now, the poor cook is exhausted, but is getting stick of the non-cook who’s “been looking after the kids all day!” and the adults what to drop into a coma, but the kids want Lego built (I’m sure they used to sell imagination kits, now they sell 8-bit Airfix) so we get to watch Rodney and Del as Batman and Robin again, hit the booze at 2pm and generally live with the worse version of your children you could ever imagine as their sugar addled, no sleep brains try to deal with all the new data, unless, heaven forbid, someone wants to visit when you have to do all those thing only dressed and with ‘the act’ on.
Come 9pm and the kids are passed out, you hope for a bit of peace and quiet with the other-half, but the weeks previous have taken their toll and resentment runs high, both smart-phones browsers weight heavy with searches for “family solicitors” and one side has to crack, either the “tight” one may ask “do you think we bought too much? “ or the “It’s bloody Christmas” one says with a solemn look over the piles of unwanted and unloved opened gifts “I told you we should have got the plastic crap number 17 (or whatever it’s called) then they would have been happy” and you spend the rest of the evening glaring at the TV never once looking at each other whilst you stop looking for Solicitors and start thinking about new Patios and texting your mates to find out when you can escape the hell and talk to some real adults for a bit.
Back to 11pm and finally the healing starts with the dreaded, but all so necessary SENSE OF ANTI-CLIMAX it’s over, it’s done, the last 3 months (at least) of work has bared its fruit and its sour and rotten – why do we do it to ourselves, it’s “just a day” we haven’t been to Church for anything other than weddings, funerals and christenings since they stopped making us in School, why do we throw ourselves into celebrating its biggest festival in such a crass way? But now it’s over, sure there’s the death throws that is Boxing Day, but without the rampant consumerism it doesn’t punch with the same sting and it’s a decent time for a meet up with other survivors for a bit of a debrief.
For SAD sufferers, Mountain Bikers and pretty much everyone else who likes to be outdoors for their leisure time, there is some glint of joy when you remember that in all the chaos the shortest day passed a week ago, we’ve broken the back of Winter, sure Jan and Feb aren’t any walk in the park, but it gets a little better every day.
For Parents those, there’s little respite, come Boxing Day and Thomas Cook, Jet2 et all will be banging down your door, if you think Christmas costs more debt that you ever thought possible, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to dragging 2 kids to come Spanish Costa hell-hole out of term time. Because your OH wants to “relax in the sun” because she’s forgotten we’ve got kids and we have to take them too, but at least you get a few hours without it.
Christmas, it’s one of those things, if it hadn’t evolved into what it is now over the last few hundred years (I’m talking about Christmas, not Celebrating the Birth of a Jesus) if someone tried to invent it now, they’ve been given life. It creates a higher number of suicides than any other time of the year, it causes more relationships to fail, it creates huge amounts of debt, wife and husbands will be beaten by the one person who supposed to love them more than anyone else, people will be murdered for it – and not just in some middle-eastern country in a fight over which book is best, but here, in the west, people’s lives will be violently taken away over the stress and strain caused by Christmas.
It’s total bullshit, it’s a marketing exercise and one that get bigger every year, ‘Black Friday’ used to be a Tabloid story from the US, then it became a thing here, now it lasts 2 weeks and starts on a Monday. New Year Sales, became Boxing Day Sales and now they start mid-Dec. The push for the early adopters (Pubs and Hotels) went year around this year, in dribs and drabs, next year it will be wide-spread, within 5 I bet it’ll expand to all the industries involved in the scam. It seems laughable now, but so did ‘Black Friday’ 3 years ago.
One day there will be a back-lash, there has been in the past I’m told, a few glorious moments when people said, no more, usually in times of war, major recessions won’t make much of a dent.
I for one hope the whole thing crashes and burns one day, shift the bank holidays to summer and call it a bad idea.
Bah Humbug.
Posted 8 years ago
