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It's that time of year again. The time when you have to be nice to people you really hate, even though you abuse them for the other 364 days of the year. The time when you spend your hard-earned dosh on stupid novelties to delight your nearest and dearest. The time to eat, drink and be merry, then be sick. Yes, it's bloody Christmas again! Now I don't want to seem like Scrooge or anything, but I HATE Xmas. All that forced jollity, and the expense! and when it's all over, what have you got to show for it? An overdraft and indigestion! |
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I can't think of one single thing I like about the so-called Season of Good Will. The whole thing is vastly over-rated and so EXPENSIVE! In my opinion the modern Christmas was invented by the credit card companies. What a bloody waste of time sending people Christmas cards is. Thousands of acres of forest are felled just so you can send Aunty Mavis a picture of a cute little Robin hopping through the snow. What is the point? You know she is only going to throw it straight in the bin. And most cards are just so tacky! The real best-sellers in card shops are always the rude cards. I don't know whether to be offended or just depressed by most of these. 'Jokes' about dirty old men wanting to find nubile 16 year olds in their stockings, limp-wristed fairies on top of trees, Father Christmas 'coming' down the chimney to 'give you one'; they are the WH Smith equivalent of the Benny Hill show. If you can resist buying these (and frankly, who couldn't!) then there's the charity cards, catalogues for which start appearing through your letter box in mid-August. These depict misty snow scenes, or pictures of three old geezers on camels gazing moronically at the sky. They have the advantage of being quite cheap, and massaging your conscience at the same time, but they are always extremely boring. So you're left with the 'cute' cards, with their pictures of children playing in the snow, their happy little red faces glowing with excitement (you're not supposed to notice the imminent frostbite - nor to comment on that fact that the last time we had a white Christmas in the south of England was 17 years ago!) or of jolly Santas sitting on their sleighs pulled by loveable old Rudolph, Dobbin, Fleabag and the rest. And inside there's a little rhyme:
Yuk! Of course, what they never do is print the second verse:
So you choose the least nausea-inducing card you can find and make a list of all the people you really want to remember at this time of hypocrisy. Having made the list, you then go through it and cross half of the people off because they didn't send you one last year. Then you add the people who you don't particularly like but who did send you one last year. Then you add the people who you know won't be sending you one but who you want to make feel extremely guilty about it. Then you realise you've got 254 people on the list and only bought 150 cards, so you go through again and cross off people who get so many cards they won't notice whether or not they receive one from you. Then you cross off the people whose addresses were in the filofax you lost last month... You're left with the definitive list, so you start writing your cards. You do half the list and decide to finish off the next day. You post the completed cards. You come to finish the mailing and can't find your list. Panic! No way can you remember who you put on the list, after all the changes - let alone who you've already written a card for! You paw through your old address books and compile what you think might have been the list, then think 'sod it!' and write the rest out at random. So what if some people get two cards? They will be doubly impressed. You post the remaining cards, and then you find the list. Horrors! as you realise the list contains far more people than you thought it did, but by this time you are totally confused so you chuck the list away and forget about it. Then the postman delivers a huge batch of cards to you. How touching! you think as you open a card from Uncle Walter. Ah, look! Denise from the chippy has remembered me. That's disgusting! as you read Cousin Henry's idea of a 'funny' card. And then the doubt starts to creep in... here's a card from Charlie - did I send him one? You frantically scrabble through the bin trying to find your list but it is so covered in coffee stains and old cat litter that it is totally illegible. You dither, wondering whether to send him one and look like a total prat if he's already got one, or to leave it and risk him being upset and not buying you drinks any more! Finally you decide to send him one anyway, and write a feeble joke inside about not being sure whether he deserves a card or not - when you realise it's the 7th of December already and you've missed the last Xmas post! Then there's this present business. Every year I swear I will start my shopping in October, buy a few things every week and have it all done by the middle of November, then sit back and laugh at the poor sods scrabbling round Oxford Street in the crowds. Every year I swear this, and every year the weekend before Christmas arrives and I still haven't even thought about what to buy. Christmas Eve dawns and pure panic sets in, so I bravely set off for London's West End armed with my credit card, and find that the only things left on the shelves are paisley ties and socks, or perfume that smells like wet nappies, or Wicked Willy's Guide to Making a Packet Out of Gullible Consumers by Recycling Old Jokes. So I fall back on the old standbys - record tokens and liqueur chocolates - and decide to give the same to everyone, even Granny who is stone deaf and teetotal. All the shops are playing endless tape-loops of Christmas carols, which, lets face it, are not the world's best tunes. And the lyrics leave something to be desired - 'We Three Kings of Orient Are' is not exactly the grammar I was taught at School. I end up laden with six heavy carrier bags, all made out of tissue paper and threatening to deposit their contents in a muddy puddle, to find the bus queues are a mile long, the tubes stopped at midday, and taxis are charging £15 a mile because it's after 3.00pm. I get home and find I forgot to buy any bloody wrapping paper! And however much thought and effort I put into choosing presents that will really suit the recipient, I might as well not have bothered because I know I will receive the same thing from them as I do every year. I have an Aunty who always gives me tights for Christmas. Not exactly the most imaginative present, is it? And what's worse, she always buys me small ones. I haven't worn small ANYTHING since I was five years old. She sees me every month and knows I have thighs like treetrunks but still she buys me SMALL tights! Or I end up with 24 different bars of soap, tins of talc, sachets of bubble bath... are my friends trying to tell me something? One friend always gives people presents that she would like to receive herself. Unfortunately her taste runs to Val Doonican records and socks with toes in them so her gifts are not always received with the delight she would have hoped. After Christmas, of course, I have to write thank-you letters, which is where I realise with horror that I threw out all the labels and can't remember which relative gave me the Crinoline Lady Toilet Roll Dispenser. So I write an all-purpose letter and send it to everyone - 'Dear X, thank you for the lovely present, it is just what I wanted and when I use it I will think of you.' That should cover everything - except perhaps the toilet roll dispenser! Sustenance at this time of the year is always a problem. You feel obliged to make an utter pig of yourself on food that you don't really like. I mean, would you eat brussel sprouts at any other time of year? You can never cut them in half without shooting them across the table, spraying Granny with gravy. And that smell! Reminiscent of the worse school meal you ever had, it hangs around in the Kitchen for days despite the lilac-scented air-freshener you spray everywhere in a vain attempt to cover it up. Christmas pudding, you make three years in advance and then wonder why it's rock hard; the only way to make it edible is to drench it in brandy and set fire to it. And the turkey! Now I've nothing against turkey as such, I'm really rather fond of it, but it causes such problems. You have to dismantle the oven to fit the bird in, and it takes hours to cook. It is always either underdone (with the risk of salmonella poisoning brightening up everyone's day) or over done (so that when you try to carve it the meat falls off the bones like a decaying corpse). And then there's the problem of left-overs. Turkey really does defy the laws of modern physics. You're left with this small pile of breast meat that you think will do nicely cold the next day, but no matter how many meals you make of it there's still some left! Your culinary ingenuity is stretched to its limit, with turkey curry, turkey rissoles, cold turkey and salad, turkey gratin... it's when you have to resort to turkey meringue pie, or turkey crumble and custard, that you know you've got a problem. The only decent food at Christmas is the brandy butter. Making it is a real experience - you take 4 oz butter, 4 oz of sugar, and a wine-glass full of brandy. You cream the butter and sugar and pour in a little of the brandy, then you drink the rest of the glass. Then you taste the butter, realise it needs a little more brandy so pour another glassful, add a few drops more to the mixture, and drink the remainder. After this you forget about the brandy butter and just carry on swigging straight from the bottle. Great Fun! Then there's the problem of what to do over the festive season itself. My ideal would be to spend the holidays in bed watching telly, eating baked beans from the can, with the partner of my choice for company. But this is never possible. If I am not enticed back to the parental bosom, with the wild excitement of listening to the carol singing on the radio, watching the Queen's speech, then falling asleep in front of the Sound of Music, I have hordes of drunken friends descend on me for 'a quick drink', stay for three days and fall asleep in front of the Sound of Music! This year, I have decided to hibernate and miss it all - that's if you buggers will let me! |
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