Bah Humbug!
Starting this missive with the words of Dickens’ most infamous personage certainly sets the scene for just how wildly un-Christmassy I am feeling this year. A bad case of the flu, persistent memories of last year and the incessant teeming rain are all serving to remind me on an almost minutely basis that this year, Christmas is not much more than an mucous stained, rushed, overly commercialised reason to empty my wallet.
My very little eco-friendly fake Christmas tree
Unlike Ebenezer, I’d be more than happy to be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. At the very least spectral beings would be a welcome break from the hoi polloi that I am obliged to mix with in the freezing damp streets.
I despise traditional Christmas food. Everything is laced with cinnamon, dried orange peel and raisins.
Normally, I am no more prejudiced against cinnamon and raisins than porridge, stew and all other items I lump into the general category of nanna food. Food that was eaten during the war, invented as a result of government enforced rationing prior to the dawn of globalisation and the advent of fusion cuisine is nanna food. Why make a solid brown cake that could easily be mortared between two bricks when you can eat a creamy fresh Panna Cotta. Is there one good reason to eat a pudding that is strung up in a muslin bag over boiling water like a dirty medieval criminal and cooked for four days? Is it wise to eat something that can be stored for a month and eaten at Valentines Day? I won’t even comment on the Bûche de Noel, a butter-cream covered woodlike monstrosity that the French swallow whole at Christmas.
I will avow that a 30 years spent eating fresh seafood, chicken salad and ice cream on Christmas Day has potentially created a bias towards the traditional perfumed stodge so loved in the Northern hemisphere.
But then there is the shopping.
Shopping at Christmas time is an arduous task of Herculean proportions. The French, so proud to be the last bastion of everything-closed-on-a-Sunday (in a secular country) open all of their shops on the three Sundays prior to Christmas in the hope of injecting some much needed cash into their increasingly downgraded economy. From somewhere far away, the entire population of Paris descends on the Grand Magasins to invest their not-so hard earned Euros on all manner of crap and clutter. In London, they go one step further and close Oxford St to traffic. The sea of humanity halted only by the twelfty million police officers attempting, in vain, to control the flow of chavs onto the unclosed cross streets.
All of London gather and pray to the God of Christmas - Selfridgus
So how about some free gift-wrapping Madame? Sure, are you going to pay me a year’s salary while I queue and wait for that unfortunate Eastern European intern to stretch some tin foil around a box? The meditating exercise of wrapping Christmas presents is surprisingly one of the few pleasures this obsessive-compulsive Ebenezette actually looks forward to. Just give me the paper and I’ll do it when I finally manage to squeeze myself past the swelling hoards of and get home.
Mouth agape in shock, I learned from an affable black cab driver that spending time with Santa, an invention of Coca Cola early last century, at one of the larger stores in London is reserved at least month in advance and depending on where you go, costs a yuletide fortune. In Hamleys, a one-hour tour with the polyester-bearded red man will set you back a cool 45 pounds. I suppose he uses it to pay for additional flu meds to ward off the myriad bacteria he is subjected to as they are sprayed forth from the orifices of London’s snotty children.
11 months of the year I quite like children. I don’t own any myself but I am quite fond of those belonging to my brother and other friends in Paris. Kids are cute, they say daft things and they are allowed to wear leggings as pants outside the house. Three qualities I am rather envious of. But in December children turn into demon-possessed monsters. They holler in a high-pitched banshee-like fashion at the sight of anything remotely Santa-ish while waving their mitten covered hands in all directions with no regard for anyone or anything nearby. They also seem to be constantly dripping with syrupy moisture from the eye, the nose and the mouth for a whole four weeks before returning chameleon style to the dry, well-mannered little humans we love them to be in January.
Actual Santa, while barely tolerable, is nothing compared to the horror that is the modern corporate invention, Secret Santa. Devised most likely by a well-meaning HR Manager in the mid eighties who was trying to eliminate the high-flying competition of Christmas present purchasing in a Wall St investment bank (Here is your Audi Smythe and thanks for the diamonds Cornelia), Secret Santa has since become the sole reason pound shops have not gone the way of the dodo.
Watching the dweeb from accounting giggle behind his toupee while you unwrap a penholder that farts every time you remove your pen is a delight reserved for that most festive of moments.
A Lego Christmas Tree in St Pancras - I can admit it, I liked it.
It must be said that spending time with people you don’t really like is truly the shining star on the just-cut-from-virgin-rainforest Christmas Tree. Running between a candy cane swirl of drinks, dinners, parties and cocktails is not a bad thing, especially if there is free alcohol. Being asked over and again, why I am not flying to Australia (too expensive) whether I will be alone (I won’t) and will I be fake-sad-eye-look “OK” (I will) requires more than the one free glass of cheap wine that I am injecting into my eyeball to avoid having to listen to another mundane conversation about just how great/tough/quick 2011 has been and what about those floods in Queensland blah blah jingle blah.
I am not going to get all ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ on you here but not unlike the Christians perched upon requisite soap boxes screaming to the earphone-deaf hoards about the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ I would like to take a moment and remind you to reflect on what Christmas should be. A time to spend with family, a time to remind each other about the delights of giving rather than getting, and most importantly a time to eat a bucket of fresh prawns.
Bring on the starry newness of 2012, I am more than a little bit over 2011.
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