Someone would take a couple of photos and, looking back, each year you notice the daggy pyjamas passing from sister to sister and getting more and more faded.
After breakfast, we’d hit the road and picnic (sangers and Fanta not some Lipscombe Larder hamper) in the Midlands with the rellies – the cousins were dorks but we could hang out with them for one afternoon.
And that was pretty much it. It was nice.
Nowadays, if you’re older than six, Christmas is overrated.
Christmas in the noughties is a good time to block your ears and poke your eyes out with swizzle sticks – Jim Carey will appear as the Grinch at every turn and Home Alone will rerun as unstoppably as diarrhoea (granted, Christmas is a great excuse to revisit Die Hard, but that’s a small consolation).
And don’t even start me on cheesy Christmas muzak in every public place from stores to doctor’s surgeries. A nice choir singing Silent Night can be moving – but not in the ladies loos. Santa Claus is Coming to Town is not a Christmas carol – it’s a public nuisance.
And – aaah! – Christmas correspondence. Whatever happened to handmade cards with actual news and thoughtful and inspiring sentiments. Nothing says ‘I don't give a rats about you’ like a Christmas card from a box of twenty identical Christmas cards from Chickenfeed – except perhaps an I-can’t-be-stuffed-writing-you-a-personal-message Christmas mail merge e-card full of PhotoShopped family snaps and boastful lies about the last tedious twelve months of someone's pitiful life.
Christmas time means spending most of December vacuuming up pine needles from your colour coordinated tree and stressing about the politics of what to provide for not-so-secret-Santa at work and what to wear for the office party (that you really feel like attending after a long work week – not).
And if that's not enough, advertisers start pestering you in October; you have to buy and prepare enough food for Christmas lunch to keep Namibia going…for a year; everyone scrambles to regift presents they don’t need for people they don’t like; and, on the day, precarious family peace treaties are decimated by excesses of grog and proximity.
These days, kids get so many presents that I’ve seen them wander off from the tree out of the sheer boredom of unwrapping more crap than they could use in ten lifetimes. They’d rather have cash – ask them, they’ll tell you.
And as for the real spirit of Christmas, somehow making a tax deductible online donation to the Salvos doesn’t give that authentic buzz of having done something meaningful.
And religion? The one time I dragged my arse to Midnight Mass in a blinding flash of romantic delusion, before the first hymn, my child projectile puked down the back of some lady's dark green floor length gown.
That about sums up Christmas, I reckon.
Image: Salvatore Vuono
Note to Christmas do-gooders .... DON'T BOTHER !!
ReplyDeleteWe are now firmly into the period where every man and his dog wants to close down the streets of their local town to have a parade, or sing "Ding Dong Merrily On High" (or whatever its called) around a bloody candle, have a festival, hold a concert or some other 'family fun event' .... I could go on.
Its a major bloody inconvenience to the rest of us, and then there's the poor old emergency service workers. Your average copper, firey or ambo just loves standing around watching you get drunk, gorge yourself on food and generally make a pelican of yourself whilst you have a good time. I'm certain they prefer this to spending time with their family and friends.
So people stay at home, don't bring your Christmas 'cheer' out in public .. it only pisses the rest of us off