Let’s ban Christmas. I hate Christmas. Christmas in this country is like sex with five condoms on - a drawn out, overlong annoyance where the final gleeful splurge only drives home further the futility of the experience in its entirety.
Don’t get me wrong, Christmas day is alright. The telly is marginally less awful, no-one expects you to go anywhere, and for a couple of glorious days otherwise criminal levels of gluttony aren’t just acceptable, but encouraged. It’s the three months of full-scale corporate Chinese water-torture beforehand that makes everything so utterly unbearable.
Right from September onwards, all manner of festive fripperies begin appearing on supermarket shelves. But seeing these whilst still attempting to cling to the pretence that summer is yet to end actually summons up all the festiveness of an emergency Christmas-Eve stomach pump. Scientific studies have shown that catching sight of a latex-faced Zac Efron looming out at you from an advent calendar on the bread aisle in Sainbury’s during the first week of October is roughly as traumatic as watching a video of your own birth.
At the same time, a kindly bunch of diversified multinational conglomerates become keen to make sure we remember that Christmas will still happen this December. Don’t panic! That loving, expensively shot advertising campaign will make sure not only that you'll remember, but that anyone who doesn’t end up hugely personally indebted in order to give their family a ton of chintzy crap and/or shit vol-au-vents (depending on your soulless chain of choice) will feel guilty enough to end up spending a delightful Christmas sat in their car in a locked garage as it slowly fills with fumes.
The slow, inexorable annexation of Christmas by commercial interests has been discussed so much it’s a cliché, but it’s not the fact that Christmas has been commercialised that rankles. I’m sure if I were a religious person it’d be at least mildly irritating, but for me it’s not a problem on its own. It’s the nakedly militaristic planning and build-up that’s the problem. If John Lewis had been in charge of invading Afghanistan, we’d have been out of there years ago. Christmas has been so extensively fetishised by the time we finally get there that it’s difficult not to feel short-changed when it comes and goes and is merely nice, rather than magical. Whilst on any other day I’m perfectly happy to get mildly tipsy during the daytime with a few relatives and then watch some telly, on Christmas Day (CHRISTMAS DAY!!!!!!!) it’s incredibly underwhelming when you don’t wake up to a light dusting of snow, presents that answer some primal urge that you could never before articulate, and a raucous family tousling each others' hair like characters from some long forgotten Enid Blyton novel.
If Christmas could just be Christmas, without the months of anticipation, noise pollution, and open warfare by retailers, it’d be just lovely. But in the absence of any kind of sense or proportion, it’s consistently a disappointment. So let’s do what we can. Let’s lower our expectations. Let’s try to enjoy an average Christmas. And if your loved ones can’t do that, why not just make this Christmas so thoroughly awful for everyone that anything from now on is an improvement? It’s the best gift you could possibly give.
