Tis The Season. Again.

A load of pointless nonsense that goes nowhere and says nothing. Much like everything else at Christmas.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Christmas is just around the corner. In fact, Christmas has been just around the corner since the middle of June but now it’s really, really around the corner, like a big, shiny mugger, clutching a broken bottle and a robust agenda. Christmas is the ultimate mugger, a seasoned predator. It’ll dazzle you with the lights and twinkle and charm you with carols, charity, goodwill and a thick slick of brandy butter and then you’ll spend from Boxing Day to the middle of the next June trying to work out where all your money has gone. You can’t get away from Christmas anymore. You won’t necessarily be thinking about it every day but it will still be there. You can even add it to that famous lists of hardy perennials – death, taxes, stupidity, gossip, Alison Hammond and silly bloody Christmas.

But it’s not all bad news. I may not love this time of year anywhere near as much as I did when I was a kid, but rummage around in Santa’s sack for long enough and you can still find the odd bit here and there to warm the cockles and soften the sharper edges of the darker corners. It was, after all, very considerate of Jesus to arrive right in the middle of winter so we could all keep cosy on mulled wine and the occasional flash of a domestic altercation. And that’s Christmas bonus number one – living in a country where Christmas is set in the dark and the cold and the damp; I’ve spent a few Christmases in hotter, sunnier places and I can tell you that you can squeeze as hard as you like but the spirit of Christmas just doesn’t feel the same if you can’t feel seven shades of bad weather creeping up through the soles of your shoes and setting up shop in your shins. It’s a British Christmas for me, because we seem to be able to do Christmas brilliantly and dreadfully at exactly the same time.

Having the right place at the right time for your Christmas isn’t the only good thing when it comes to celebrating the benefits of Joseph’s apathy towards competition. I, for one, am very grateful for the supermarkets pulling out all the stops. You can forget all about fat tax and sugar tax and recommended weekly units when it comes to the middle bit of the Venn diagram which pitches Britain’s biggest supermarket chains up against a celebration of the birth of the son of God. Only here can you find 463 different varieties of pigs in blankets, each one ready to be pushed into the system like a greasy cork being forced through a straw. Only here can you find a drinkaware sticker on a litre of vodka that’s being sold for less than you’d pay for half a shandy and a bag of nuts in a Wetherspoons. Only here can you find towers of mince pies and gammon joints at the end of every aisle, accumulatively sturdy, stodgy and lofty enough to solve Britain’s housing problem for the next three decades. This is gluttony on an industrial scale and some of us just can’t seem to get enough. You might imagine, just for a few moments, that there’s no way in the world we could get through all this food and booze and yet when the last of the leftovers hit the shelves on the 2nd January they vanish as if by magic. There’s no doubt that a lot of it gets thrown away (apparently, 44% of all the bread bought in this country gets chucked; which is not a good thing, in case you weren’t sure) but by now we’re used to the true purpose of the yuletide season: fill your hearts, fill your stomach, fill your bins and then empty your guts. Hoorah!

It is now also a tradition for retailers to help in every way they can think of to take all your money, very often for things you don’t even want. The knife edge journey that takes us up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday often makes us question if we have the slightest morsel of control over what we do with our own money. Here, across thousands of websites and in whatever is left of your local high street, can be found a thousand times more bargains that have already been available at these prices at least six times in the last calendar month. These products continue to be regularly discounted on account of the fact they would be hard to shift at the RRP, so the retailers make it work for them on the principle that if you keep dangling a rotten sausage in front of a hungry daft dog sooner or later the silly bugger is going to bite. It’s a simple little Christmas gimmick and should be applauded for its blatant, cavalier cynicism – sell shit to people that they knew they didn’t need by persuading them they can just about afford paying for something they might slightly want. Not that I’m complaining – they reel me in every year with virtually no effort at all. Santa be praised!

You want more worth celebrating? Well, I’m not going to lower my standards enough to accept that there is any joy to be had in 99.99% of Christmas music, but on TV there are still some gems to be found, albeit smelly gems that have been passed through the digestive system of an Botswanan diamond miner; whether they’re production line fresh or many times recycled, it never seems to matter. Personally I’d rather moisturise Gregg Wallace’s bald bits than watch an hour-and-a-half of Gavin and Stacey being not at all funny on Christmas Day but, interestingly enough, I can easily put up with the other Wallace fucking around with Gromit in some highly improbable plasticine based adventure. I feel that after a year this lame I’ll be well equipped to let all the repeats and the specials and lightweight documentaries called ‘Britain’s Favourite Christmas Infanticides with Alan Carr’ or ‘A Truly Special Syrian Prison Christmas with Jane McDonald’, but what I still cannot swallow is whatever Jamie Oliver has decided to make his own ‘extra special’ or ‘best ever’ version of for the family. I would try to avoid watching him at all but he seems to be everywhere, looking like a fat cracker in his jumper and gently leaking with ill-found pride as he tells the nation how to brown off a sprout while his rich friends fondle his turkey wattle in whatever mock up Surrey shed for a kitchen they’ve chosen to film. In a world with no shortage of arseholes when it comes to celebrity chefs, somehow Jamie Oliver bobs up to the top every time; a bloated knot of gristle to replace the fairy on the tree. And if you wanted to give Jamie a break I’d be more than happy to see James Martin modelling a seven foot Douglas fir up his ample backside instead.

Like it or not, getting through Christmas ought to be a doddle and yet it is arguably the most challenging celebration of the year. What chance the manic depressive, the heavy treading salad dodger or the type who cannot, ever, sink a quick tipple and just leave it at that? Christmas is just as much about victims as it is winners and what used to be a relatively smooth ride has become, year on year, more like living through a sequence of severely botched colorectal operations. It isn’t that there’s nothing to enjoy – if anything it’s more like there’s too much – it’s just that Christmas seems to be counterintuitive to everything we are lectured about through the rest of the year. We are told, without relent, to cut back on bad habits, do more exercise, eat this but not that, eat that way but not this, get out more, avoid going out, only enjoy ourselves in a safe and healthy manner, sleep better, be mindful, voice our feelings and do our shoelaces while we’re at it and then, come the middle of November we are bombarded with a thousand and one ways to hasten our demise through unbridled, sickly greed. Ding dong merrily on high!

But it’s ok, really it is. I’ll be hibernating for most of this Christmas and I’ll take rather a lot of joy from firing scattershot sarcasm at the telly, muttering obscenities every time I hear ‘Stop The Cavalry’, and buying enough cut price gin to tempt the Queen Mother back from the grave. I’ll eat too much and drink too much and smoke more than I usually do and I’ll wake up each morning wishing I had showed a little more restraint and then proceed through each day showing no restraint whatsoever. Because if there’s one time of the year when you may as well throw all your regrets out of the window it’s Christmas. It won’t stop you having regrets but it will put them all into a little seasonal perspective. It’s the one time of year when you can go over the top and be safe in the knowledge that everyone else is doing more or less the same, and if there’s one thing better than diluting your own guilt it’s other people doing it for you. And that is worth celebrating. I know that I miss the old Christmas, the Christmas you only get when you’re a kid, but I think I’d always rather have this Christmas, any Christmas, than no Christmas at all. And when it comes to next June, whether I want to or not, I’ll find myself thinking about Christmas all over again and even, in my weaker moments, looking forward to it a little bit. For I am told I am made in God’s image, and am therefore an idiot.

G B Burton. 19.12.2024