Holidays are Coming

It seems appropriate to write about Christmas in November since that’s when it starts according to the likes of Argos and Tesco, and perhaps most annoyingly, Marks and fucking Spencer. Whinging about the commercialisation of the celebration of Jesus Christ is nothing new and probably just as annoying in itself. For every person super excited about Christmas there is a bastard who hates it and the result is a frustrating two months congested with conversations about how great or lame tis’ season to be jolly is.
I used to get so excited about it I’d be physically sick but since growing up and having a job the only really good thing about Christmas is the novelty of drinking in the day and not feeling guilty which is like every day in Scotland. No longer do I think about nothing else from September, or write a thousand different lists, or search the entire house for presents despite wanting to keep everything a surprise. There is never one present I dream to be opening on the 25th anymore because if I want something, I usually buy it.
There’s no point in hiding it, Christmas is about presents, forget the turkey, the tree, the Only Fools and Horses special, all we want are presents, and good ones! We don’t want shit presents, you might as well punch me in the face while you’re at it if you‘re going to give me some actual shit. I don’t mean to be ungrateful or greedy but a novelty gift might make you laugh but it fucking annoys me. It’s totally useless and I can’t throw it away because that would be impolite so I just have to keep it forever cluttering my room, I’ve lost count of the number of “executive ball scratchers” I own, if there is ever an itchy ball pandemic you know who to call. More often than not we are asked by someone what we want for Christmas and in turn we ask them and we end up giving two presents of the same monetary value, it’s the equivalent of handing someone £20 and then having it handed back to you immediately after, only you can’t spend it now, you just have something you kind of wanted but would never spend your own money on (but you essentially just have).
My fondest memories of Christmas all seem to involve computer games, I don’t think I will ever have the same feeling of wonder as I did when receiving an N64 and playing Super Mario 64 for the first time. Every year after that I asked for a computer game, I usually picked the one I wanted during the summer and obsessed about it until I had it in my hands. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Pokemon Blue, GTA: Vice City, this was what Christmas was about! (If you’re a geek).
Growing up and having money has ruined this, not only can I buy any game I want, I can also buy a lot of games I don’t want and I simply don’t have the childlike wonder I used to over them, probably because I’m not a child anymore. The same goes for everything else and it makes it hard to get excited about Christmas, especially when it’s not even a week off anymore, I still have to work and then there’s that awful thing called New Year’s Eve.
Like I said earlier though drinking throughout the day does inject a little life into the day and another perk is the great tradition of the Christmas Movie. For the past few years I have watched Home Alone and Die Hard every Christmas Eve and by maintaining this routine there is still something special about the most wonderful time of the year, much like when you see the Coca Cola advert with all the trucks and shit, only today did I see a real Coca Cola truck and got all giddy.
To get to this state of happiness though I have to negotiate through a stampede of crappy adverts (crapverts) where Jason Donovan serves a Nolan sister a “traditional” Christmas spring roll along with other similar twats all pretending to have a really great time when in reality they just want go home and count their money. All these crapverts have one goal, to present an idealised Christmas home where everything is perfect and everyone is just swell in love with everything. Marks and Spencer takes this to an extreme, and when they’re not sexualising food they’re showing celebrities (some of them proper ones) frolicking in the snow and having a splendid middle class time making you envy and hate them at the same time and in the end it just depresses you as you look forward to your day of Quality Street and Carlsberg.
If the build up to Christmas lasts for what seems like eternity then what the fuck is that week between Christmas Day and New Years Day? This period of limbo where if you don’t work you stay at home and continue to watch TV and eats loads of food and if you do work you don’t put a shirt and tie on and you don’t work half as hard as you would on a normal day. I guess this week is what it feels like to be in Lost, not having a shitting clue to what’s going on, and before you know it everything is back to normal and you’re left with a crushing disappointment.
So in between the Christmas bummers and the Christmas haters I sit confused and ambivalent to it all. While I don’t like it to be over commercialised I don’t want it to go the other way where we all just give each other a hug and sit round a fire because that sounds shit. More than anything I’m just bitter that my favourite thing in the world isn’t as good as it used to be and it’s clear that the one thing I want for Christmas this year is to be young again…or a DeLorean.