I Hate Christmas E-Book

Daniel Blythe

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

Does the sight of a house festooned in glowing coloured bulbs and a huge illuminated reindeer bring you out in a cold sweat? Or the does thought of eating turkey for days and days upon end make you groan inwardly? And what of the adorable little carol singers - does their out-of-tune wailing and screeching set your teeth on edge? And the oh-so-annoying Christmas albums constantly on play in every crowded shop you visit.the jumper-knitting relatives pouting to be kissed.the freezing, dark mornings that make you wish you could stay under the duvet forever. If all these things make you want to either jump aboard the next plane to Timbuktu or stick your head in the oven along with the roast tatties, then this is the must-have survival book for you. Find comfort in the curmudgeonly anti-Christmas comments. Laugh at the ludicrous festive facts. And pity those about you that are taken in by the silly-season madness!

Leseprobe

The Christmas List: with thanks

 A Chocolate Orange to the family (Rachel, Ellie and Sam) for leaving me alone in the attic.

 Trivial Pursuit to David Simms, for advice on curmudgeonly rantings.

 A novelty jumper to David Shelley for switching on the lights and some amusing socks to Susie and the team for keeping the fire stoked.

 A Best ChristmasHits CD to Caroline Montgomery, for tea and empathy.

 Some herbal infusions to Adam Curtis (and the chicks) for a fascinating excursion into natural history.

CONTENTS

Title Page

‘Iiiiiiiiit’s Chriiiiiiiist-maaaaaas!’

Joy to the World

A Christmas Story… for people having a bad day

Countdown Conundrum

Deck the Halls (and the porch, the roof, the garden  path and the herbaceous border)

The Great Christmas Myths

The Father Christmas Letters

Needles and Pins

The White Stuff

Who the Hell Are Jeff and Sandra?

All Present and Correct

Logs on the Fire and Gifts on the Tree…

Jesus Loves Your Money

Thank God It Isn’t Christmas Every Day

Figgy Puddin’ an’ All That: a true account (part 1)

Figgy Puddin’ an’ All That: a true account (part 2)

The Best Ways to Deal with Carol-Singers

Shoot the Sodding Partridge

Supermarket Sweep

Your Goose is Cooked

Stop the Cavalry

My Husband and I

Ten Good Reasons to Leave the Country  at Christmas

No! Not the Yuletide Round-up!

Where’s Your Career? It’s Behind You!

It’s a Terrible Life

No Room at the Inn

Blue Christmas

In the Grotto

I’m a Celebrity – I’ll Get Me Coat

It’s the Best Celebrity Christmas Ever

Yellow Snow and Other Hazards

Be Careful Out There

Is It Me?

’Tis the Season To Be Stupid

Season of Goodwill?

What’s Another Year?

Christmas By Numbers

The Christmas Checklist

The Ballad of the Modern-Day Scrooge

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

1‘Iiiiiiiiit’s Chriiiiiiiist-maaaaaas!’

h, the seasonal call of Sir Nodsworth Holder. Perhaps it makes your bosom swell with festive joy. Or maybe you just want to deck the overly badged, flamboyantly booted twit, knock off his unnecessary headgear and tell him to get back in his box.

When you hear Sir Cliff, Michael Bublé, Wizzard and Jona Lewie echoing through the tinselled aisles of Tesco, do you start panting for joy and immediately planning which shade of socks you are going to buy for Uncle Bert this year – or do you develop a twitch and immediately need to flee the country and head for the nearest holly-free zone?

What about the city illuminations? Do the coloured searchlights of Oxford Street fill you with wonder and awe as if you were a 6-year-old again – or do you find them rather sinister, as if they are designed to pick out unbelievers for people to throw snowballs at? Do you wish they’d spent the money on something more sensible?

Then there’s the prospect of having the whole family packed into your front room for the day, trying to look pleased as they unpack yet another scarf, bottle of cheap perfume or box of Roses – before having the annual argument over the fifth repeat of the 1996 Only Fools And Horses special. Does the thought delight you? Or would you rather, like one of the wacky characters you’ll read about in this book, escape into a nuclear bunker for the whole of the festive season?

When the first flakes of snow start to fall, maybe you feel a thrill and immediately have the urge to open the sherry and the Twiglets and put your valuable old 78 of Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ on the gramophone. Or perhaps you wonder how the hell you are going to de-ice the car and dig it out in the morning, and decide that you’d rather express your feelings by playing some Nirvana at full volume against the neighbours’ walls.

Yes, they say, it seems to get earlier every year. So, dip into this cornucopia of antidotes to seasonal joy. See the dark side of the angels, the flipside of the chocolate coins, the carols, the festive bargains, and what Ronnie Barker in Porridge referred to as ‘all that swaddling’. It’s a book for all those whose gut reaction to the festive season is a large bag of Mr Scrooge’s Special Bah Humbugs. A handbook for everyone who wishes that the bloody Snowman would drop the cute kid from a very large height to the accompaniment of ‘Walking in the Air’.

It’s for anyone whose heart sinks at the prospect of passing round the Quality Street and finding that only the horrible toffees are left. It’s for you if, during the Queen’s annual piece of patronising waffle, you’ve briefly considered turning to the cause of Republicanism (even if you were brought back to your senses with the single thought: ‘President Blair’…).

It’s somewhere to retreat to while the sprouts are steaming, while Gran’s swigging the cheap Glen Campbell cooking whisky and a nearby 5-year-old is bashing the hell out of ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’ on the new electronic xylophone which Santa unwisely brought her.

If you feel like being a curmudgeon at Christmas, you are not alone. Don’t feel guilty about it. A season of enforced joy is so dangerously close to a season of enforced misery that they may as well be the same thing.

And maybe, in sampling the following anthology of seasonal suffering, you’ll draw some comfort from the fact that somewhere, a great many people are actually having a worse time than you.

Merry Christmas.

Yeah, right.

2 Joy to the World

Do You Hate Christmas? The Ultimate Quiz 

What is the most enjoyable thing about Christmas?

a) It celebrates the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

b) It gives people the chance to get out and indulge their otherwise repressed passion for consumer items they don’t really need.

c) It brings families together in a spirit of love and unity.

d) It’s all over by Boxing Day.

What do you consider to be a suitabledateforbeginning to discuss‘what we are doing at Christmasthis year’?

a) 1st January.

b) 1st August.

c) Some time in December.

d) Who cares?

What is a reasonable time of year to begin advertisingChristmas hampers,food,television programmes,bargains,toys and God knows what else?

a) Early October.

b) Early November.

c) Early December.

d) I don’t wish to see any of it advertised.

How would you most like to spend a free weekend in themiddle of December?

a) Making mince pies and mulled wine for the Women’s Institute party.

b) Traipsing round endless over-lit shops filled with pale, zombie-like people weighing themselves down with bulging shopping bags.

c) With your feet up, reading the newspaper.

d) Doing anything unrelated to Christmas.

What is the best way of dealing with overenthusiasticcarol-singers?

a) Paying them.

b) Asking them nicely to go away.

c) Cold water.

d) Machine-gun posts and boiling oil.

What is your reaction when you see shop assistantsdressed up in tinsel andSanta-hats?

a) Great – really getting into the spirit of things.

b) Amused tolerance.

c) They look a bit silly but it’s up to them.

d) What stupid plonkers.

What would you like to be Christmas number one?

a) Something traditional – ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ by Slade, or Sir Cliff’s latest one.

b) Novelty thing by a TV character, or a boy-band ballad.

c) Something completely different – say, a Norwegian electro-Goth anthem or a three-minute art-rock masterpiece totally unrelated to Christmas.

d) Go away. As if I care.

What happens when you hear the inevitable sleigh bellsandding-dongmusic heralding a BBC Christmas trailer?

a) You rejoice – that magical time has come again.

b) You look forward to some innovative quality television.

c) You remark that it gets earlier every year.

d) You reach for your revolver.

How likely are you to describe Christmas as‘the mostmagical time of year’?

a) Definitely will – I love it.

b) Maybe after a pint or two.

c) I probably wouldn’t go that far.

d) You’re just taking the piss now, aren’t you?

What is the true meaning of Christmas?

a) Gathering families together in festive spirit for a joyous celebration.

b) The birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

c) Piling your trolley high with crates of booze, dates, nuts and chocolates.

d) A travesty – a once-noble celebration going back to pagan times, first hijacked by the Christians and now firmly in the hands of grasping profiteers.

If you scored…

Mostly (a): You are a fully paid-up, rose-tinted-spectacled, brainwashed Christmas-lover and so you will probably hate this book.

Mostly (b): Maybe through obligation rather than true love, you look forward to the festive season – but secretly harbour a desire to get away from it all.

Mostly (c): There’s hope for you. You’re a traditionalist at heart, but a streak of anarchy makes you want to get on the roof and shout, ‘Santa doesn’t exist!’

Mostly (d): You are a modern-day Scrooge and this book will teach you nothing, but you may want to read it to have your views validated. 

3 A Christmas Story… for people having a bad day 

ather Christmas, never the happiest of souls (all that ho-ho-ho-ing is just good PR, and it’s strictly business anyway) was mightily pissed off. Several of the elves had gone down with MRSA (picked up in a National Elf hospital) and the New Deal elves were having problems producing the toys as quickly as the regulars. By December the twenty-third, they were well behind schedule, and Santa was starting to feel the pressure.

At lunchtime on Christmas Eve, Mrs Claus happened to mention that her mum was coming, which just made Santa Claus even more stressed. And then when he went out to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were drunk on his cheap rum and the rest had absconded somewhere.

Still, he could always start loading up the sleigh, so he did – until it cracked under the weight of all the PlayStations, Barbie houses and Xboxes. This never happened when all the little buggers wanted was an Enid Blyton paperback and an orange, fumed Santa Claus quietly, lighting a fag – which promptly set his beard on fire. Frantically thumping the sparks from what remained of his facial hair, Santa stomped off to the drinks cabinet to pour himself a large shot of whisky – only to find the New Deal elves had pinched it all and only the Shloer and the Sunny Delight was left.

It seemed things couldn’t get any worse.

Just then the doorbell rang, and an irritable Santa stomped to the door. He opened it, and there was a smiling little angel carrying an enormous Christmas tree. The angel said, very cheerfully, ‘Merry Christmas, Santa! Isn’t it a lovely day? I’ve got a beautiful tree for you here. Where would you like me to stick it?’

And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.

4 Countdown Conundrum

t what point did Christmas become something for which it was acceptable to have a ‘countdown’? You don’t get it for Easter, or the spring bank holiday. Even those other ‘occasions’ which have been invented by a satanic cartel of Interflora, Clinton’s Cards and Thornton’s chocolates don’t overdo it that much. You don’t have huge, illuminated displays in the main streets of the identikit towns up and down the country, shouting out at you that there are ‘Sixteen more shopping days left until Mothering Sunday!’

You are calmly going about your own business in WHSmith one Monday in mid-August and chuckling at the way they always get the ‘Back To School’ stationery displays up at least a week before anybody actually finishes the summer term. You may be dragging a small child around with you, wondering how much longer you can stop it from screaming with the promise of a chocolate bar and a go on the miserable Postman Pat car – and then you see it. The Christmas display. It starts small – just a few baubles and a bit of tinsel, perhaps, and a rack of cards. But it’s there.

You laugh hollowly, wondering who on earth would be contemplating the supreme hell of Christmas when they still have the prospect of filling five more weeks of the endless, stuffy, sweaty, smelly and achingly sun-blasted days of the summer holidays, those weeks when the heat clamps you like a huge rubber glove and won’t let go, and you have to mow the bloody lawn every week… (But let’s leave that for another time.) No, you can’t believe that anybody can seriously be planning so far ahead, be so obsessed by the prospect of that day in December that they actually want to see the trees and the lights go up. They can’t possibly already want to start reading tips in the magazines about how to prepare the perfect mince pie, and learning about what Dale Winton, Michael Winner, Lisa from KaraokeIdol and the cast of Hollyoaks are all going to be doing for the festive season.

But they do. And you are made to feel like an old curmudgeon for moaning about it. ‘Ooh, all these people who moan that Christmas gets earlier every year. They should just shut up and get on with enjoying it.’ Well, actually, no. We shouldn’t. It’s about time we made a stand. Why do they have to start promoting it in August? It’s not like we don’t know it’s coming. It’s not as if we look at the ‘Christmas Bargains Galore!’ display of catalogues in the window of Boots and think, ‘Ooh, thanks for that! Do you know, I wasn’t sure if we’d be having Christmas this year. When is it again? December the what? Twenty-fifth? Oh, I might be able to make that. Let’s have a little look in the diary. Hmm, do you know, I don’t seem to be doing anything then for a few days. I’ll pencil it in. Thanks for giving me decent notice.’

Can we not just take it for granted that people kind of know, actually, that Christmas is coming this year, just as it has every year for the last several hundred? How about lobbying your MP to have a new law made – one which imposes a blanket ban on even mentioning the bloody thing until mid-December? Even then, we’d have a good couple of weeks of build-up and promotion.

Worth a thought?

5 Deck the Halls  (and the porch, the roof, the garden  path and the herbaceous border)

he art of Christmas decoration in suburbia has gone beyond simple jocular, festive activity. It is now a full-blown orgy of competition, possibly fuelled by a growing consumerism and aspiration across all social classes.

It seems to have grown exponentially through the years of Thatcherism and beyond. Who, in the 1970s, festooned their entire roof with flashing fairy lights or displayed a gigantic luminous reindeer on the porch? Nobody – for one thing, the government was keeping everyone on their toes by switching off the electricity every couple of days.

One particularly memorable power cut – I think it was in 1976 – actually happened on Christmas Eve itself. The question of how to power the lights on the tree was somewhat secondary to the challenge my mother would face in cooking an entire turkey with roast potatoes and vegetables for four people on a Campingaz® stove in the garden shed. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that, but I still have a pathological fear of the smell of oil lamps and the sound of the NineLessons andCarols crackling from a battery radio.

You do wonder how anybody can get pleasure from having their entire house illuminated like the seafront at Blackpool. Perhaps it is a symptom of the growing insularity of the British nuclear family. In our day, children used to go into town to see the Christmas lights being switched on by Brother Beyond, Limahl, or Philip Schofield and Gordon the Gopher. There was also the added thrill that some cowboy might have wired the switch up clumsily and that you could be in with a chance of seeing several thousand volts being jolted through, say, Glenn Medeiros. These days, though, they just put the whole lot on the roof, in the mistaken assumption that it costs less than a day at the seaside – and all without the bonus thrill of expecting the live incineration of D-list celebrities.

It’s ironic that the British homeowner – having spent a decade becoming a creature of restraint, an acolyte at the magnolia-hued altar of Ann Maurice’s house-doctrine – should, once a year, rediscover the joy of the garish. So what has happened? Is this a kind of ‘bling-bling merrily on high’ makeover? Or is it simply a huge joke, a way of inflicting your bad taste on the rest of the world while you sit inside in your low-lit, stripped-pine, minimalist comfort?

Let’s hear from Jonathan Shaw, director of online lights supply firm Christmas Lights Direct. ‘The American trend is coming over here,’ says Jonathan, as if this were somehow a good thing. ‘Over there, the whole street goes barmy at Christmas.’ (Only at Christmas?) ‘When we were children, very few people trimmed up outside – but now, more and more people are starting to put something in their garden.’ Seemingly unaware of the comic effect he produces by using the chirpy expression ‘trimmed up’, Jonathan goes on to add that their most expensive line was a 12-foot sign saying Merry Christmas, costing £148, and that this sold out very quickly. Another popular item is the 3-D Christmas train, retailing at £125. Jonathan tells us all of this with a straight face.

If we have to have stuff from America, why can’t we only have the good stuff? Can’t we just take Babylon5, Charlie Brown, JD Salinger, choc-chip ice cream and The Killers – and leave the rednecks to enjoy their burgers, their fries, their obesity, their charmlessness, their idiot president and their gung-ho, yee-hah, let’s-save-the-goddam-world foreign policies without making them feel they have to share them with the rest of us? Do they also have to foist on us their idea of taste and restraint and their total lack of self-awareness and irony? After all, we’d only just started forgiving them for Garth Brooks.

The people that walked in darkness…

It’s a way of life for some, which just makes it harder to understand for those of us who would see Satan skating past the front door before we would deck our houses in such tasteless gaudiness.

Let’s have a closer look. It seems snobbish, but is unfortunately true, to observe that the abundance of external decoration is in inverse proportion to the social standing of the area. Thus:

Double-gated mansions: sport a single wreath (probably handwoven from ethically sourced leaves) on the front door, just like the houses in the Victorian scenes on Christmas cards.

Neat suburban semi: might stretch to a few hopeful-looking lights at the end of the garden, maybe a Santa or two. You get the sense that there’s a bit of a domestic going on about whether to have them up at all, and that this is a compromise to placate the kids.

Row of council houses: will be dripping with lights, stars and flashing animated objects, plus possibly a giant illuminated Virgin Mary. Gardens will be adorned with an army of eerily glowing snowmen, reindeer and hideous Santa Claus effigies, all illuminated with enough power to run the national grid of a small Third World country.

These monstrosities are presumably put up for the delight of a particular brand of children. They are the very same urchins who, two months earlier, adorn themselves with black plastic bin liners and glowing fangs and take a delight in knocking on all the doors in the neighbourhood in search of free confectionery.

Yes, for our ancestors, no terror was greater than the darkness of Hallowe’en night: the boundaries between this world and the next would grow thin and the restless and vengeful spirits would roam abroad seeking souls for the netherworld. In the twenty-first century, these have been supplanted by restless and vengeful pint-sized hooligans (whose idea of roaming abroad is Benidorm) demanding sweets with menaces. This is progress.

They then go on to be found sitting outside Oddbins, propping up an old pillow topped with a football (on which a mask of Wayne Rooney has been precariously fixed) and asking for money on the grounds that this Frankenstinian hybrid resembles the leader of the Gunpowder Plot. A few days later, you will hear them whooping with joy while letting off a small arsenal of Scud missiles in your back garden until three in the morning. You somehow doubt that they are celebrating a failed attempt to destroy the Houses of Parliament.

And the problem is (to return to the point) such decorations are not even pleasant to look at – you can imagine them scaring the wits out of small children at night. The glowing snowmen, in particular, look as if they are poised to become animated like the main baddies in a spectacular seasonal edition of DoctorWho, eyes glowing with extraterrestrial light and broomsticks levelled as they spit deadly fire into the heart of suburbia.

The backlash starts here

Be warned – not everyone will appreciate your seasonal illuminations. In 2004, one Cotswold couple, Carol and Roger Knapp of Gotherington, were even sent a poison-pen letter about their Christmas lights. The Knapps received the anonymous letter after living in the village for nine months. It read: ‘Your dull, ugly front garden and tacky tawdry lights fail to reflect our village image. Please do what you can to improve matters. Thank you.’ The seasonally named Carol spluttered: ‘I think it’s bullying and intimidating and cowardly. My husband and I moved into our bungalow in March and have worked endlessly on it ever since. We must have spent £4,000 doing up the front and back gardens, putting in a patio, plants and fencing. And as for the criticism of the lights – it’s a single white string of lights, not anything tasteless. Believe it or not, it’s the first time I’ve ever bought any.’ (Well, maybe that’ll teach you a lesson or nine, Carol.)

There has to be an element of neighbourly rivalry here, a bizarre kind of peacock display. ‘Look at our house! We’ve got lights!’ Having electricity is, in this day and age, not something which you really need to boast about (well, maybe it is if you live in some parts of rural Northumberland, but that’s about it). In the summer, there are men who compete to see who can display the largest St George flag during the football competitions and who can rev the loudest lawnmower. In the winter, they transfer their rutting-stag tendencies to the application of festive electrical power. Sadly, as their good ladies will attest, an element of compensation is in play, and so the size of their glowing Santa is bound to be in inverse proportion to their manhood.

In Germany, meanwhile, everyone displays tasteful white light bulbs in straight lines on their garden conifers, with not a ghastly illuminated Rudolph in sight. It must be something to do with the trains running on time. (Then again, you’d expect no less from a people who actually have a single word for ‘to commit the offence of placing one’s rubbish in an incorrect bin’.)

If it all really becomes too much, make your neighbours think you have gone completely mad by getting your revenge. In spring, celebrate Beltane with a large, inflatable stone circle and a glowing image of the Horned God on your roof. You never know – it may make them think twice next year.

A final twist. From deep in the Arizona desert comes this website:

www.redtongue.com/badxmas.html

The astonishing pictures featured here are testament to a deranged kind of inventiveness. In the middle of the scorching desert, where snowmen and icicles would look somewhat incongruous, the local residents ‘trim up’ for Christmas by sticking painted plywood boards in their front gardens. Look and weep.

Spot the Unnecessary Decorations: a game to play in December

You may like to score the houses on your street or on your journey to work as follows: 

 String of lights across window: 1 pt

 Lights across porch: 2 pts

 Lights running along garden fence and/or wall: 3 pts

 Illuminated Star of Bethlehem on porch and/or roof: 4 pts

 Terrifying fibreglass snow-person: 6 pts

 Horrifying illuminated Santa and/or reindeer: 6 pts

Entire outline of house picked out in lights: 8 pts

 Reindeer and sleigh, lit and parked on front garden: 10 pts 

6 The Great Christmas Myths