Festive Frenzy

This post was originally going to be done some time ago, but unfortunately, work got in the way. It was about how many people kill themselves at Christmas, which is probably just about all the festive jollies that you need. But things happen, so instead you're getting something similar, I suppose. Humbug.

So, unless you've been living someplace that doesn't value Saturday's very highly, you'll maybe have noticed that this last particular Saturday was Christmas Day. Now, usually there is a set pattern we follow at Christmas, and every year I just wonder more and more why we subject ourselves to it.

It starts with the lights. Bright, dazzling lights appear all over our towns and cities with no particularly good reason, unless it is to work their way into our subconscious and send us some sort of collective madness. This usually happens in November, but may happen earlier, especially if we're not considering public sector job cuts that year. With the lights up, a terrible change comes over people. Children begin to demand things of their parents, gnashing their dribbling red jowls together and crying out for expensive shiny things. Parents, in turn, lie to their children, usually about a giant clad in red, breaking into houses around this time of year. His beard is thick and unkempt, his eyes flame like coals, and apparently he drags a magical reindeer powered sledge across the world like the Fifth Horsman of the Apocalypse.

We begin to buy things, slowly at first but with increasing frantic desperation. Plauges sweep the nation, wiping out pretty much everyone except you when it comes to being available for work. Hundreds flee to the cities, seeking to spend as much money as is humanly possible in an attempt to win favour with their family and friends. Roads are gridlocked by a few inches of snow and ice, planes are grounded and trains just stop in the middle of nowhere.

Now, if it sounds a bit less like Christmas and a bit more like Ragnorok, in which a giant Viking Wolf eats the world to death, then imagine how it must look to people who don't necessarily celebrate it. In the final days before the inevitable climax, we hoard up far too much food, complain about eating it, and then eventually share it grudgingly with people we don't really like before throwing it in the bin. Then we roll our vast, bloated bodies to sit in a nest of dismantled paper, usually wrapped the night before, to gaze at a pile of stuff. Some of it is nice. Some of it is crap. All of it was bought because of some insane notion that we should do this kind of thing. Christmas usually ends around the 28th or 29th of December, when the corpses of slaughtered birds and threadbare Christmas Trees are surreptitiously thrown over the garden wall into the neighbours yard.

And then we return to hating people again. But now we've got more stuff.

Anyway, as Christmas' go, I don't suppose it was that bad. It was better than the year before, which revolved largely around arguments, desperate Christmas shopping and then finally being dumped with a shrug and a few choice words. I suppose relationships are a bit like expensive electrical gadgets. If you don't have one, you want one. Then you spend good money on it, then it works for about two days because it was designed to break from the start. Crying out in frustration, you drag it into the garden and smash it in with a hammer. Then, realizing the enormity of your actions, you dump the evidence in secluded woodland late at night.

But hey, I suppose its a rather delayed 'Merry Christmas', followed up by an insane amount of alcohol abuse on Friday night, a lot of regrets on Saturday, and the notion that 'peace on earth and goodwill to all' is a bit like quitting smoking. Its difficult, and you'll probably be dead before it really takes off.