Let’s get a few things
straight. In fact, let’s get about 12
things straight, 12 Christmas myths that frolic around in the social ether like
aimless snowflakes of disingenuousness.
Firstly, Christmas NOT
being about Jesus anymore is not a BAD thing, and the reason why it’s not a BAD
thing is because – and I’ll try to say this without jumping onto the
fashionably militant atheist bandwagon of furiously trite pseudo-profundities –
Jesus is a load of tosh. Sorry if you
believe in it, but without a shred of logical evidence or even a
cigarette-paper-thin slice of POSSIBILITY that there is anything more to Jesus
than a delusional Derren Brown who happened to be born into a society of
incredible ignorance and superstition, I cannot begin to tolerate such
pretensions. Ditch the angels and stick
a TARDIS on top of your Christmas tree (which I have, actually, this year),
because Christmas Day is Doctor Who Day.
Fuck you if you think it’s a kids’ programme. That’s just an unwarranted playground cuss,
lazily flopped about by those with a gripe against too many other people
enjoying something that they themselves happen to not enjoy.
Secondly, the time you
spend ruminating over which Christmas card design is the most appropriate for
all the people who will end up receiving it from you and your bumper box of
identical cards is hugely disproportional to even the combined time that all of
those recipients will spend looking at it.
It’ll be envelope open to card open to “oh it’s from those fuckers we
never see” to mantelpiece in less than two seconds. I couldn’t tell you what even ONE of the
Christmas cards in my house has on it as a design (unless it happens to be
particularly odd, like having a dog chewing a present open or something bizarrely
un-Christmas like that) and it could well be that they’ve all got pictures of
turds on, I wouldn’t know.
Thirdly, and still on the
theme of cards, you are not a GOOD person because you choose to buy charity
cards. Have you ever read how much of
the price is donated to charity? Usually,
peanuts. So, you’re fooled into thinking
that you’ve been morally erect and a paragon of altruistic righteousness and
therefore you’ve done your bit and you don’t need to actually GIVE to charity
or DO something for anyone who might need charity, because you’ve just allowed
30p of the retail price of a £5 box of cards to go to the NSPCC.
Fourthly, to batter down the
inflated smugness of those who might have agreed with points 2 and 3 above and
thus decided to Facebook everyone with the “we’re not sending cards this year,
we’re making a donation to charity” get-out clause, can I just say one thing? You lazy cunts. Why can’t you give to charity AND send some
bloody cards? Oh, is it because you
think it’s a waste of money and planetary resources sending cards, so you save
on the latter and redirect the former to a worthier cause? Well done you! You’ve spread a worthy message and converted
those of us living in the dark ages of consumerism and waste, so that now I too
will save on at least one card, one envelope and one stamp, because I can
guiltlessly cross you off my fucking Christmas card list.
The fifth myth of
Christmas that I wish to burn to coal like the parsnip that fell down the back
of the oven is yet another card-related snot-drop of fatuousness, and that’s
the empty sentiment of the phrase “we must meet up in the New Year!” Let’s be honest, this actually means, “I do
like you, clearly enough to send you a card, but not enough to be arsed to
leave my house and travel to an agreeable rendezvous location in order to
converse with you, I didn’t last year and I am not going to next year, but if
some force of nature flung us together, without any effort on either of our
parts, for a short time, then it wouldn’t be unpleasant.” And we put them off another year and then one
year one of you will be dead and the other will muse on how you “should’ve met
up.”
The sixth myth of
Christmas is this: Christmas songs are
NOT annoying. Stop being so bloody
miserable! They’re better than adverts
and radio jingles and when they stay stuck in your head for days on end they
give you a warm feeling, and not that warm piss feeling you had when you wet
the bed as a kid, which then turns to horror as it cools and the realisation
hits you, no, that’s what NOVELTY pop songs do to you. Christmas songs are cosy familiar echoes of a
past stripped of all its bitterness and misery.
I hated Wham when I was 13 (OBVIOUSLY) but I love Last Christmas. I squirm
with prudish discomfort at Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for Relax, but The Power of Love makes me weep.
And when I hear Walking in the Air
I block out the memories of 1980s casual homophobia and the application of the
Aled Jones insult to any boy at school who hadn’t quite met an accepted level
of manliness, and I wallow in a snow-tinted nostalgia of Sunday evening tea in
front of the telly, with the Woolworth Christmas tree lights flickering and the
taste of Advocaat and lemonade and cigarette smoke in the air.
Finally, the seventh myth
of Christmas, is that there aren’t 12 myths and furthermore, 12 of anything is
too much. Unless it’s those
pig-in-blankets things, you know, the thin sausages wrapped in bacon that taste
so good alongside turkey? Jesus, I love
those!
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