And The Bells Were Ringing Out

“It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas,” goes the song.

And so it is.

It’s starting to feel like the end of the year, like finality is fast approaching.

Anyone would think that the apocalypse is nigh or perhaps a tornado or a volcano or a tidal wave. I mean, if the end of the world was just about to begin then buying every last tin of tomatoes, stalks of broccoli and can of Fosters is hardly going to help and you would hope that in their last moments of existence people would be able to find something better to do. But then again, possibly they wouldn’t. They’d probably leg it down to the shops to buy a few extra galleons of milk in case Auntie Ethel decided to sit out the nuclear winter in their shelter after all.

Seriously, you should see the insanity in the supermarkets around here. The desperation and the aggression, the over-compensation, the almost inevitable waste (or so I suspect - no family can eat eleven kilos of sprouts, can they?). Besides, we live in the (almost) middle of the biggest city on the continent. There are five large scale, big name supermarkets within a half hour walk from my house and at least a further fifteen corner shops within ten minutes. At the very worst they will be closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Two days. Let’s be honest, it’s unlikely to even be for that long, but people are stocking up like they need to feed a regiment for the next three months. You’d think that it was 1963 and that the missiles could start flying at any moment.

I used to love Christmas, the drunken frivolity, the giving and the sharing and, hell, everything about it. Even, sort of, the fairy tale of the son of god born under a star to bring peace to the world. It’s nice. Just thinking about it used to give me a warm glow inside.

Increasingly, though, that’s no longer the case. I’m getting more and more grumpy as each year passes. I leave the gift shopping later and later in lone protest against the advertising and store dressing that seems to begin earlier and earlier and so, consequently, I’m fighting against the rampaging hordes of desperate mothers and guilty husbands. I find the centre of London claustrophobic on an average Saturday afternoon, but in December it’s utterly unbearable. The streets are packed with people layered up in heavy coats, gloves and woolly hats, who then become drenched with sweat the moment they enter an overheated shop. Everyone gains an extra two feet in width as the number of bags surgically attached to their hands increases every fifteen minutes. Those more innocent are barraged out into the road, knocked to one side by a taxi transporting a peroxide blonde footballer’s wife fresh off the train from Hertfordshire, heading to Selfridges and the privileges of a personal shopper.

Me? I take a rucksack, keeping my hands free to shove the occasional cyclist under a bus, and a plan. Get in, purchase presents and get the hell out of Dodge.

Rarely works, though.

Plus, there’s the never ending Slade-Mud-Wizzard-Wham medley of audio torture, bits of tinsel attached to the door handles of public toilets, a stuffed penguin dressed as a reindeer dressed as Santa in the middle of every damn shop and the electricity drainers suspended from every lamp post, tree and vertical object on every high street around the country (to say nothing of some people’s houses). Mind you, it could be worse - at least the Christmas lights no longer seem to be just adverts for fizzy orange drinks or the latest kids movie or condoms or whatever, but how come the eco-police don’t harp on about the four million extra light bulbs along Oxford Street switched on for sixteen hours a day for nine weeks?

Oh, and then there’s my favourite part of Christmas. The complex negotiations over which parts of the festive period we’re going to spend in which parental abode. A process of feints and bluffs and counter strategy which needs to accommodate a myriad range of considerations: quantity of time spent with each family; quality of time spent with each family; number of meals where; sisters; grand-parents; aunts and uncles; dogs; cousins. Who we see when and where becomes so convoluted with twists and turns, a couple of hours here, twenty minutes there, that in fact we spend all our time driving the three miles between junctions four and five of the M42. I’m confused, but I think that I’m having lunch on Boxing Day with my Dad, Beck’s Uncle Peter, my cousin’s husband Paul and mine and Beck’s nephew at a secret rendezvous point somewhere in Wiltshire.

It’s enough to make me say “sod it, bugger Christmas” and stay in London sulking. I’ll draw the blinds, speak to no-one, spend the day in bed reading books, drinking fine ale and masturbating. It’ll be great.

H’mph.

Except.

Actually, you know, it’d be shite. And in the end it’s the little details that make Christmas so special and overcome all the crap in the run-up.

On Wednesday afternoon we went to buy a tree. This involved a fair degree of faffing; first we went to the local garden centre (too big and too expensive), then to Homebase (wrong shape) and then to a couple of random blokes selling them off the street (sawn off at the base; impossible to water - it’d be dead before we got home from Birmingham) and then back to Homebase. A small, rather full of character I think, tree now perches on the chest in the lounge.

We decorated it that evening. The box of decorations was, incredibly, where I’d left them the year before and I even managed to find a set of lights that worked. We sipped red wine, listened to Rufus Wainwright and in the artificially warm fuzz of the evening tied tinsel around the pot, dangled baubles and bells and stars. She smiled at something daft I said and I smiled back. Suddenly all was right in the world and that glow in the pit of my stomach returned.

I started thinking about all the times past. Of as a little kid my Dad drawing a clock face showing the time that I could get up in the morning and placing the piece of paper next to my Noddy clock; of getting up, finding Mum already up and about and being over-excited because Father Christmas had already been, unable to understand that she was getting undressed, not dressed; of the sheer unadulterated joy at getting the exact Action Force or Transformer toy that I’d dreamt of for months; of silliness and a lack of competition in playing board games with my sister and my cousins; of the straining in my gut as I force down one more roast potato and know that I’ll have find room for pudding; of sinking into the big, bright pink chair in the window of my grand-parent’s dining room, opening a bran new book and beginning to read, feeling slightly dozy as digestion takes place; of the smell of drambuie; of tunelessly howling carols in the Railway Inn late on Christmas Eve having already sunk too much Brew XI and then slurring my way through a solo version of Fairytale in New York somewhere between the pub and my parents house.

Despite the odds and all the attempts to make it trite and frustrating, it is still a wonderful time of the year. Merry Christmas everyone, now get off the internet and go spend time with your family.