Dean Martin might have called it “The most wonderful time of the year”, but it isn’t all mistletoe and wine at Christmas-time. For many of us, Christmas is a time for family, togetherness, hope and excessive consumption of sweet berries in pastry. But there are those few little niggling things that seem to see Christmas as an irresistible opportunity to make your life slightly less worth living. So here is a list of twelve such yuletide ne’er-do-wells.
1. The Christmas Adverts
The classic Coca-Cola advert might get you in festive spirits, and the effort from John Lewis, featuring a romantic snowman on a voyage to buy his snow-girlfriend a pair of gloves, is charming enough (even if she is made of snow and so he is essentially precipitating her death), but any success is swallowed whole by the nauseating seasonal advert for isme.com. The ad is a selection of snippets with Loose Women regular Lynda Bellingham ending each segment with a reference to the website. “Flatter me” she demands, as she looks at a reflection of her dumpy arse in the mirror, “Notice me” she proclaims as she smugly struts across screen in a leopard print bin-bag. This is all nauseating enough but to just throw the kitchen sink at it, the ad ends with a bedroom scene where she whispers cat-like to the audience, “unzip me”. It’s enough to make you fetch up your Christmas pud at any rate.
- 2. The Christmas Night Out
I don’t care if this is supposed to be enjoyable, it makes the list with ease. Clubs are keen to leap on any event that can be disfigured enough to resemble an excuse to drink excessively; the mass celebration of Australia day provides a good example. And what better than a religious celebration of resurrection to lay on the mojito two-for-ones
3. The Tinsel, the Tree, and the Lights
Okay, my beef is not with tinsel and such, I love all that sparkly shit. My problem is with the dullards who don’t so much decorate their house as try and blind the Russians. Some households you see are lit up in such monstrously bad-taste, with so many animatronic nativity characters and flashing lights that just looking at them hurts; you can feel your retinas sizzling like a couple of fried eggs. Please, no
4. The X Factor
Considering Simon Cowell has a greater impact on the free world than President Obama, you’d think he would call it a day on money-making and retire to a mountaintop secret-lair with a gargantuan supply of oil of Olay and high-waisted 501’s. But apparently not. Since 2005, five of the seven Christmas No.1’s have fallen to Cowell and his minions, with the only resistance offered being the ‘Rage Factor’ campaign in 2009, and the Military Wives who topped the chart last year. The X-Factor chart-toppers have included professional vowel impersonator Leona Lewis, and Alexandra Burke’s mawkish re-working of Leonard Cohen’s classic, Hallelujah. What this year will give us, I can barely even imagine.
5. Boxing Day
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Boxing Day, it’s just that after the giddy excess of Christmas day, it’s so unbelievably ordinary. Boxing Day is to Christmas Day what Coldplay is to U2; a lukewarm afterthought, shot-through with disappointment. You lumber out of bed at two in the afternoon and spend the rest of the day sat about among torn wrapping paper and turkey in misty Tupperware boxes, wondering whether it’s worth waiting another 365 days till Saint Nick’s return.
6. Primark
Being a student you are going to have to lean on Primark at least once; it’s like an unwritten rule. But doing your shopping at Primark always feels like asking a favour of a particularly dubious friend, except none of my dubious friends keep a bunch of Bangladeshi orphans sewing in the basement. At Christmas time Primark is even more crammed than usual with gaudy tat for the Christmas rush. Walk into a branch of Primark in mid-November and you could be forgiven for mistaking the ensuing melee for the final days of Gomorrah. The place is crammed with irritable shoppers carting about their swelling baskets of festive treats, battling across a shop floor resembling a collection of higgledy-piggledy haystacks made up of vests and those idiotic tiger one-pieces. Avoid at all costs.
7. The Soaps
Oh, the soap Christmas special this way cometh. We can expect a sappy and fatally over-egged plea to togetherness on Christmas Eve, followed by the gaudy ramshackle of the Christmas day special; an event that promises revelations, plenty of yelling and bawling, and generally a great deal of aimless bang and clatter. But very little cheer.
8. Present Shopping
There is quite a lot of pressure to ‘get it right’ at Christmas, and shopping, though inevitable, makes the list for being so incredibly fickle. If you get someone the wrong thing in my family, it’s instantly obvious. I once made the mistake of purchasing my dad an Ian Brown CD; it was promptly returned to HMV, on Boxing Day. A misjudgement on my part, met with cut-throat honesty. Christmas is no time for subtlety. Furthermore, there’s no small difficulty in the guesswork required to figure out how much to spend. If you shoot wildly over what your partner has spent on you, then it can be awkward when you produce her Jimmy Choo gift box in the face of her offering of a natty ball of twine.
9. People who leave it to the very, very last minute
Purchasing presents is hard, but being on the other end of the transaction is endlessly more trying. My first job was as a Christmas temporary at BHS; a hellish, godforsaken experience if there ever was one. It was my first taste of the particular brand of hysteria and free-for-all that is unique to last minute shoppers. I’ll be working on the 23rd and I anticipate fatalities.
10. Iceland
Iceland (the obnoxious frozen-food chain, not the small country), spends the majority of the year pumping out TV-dinner slop, but things get intensive around November time. Endless adverts appear for platters of calorific nibbles, and roast turkey joints liquid-nitrogen’d to perfection, all choreographed to Michael Bublé telling us “the best is yet to come”. Though that is definitely not true; the only thing that can follow an Iceland Christmas roast is despicable, relentless diarrhoea.
11. It Comes Earlier Every Year…
Department stores take it on themselves to bring Christmas a little earlier each year, and it’s now common to see the Christmas wrap out long before the cobwebs go up for Halloween. Presumably the ultimate goal is to begin selling seasonal goods sometime around February.
12. Christmas Cards
It might be a tradition, but in the age of Facebook and free wifi is there anyone who actually does this anymore? It’s done in the spirit of goodwill, and yet seeing your parents sat up writing and re-writing ‘Merry Christmas_________’ with all the mirth of Leon Trotsky at a mountain climbing convention doesn’t seem very cheery at all. If the messages written inside were honest, then by the end of your card list you would be writing ‘I hate you so much’ and ‘Life is just a long road to a cold and lonely death’ as opposed to seasonal good cheer. Sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy I suppose.
words: Jack Hedley