So, Christmas again.
It seems to come around so quickly; are we celebrating it half a dozen so a times per year now?
2024 has, for me (and I am sure I’m not the only one) felt super concentrated, it’s as if everything has been crowded into a few short weeks.
It was, after all, Easter just the week before last whilst I’ve only recently taken my Birthday cards down so they can be supplanted by the Christmas ones.
And my Birthday is in June.
Which means the harvest, a beloved, almost sacred annual event for me (and which I wrote about on here only recently) must have seen everything safely gathered in at the weekend.
I’ll be honest. And feel free to agree with me if you want.
I don’t really enjoy Christmas and I will be glad when it’s over.
That wasn’t always the case.
I used to get so excited about it when I was a pupil at my local primary school, I managed, for two years running, to make myself so sick in anticipation of our school party, I had to go home early and missed it, Father Christmas and all, entirely.
I had flu one year just as we were completing rehearsals for our school nativity play (coloured cardboard crowns for the Kings with Rowntrees Fruit Gums stuck to them so the crowns looked jewel encrusted) so was bedbound on the day of the performance.
But the performer in me rose from my sick bed and was ferried into the school by my grandparents where I played my part and made my bows before being promptly rushed back home and into bed again.
The show must go on, you see.
Christmas at University was unforgettable.
Every year, on December 1st, the catering staff would decorate what we rather grandly called the Refectory.
It was a canteen really but hey, come on, the authorities also called what I, and just about everyone else, regarded as ‘Tea’ as ‘High Tea’.
And we’re not talking about one of the Oxbridge colleges here.
We’d have a Christmas party there as well, except that it was, again, with an eye for hyperbole, called the ‘Grand Christmas Ball’.
A disco, some flashing lights and a band.
Ever heard of Frankie & The Hitmen or Carlene Carter?
No, I hadn’t either.
But we put our glad rags on, bopped until we were a little bit fatigued and hoped for a Christmas kiss or two.
I was singularly unsuccessful with most of the girls I approached, mistletoe in hand.
It must have been my mullet, decorated, as it was, with Lametta.
Then, a couple of days later, we all made our way home for the holidays. Where my Dad wasted no time in reminding me that I had to pay for my keep now and he’d arranged for me to go brushing twice a week for the rest of the holidays.
‘Brushing’, in case you didn’t know, is forming a line with about ten to twelve other chaps (all of us looking like Worzel Gummidge) in some woodland or a field of kale (or similar) and walking the hiding pheasants out towards the waiting rich people and their shotguns.
I HATED it.
But it was £10, a bottle of beer and a brace of pheasant at the end of the day, so…
In the days before I wrote full time and had what my afore mentioned father would have called a ‘proper job’, I worked, for a couple of years, for an IT training company in Reading-Britain’s silicon valley.
My boss was a New Yorker from Queens. All sneers and ‘…you donna gimme no respect’ if I didn’t get his bagel order right.
It was like being on the set of Goodfellas.
But I really liked him.
One reason is that he loved Christmas. December would arrive and the office would be decorated in a manner that made the strip in Las Vegas look understated.
And he’d put his Christmas music on.
Especially Nat King Cole.
We even did a pantomime for a couple of years that we put on for all the other offices of the company in southern England.
My Buttons, let me tell you, was a triumph.
That was, and it sends a shiver down my spine (or should I put the central heating on?) just to think about it, back in 1995, so it’ll be thirty years next Christmas since that unforgettable evening.
I wonder what the old E xecuTrain of Reading team are up to now?
(If any of you are reading this, please get in touch!)
That was a good Christmas.
I’d just moved house, to one, no less, a mere hop, skip and a jump away from the one Warner Brothers used for Harry Potter’s home in the afore mentioned films.
I was young, dynamic, ambitious and full of vim and vigour.
Well, young anyway.
Happy days and multicoloured Christmases.
Even back then and look, it’s not THAT long ago, they didn’t feel as forced and over commercial as they are now.
Christmas has become an industry. One which we are all expected to clock onto, wearing (fake or not) a forced smile and silly jumper.
From about November 20th…
It’s funny (not at all really) but, when I was that young man cited earlier in this blog, I used to laugh long and loud at older relatives and friends who’d roll their eyes skywards and sigh, “…ah, it’s not the same anymore’.
‘We had a dried up Satsuma, a few Brazil nuts and some Izal as a treat in the bathroom…and we were happy with that’.
Now I’m the one rolling his eyes, much to the amusement of my nephews.
‘I had a Blue Peter annual, a Flight Deck game, a couple of selection boxes and some Matey bubble bath as a treat in the bathroom…and I was happy with that’.
Poor old Uncle Ed.
Anyway.
Whatever you’re doing this Christmas and New Year, I hope it brings you and all of your loved ones joy.
And peace on earth. Well, pigs in blankets might fly…
