You have to catch up with everybody you have ever known in your entire life before Christmas. This means you have to juggle social engagements and check your calendar before committing to anything, and that is just such a tosser thing to do.
Houses with exterior decorations suddenly become cool. Strange, given that garden gnomes in football guernseys and terracotta mushrooms aren’t anywhere near acceptable in the garden ever, but blow-up Santas on sleds and dancing elves are.
Then, after New Year, decorated houses are all of a sudden not cool. In fact, some people choose to leave their Christmas decorations up all year round. They are on to something, and it’s called apathy.
Christmas trees are ghastly but everyone’s afraid to call it. The real ones leave prickly little things all over the place, and the plastic versions that come in boxes give off a very strange chemical smell. Still we insist on posting pics of our freshly decorated, jazzy, sparkly trees on Facebook and Pinterest so everyone can say how gorgeous your tree is. Oh, and tinsel is meant to represent falling snow, so why is it red and green and blue?
Some people go to church only at Christmas. We don’t, we watch Elf. We’ve tried religion and all the Christmas movies, but Elf is the only one that works for us on both counts. Sometimes we watch it during the off-season, just to remind ourselves to be wary of fake Santas and not eat used chewing gum from the New York subway.
My seven-year-old thinks “Jesus-Christ-was-born-on-Christmas-Day” is a swear word. Mention Jesus in the actual context and she freaks out and gets the swear jar. That’s another reason we don’t go to church.
We know most of what we know about Christmas by watching American TV shows, Elf included. So, all the things we understand to represent the season – roaring fires, dragging fresh trees home in the snow, shopping at Macy’s, strange groups of people in hats and gloves singing Christmas carols – we’ve never, ever experienced.
The only time a group of singers has stood outside our house and sung Christmas songs, they woke the kids and I had to tell the singers to shut up and go away. There was no Christmas joy spread anywhere on that occasion. And eggnog in 30-degree heat could quite possibly cause a salmonella outbreak.
It is no longer acceptable to have Kentucky Fried Chicken and mashed potatoes for Christmas lunch. Christmas is all about the food these days. Right now I do not know what watercress is, and I am worried a whole salmon won’t fit in my oven, so already I’m feeling the pressure. And I have vegetarians coming!
No matter how many presents the kids get, they will always ask if there is more. Maybe Santa left one outside on his way in, or maybe there’s another one somewhere under the tree. Come Boxing Day, they’ll be asking when Easter is.
The only queue-jumpers we should deal with, and as a matter of urgency, are those at the Myer windows. They are tricky, man.
But for all these weird, strange and wrong things about Christmas, there are a hundred good things … like Champagne and bonbons and being woken at 5am by kids telling you to come quick, mum, Santa’s been. You’ve got to love it for the good and bad.
