Eamonn Duffin is a local writer based in Belfast. His work has been featured in The Belfast Review and The Honest Ulsterman.
A recent piece of analysis in The Guardian informs us that Christmas creep is getting earlier every year. Apparently, it is now a full 45 days before the birthday of the baby Jesus. 45 days! Is that all? From what I have seen the last few years, Christmas starts on Easter Monday when the Easter eggs are replaced on the shelves by selection boxes – very small, overpriced selection boxes I hasten to add. Christmas just seems relentless now, like The Terminator, and this is not much fun for people who find Christmas a tough time of the year for various reasons, and for the rest of us who are sick of the sight of it by December.
Christmas fever lands just as soon as the kids go back to school, on that first day of term, the same day the sun comes out after two months of summer rain. Halloween has even been bypassed by Christmas creep. Mince pies were in Tesco from the 7th of September for heaven’s sake. I’m half expecting tins of Christmas sweets with a picture of the baby Jesus wearing a false face, trick or treating to start appearing for the 31st of October. Might as well try and cash in on two markets at once. It used to be that Christmas ads didn’t appear until the 1st of November, but now they start well before Halloween, meaning we have to suffer Johnny Depp selling overpriced scent dressed like a mid-life crisis playing crap guitar even earlier.
Christmas movies have been on Channel 5 for months. I miss the days when Channel 5 was all shark and Nazi documentaries, but now it’s cheesy American Christmas movies set in Vermont, nearly always starring Dean Cain. They all have names like ‘’Tis the Season of Love,’ or ‘Falling for Christmas’ or ‘Try Not to Rip Your Own Eyeballs Out While Your Kids Make You Watch This.’ If you don’t know these movies, well, never worry as you don’t need too, they are all the same, with the exact same terrible plot: beautiful single parent mom/dad moves to a nice town at Christmas called Niceville or Photogenicville to open an organic, artisan bread shop. They will live in a massive, amazing house, one of those wooden ones with a porch, and there will be snow. They will meet a man/woman in the town through some kind of playful accident, such as falling over in the snow, being locked out of their house or being hit by a snowplough, they will like this man/woman but somehow ignite some kind of stupid feud for comedy value. Their young child – the sex of said child is irrelevant – will try and reconcile them by being cute AKA annoying. There will be a wise elderly person who will hand out worldly wisdom. You will recognise this elderly person – ‘I’m telling you; he was in Magnum. Owned a bar or something’ – and trying to figure what they acted in will distract you for the rest of the movie, but it won’t matter as the couple will get together anyway and kiss on the porch in the lovely light with everyone surrounding them and that will be it. Swap the actors, change the titles, all these films are the same. What happened to real Christmas movies, like The Muppets’ Christmas Carol or Die Hard?
Christmas creep creates anxiety-inducing levels of stress even earlier than it has any need to. Take shopping for instance, now I’m not talking about food shopping, though that is stressful enough as everybody knows from having to wrestle that last bag of Brussel sprouts from the grip of a determined compatriot, despite both of you knowing that most people around the Christmas table won’t eat them (they are fools, they are delicious). No, what I’m talking about is present shopping. Even typing that brings out a sweat. Shopping for kids is easy, they point at a Nintendo Switch, and you go and buy it, begrudgingly, but you know the joy it will bring and the peace it will bring you, it’s a win win, but I’m thinking of adults shopping here, and in particular men, because let’s face facts, men are useless. They will get it wrong. But I have an invaluable piece of advice for partners who wouldn’t mind a decent present this year – just tell him what you want. Yip, tell him. It works. Write it down in easy understandable crayon on a big piece of paper and hand it to him or send him a link for that big conglomerate I won’t name, you know the one, the cowardly one that wouldn’t endorse a candidate for US president in The Washington Post (look where that got us). Make it easy for you both, because if you are relying on dropping hints they won’t work as men don’t listen. They maybe listen 25% of the time and remember 5% of that. If you are watching a show together in November and an ad comes on with some famous beautiful actor selling a perfume, or you see an ad for some great hair straighteners, don’t say, ‘I smelt that in boots the other day, it was lovely’ or ‘I bet those get your hair so smooth,’ as it will be lost on him by the time the ad for the mattresses comes on next. Text him the item with capitals saying, BUY ME THIS FOR CHRISTMAS. He will be thankful, oh, so thankful and you will be thankful that you aren’t opening a VERY, VERY BADLY wrapped present on Christmas morning only to find a three pack of something smelly from Lidl and an iron as he thought you needed something to get the wrinkles out. Just give him a list.
Shopping is of course a perennial Christmas hazard. There are shops and streets in the towns and the cities full of crowds of miserable people who have no idea what they want, wandering around listlessly like zombies. Think of those older husbands who have come with their wives and are trying very hard not to look uncomfortable and arrestable in the underwear section of Primark while waiting on their wives to buy something, hopefully really quickly.
Then, there is the Christmas market in Belfast. Nothing makes your heart sink faster than the words, ‘Will we check out the Christmas market?’ Now, before everyone reading this says, but I like the Christmas market, I have nothing against the Christmas market, it has a lovely vibe: you can buy fudge, and a sausage, and some candles, some wooden toys and paella, that well known Christmas food, but my problem is the market’s location in the grounds of the city hall. It is too small now and far too bunged. It is like trying to put 10 pounds of something in a five-pound bag. Surely, it is time to move some of it out and down along Donegall Place. Think of the barked shins that will be saved from the merciless double buggies being pushed through the market, the hot chocolate spillage incidents, the mouths and hands burned with mulled wine, and it will free up some room for the enormous queue for the crepes. Talk about Christmas Crepe. I’m convinced the queue goes from Belfast to Berlin. It’s endless. And don’t forget those beer tents, full of drunken office workers on their Christmas do, out on the beer since lunchtime, which brings us to another stalwart event of Christmas, the Christmas do. Who doesn’t love those?
“Are you going to the Christmas do?”
“It’s July.”
“I know, but we need to know numbers.”
The Christmas do tends to come in two distinct varieties. The first is a low-key informal gathering of the people in work you actually want to meet in a bar you like for an unplanned drink or five. The second kind of do is a battery chicken event in a hotel the weekend before Christmas, possibly black eye Friday, with terrible food and a lot of Christmas Jumpers – the comedic Christmas item that irony has forgotten – where everyone is sitting cheek by jowl while a bored band plays terrible music that nobody will care about until 12.30am when the hotel wants to throw them out and they suddenly want to dance. These dos are messy. Very messy. There will be tears, lot of tears, there will be memorable outfits, there will be snogs, there will be vomiting and there will be a fight between two people stemming from something that has been simmering since last year’s Christmas do. These Christmas dos are also where work legends are made, with unbelievable events that people will talk about for years done by that one person who will astound everyone with their behaviour. If you do not know who this person is, it is you. These are the Christmas drinkers. The once-a-year people. We all know them, that mild mannered person we had forgotten even worked in your office until you see them falling over tables, insulting everyone, molesting people, crying, punching, minesweeping, falling asleep and then eventually disappearing with a person you don’t know who has tagged along with one of your work colleagues. Come work on Monday these office legends will act as if nothing has happened. These people are to be admired yet feared.
A Christmas do makes for a long day, and the longest day does occur in December, but it is not the 21st, no, it’s the 25th, for that is the day that you spend with your loved ones… and other people related to you. We all know the joys of a family get together, it doesn’t even have to be at Christmas, but several things have now made the negotiation of any gathering with our beloved family very difficult, and they are Brexit, Trump and Covid. These things have made it a minefield with those aunts or uncles. You know the ones. Every single word said must be chosen with care and precision.
“Pass us that tin of Quality Street there, Aunt Mary.”
“Did you know there is a ring of paedophile satanists in the European Union who want to put chips in our brains through chemtrails in the sky?”
“For frigs sake, I only wanted a toffee penny.” Maybe it’s an idea to sit in silence and nurse a Baileys. Clock watching becomes an Olympic sport in moments like this. It’s only one day. One very long day.
But you know, you can forgive all that, as regardless of all this, of all those awkward situations, this is what Christmas is about, family, friends, and catching up, remembering that although that aunt or uncle might like Brexit, they are still great to the kids. What we just don’t need is this Christmas Creep crap.
Christmas is really hard for some people. They find it hard to have cheer, they may not want to go to the pub, they may not want to watch that crap movie or listen to Maria Carey on endless loop on the radio in the office. They may just want to be left alone, without some needless drunken get together. They may just want to be with their own thoughts for that time of year, in their own time, and that’s OK. There is no law to say you must be happy at Christmas, you are allowed to be miserable if you want to, as let’s be honest, Christmas can make even the cheeriest person miserable at times. So, lets not make it harder for people. Let Christmas happen when it’s Christmas. Late November is time enough, not September. We don’t need Christmas movies in July and Christmas shops and Santa’s Grotto opening in August, we can ‘enjoy’ all that in December, with the Shloer, the stuffing and the mince pies. Christmas creep dilutes the good stuff about Christmas and when the actual day comes, we are all exhausted by the rampant consumerism and stress of it. Let Christmas stay special, by keeping it at Christmas. That’s what the baby Jesus would do.
This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.
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