15 reasons why Christmas can do one

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! So, er, something happened this week, by which I mean that I was going to write about something else but then I realised that what kept gnawing at me was my sheer hatred of Christmas. I decided to write a quick fun intro spelling out the many ways in which I loathe the festive season but somehow that turned into…a 2000-word rant, so I wasn’t going to write anything else afterwards.

I can only apologise for what’s about to follow if you do enjoy Christmas but, in my defence, you’re wrong. Normal, non-Grinch service will resume next week.

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A column

Something weird happened to me in, I think, 2017. It might have been 2018, I’m not entirely sure. Point is: there was one single year, some years ago, when December came round and I realised I was looking forward to Christmas. I got into “the festive spirit”, whatever that means. I remember it as quite a fun few weeks, and quite a remarkable exception.

I’d never enjoyed Christmas before then, at least as an adult, and am yet to enjoy Christmas again. Christmas sucks. It’s stupid and bad. I think we should stop doing it. Here are the reasons why:

1. It now starts in early November, at the latest

Listen, I’m not entirely heartless. I’m happy that there are things out there making people happy, even if they’re not personally my cup of tea. I reckon I’d hate Christmas at least 85% less if it was treated as, at most, a week-long celebration. Well, ideally I think it should only really be talked about between December 23 and 26, but I’m willing to compromise and give the Santa shaggers a full week. That should be enough.

Sadly for me, however, the Santa shaggers’ reign of terror means that shops begin selling Christmas crap in October now, and Christmas songs - more on those very soon - become unavoidable on exactly December 1. “Christmas” is now a months-long event. It lasts for decades. Over 16% of the year is now Christmas-themed. That’s unbearable. That’s terrorism. All good things should be had in moderation, and all bad things should be kept contained.

2. Oh, those fucking songs

I have thought about it in the past and if I could make some sort of deal with the devil, or a lower demonic entity, I would be willing to pay 250 pounds of my own money if it meant never hearing a Christmas pop song again. I could buy a really nice jacket with that! Could get flights to somewhere warm, and two nights in a cheap Airbnb! But no. I would spend it on being freed from Christmas songs.

There are, I think, two issues at play here. The first one is that the vast majority of Christmas songs suck ass, which is not a good start. The second is that even a good song - say, All I Want For Christmas Is You - will be ruined forever if you must hear 40 to 80 seconds of it every time you walk into a shop for several weeks every year.

We know that the CIA or FBI or what have you sometimes use music to torture people and I get why it works. It’s how I feel when I hear the first notes of Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade for the seventeenth time in two weeks: tortured. Just play normal songs, like you do the rest of the year.

3. I don’t care about your tree

I’m sorry! I’m usually good at caring about things my friends care about! But unfortunately I never want to see another Christmas tree on my Instagram feed again, for as long as I live. It’s just a fucking tree with stuff on it, lads. It’s just not that aesthetically compelling.

I also don’t want to watch another story of your boyfriend carrying the tree home unless it really is a fucking massive tree. I’ll take feats of pure strength and balance but anything else is just - again - a man carrying a tree. Men have been carrying trees for millennia. There’s nothing new or interesting about that.

I also think that you’re a sick pervert if you put up your tree in November but that should go without saying. You know what you did.

4. Don’t even get me started on the ads

Speaking of sick perverts - I think I would be thrown in jail or at the very least socially ostracised if I shared my true feelings about people who willingly watch Christmas TV ads, like they’re entertainment. “You look like you enjoy watching Christmas TV ads” is maybe the worst insult I can think of. I’d yeet myself into the Thames if someone said that about me.

5. Buying presents sucks

It just does! Doesn’t mean I don’t love my family - I do! - but there’s nothing more stressful than having to figure out what to buy for 7 to 9 people, many of whom already have pretty much everything they need. It’s financially ruinous and you just know that no matter how much effort you put in, most of those presents will be underwhelming in one way or another. Most people only have one to three great present ideas a season in them.

6. Receiving presents? also sucks

I mean that’s just the flipside of the above. Maybe my family is quite rubbish at the whole “presents” thing but I really, really don’t like it when I have to pretend I enjoy something I clearly don’t enjoy. It makes me feel bad because I know the other person spent some money on it, but I will very obviously never use it/wear it/read it/whatever you’re meant to do with it. It’s resentment and guilt all rolled into one. Bad!

7. The weather? That’s right: it sucks!

Right so I’m aware that it is not Christmas’ fault that it happens in December but I can’t not mention this. “Ooooh I love the festive season”, people say, but I’m writing this in December and I had to turn my bedside lamp on at 9am despite the fact that my bed has a big window just behind it. How could you possibly love that. I miss the sun so much. I could never love a period of time when the sun abandons us.

8. Christmas dinner: no bueno

This is more true of Britain than France as at least in France we have delicious foie gras and in my family we usually have boudin blanc on the 25th and boudin blanc is great but I mean: come on. If roast turkey actually was pleasant to eat then we would also have it the rest of the year. There’s a reason why we don’t.

Cranberry sauce can die in a fire, as far as I’m concerned, and the less is said about “Christmas pudding” the better. I won’t even dignify bread sauce with a proper mention. All other ingredients in that meal - potatoes, vegetables and the like - are just normal things which we eat the rest of the year anyway. There is no upside to eating a Christmas dinner.

9. The increasing inescapability of Christmas-themed foods

As previously discussed, I believe cranberry sauce to have been invented either by the Devil himself or by someone who lost their sense of taste in a terrible accident. It is hard for me to believe that I am the only person in the world who has the correct opinion on this. Why, then, is cranberry sauce simply unavoidable in December? Why is every high street lunch place hellbent on making their own food worse?

The same goes for dry, cold turkey, obviously, or even pigs in blankets in any setting that’s not “someone has literally just cooked some pigs in blankets and they’re still warm”. The vast, crushing majority of Christmas food cannot easily be turned into, say, a sandwich. If you think it can then you are lying to yourself. The Christmasification of casual food is something that ought to be resisted.

Similarly: every “Christmas-themed” menu in a restaurant is always, always worse than whatever they make the rest of the year. Again, this is how I’ve got radicalised: had the Christmas dinner stayed in the home, I wouldn’t be objecting to it as much. Why, why must you make me order something with chestnuts in it just because I made a dinner reservation on December 9? I don’t want chestnuts. I have never wanted them. I will never want them.

Oh, and perhaps most controversially: mince pies are wildly, wildly overrated. So many things in the world are better than mince pies.

10. Going home is hell

Fun fact: flights to my hometown usually cost around 60 pounds for a return. Over the Christmas period, even if I book them months and months in advance, they tend to cost 300 pounds. Is that an amount of money I’m happy to shell out every year in order to celebrate a holiday I don’t like? I’ll give you three guesses!

At least, though, I don’t have to suffer through the hell of British trains on December 21. My point is: no-one has a good time travelling home for Christmas. It’s always bad, because everyone else is also travelling. “Oh but I actually live near my family!”, I’m already hearing from some of you. Shut up. This is not about you. No one likes a gloater. Shut up.

11. The pubs, dear lord, the pubs

I realise I’m repeating myself here, but I wouldn’t hate Christmas anywhere near as much as I currently do if people weren’t forcing me to hate it. I would, for example, be considerably more okay with it if “festive drinkers” weren’t a thing. God I loathe festive drinkers. They appear in pubs on December 1 and for a whole month everything goes to shit.

They don’t know how to order in a pub, somehow - so many of them try to queue? - and they never figure out what they want to drink until a bartender asks them what they want. They order rounds for roughly 75 people in one go and will always, always ask for the Guinnesses last.

Obviously, because going to the pub is Such A Special Occasion for them, they’ve booked up half the tables in the place. Because It’s A Fun Thing They Do In December, they also tend to get hammered very quickly, making the whole atmosphere needlessly unpleasant by about 7pm.

I hate the festive drinkers! I hate them more than maybe any other group of people! They don’t patronise pubs the rest of the year and when they descend, like a horde of cunt buffalos, they ruin everything for everyone! I think we should create fake pop-up pubs for them to drink in every December so they don’t have to inconvenience the rest of us.

12. Blurgh, “Christmas markets”

Oh you like spending your hard-earned money on wildly, offensively overpriced tchotchkes, do you? Love it when you walk around and everything smells of sweet, burnt vomit because of mulled wine? Can’t get enough of people walking slowly and somehow always being in your way, can you? Have a great time looking at stalls selling stuff that no-one in their right mind would want to buy but now you’ve made eye contact with the person selling said crap and it’s just quite awkward? You love all that, don’t you?

13. Doing nothing is so boring and stupid and bad

This is probably the crux of it. I think a lot of people like Christmas because they like the idea of sitting at home in their pyjamas and doing absolutely nothing, aside from eating, drinking and watching terrible movies, for three to five days. That is - no point in mincing my words here - my idea of hell.

I like it when my days have structure and my favourite thing in the entire world is to leave the house. Being outside is my passion. Being outside at Christmas is pointless because, crucially, everyone else is indoors anyway. I hate being idle with my life. I always go completely nuts on December 26, sometimes even December 25, because I feel like a cranky tiger roaming in a little cage.

All I want is to have meals at normal meal times and get dressed and go do something with my afternoon. That is not something Christmas can offer me. It can, consequently, do one.

14. Whoops I forgot Christmas movies

I mean they’re appalling, obviously. I don’t understand what people see in them, on quite a fundamental level. Knitwear is boring. “Unrealistic and barely plotted romcoms involving people who can’t act” should not be this popular a genre. Why not simply watch a movie about literally anything else. Why insist on lobotomising yourself willingly.

Relatedly: if I hear one more person indulge in the “jokey” “banter” of wondering if Die Hard is a “Christmas movie” then I will have no choice but to push them into traffic. I would even consider travelling to their location, if that’s what it would take for me to push them into traffic.

As we all know anyway, the only true Christmas movies are the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I will not hear a word to the contrary.

15. I feel really left out!

I think that’s the worst thing about it all. I would love it if Christmas was good instead of bad, because then it would make me feel happy instead of grumpy. Sadly there is not a single thing I like about it, so I’m just destined to spend six weeks of the year getting increasingly grumpy as everyone around me is heartened by festive cheer.

Maybe I will write a list of ways in which we could fix Christmas at some point. I would back myself to make Christmas good. I’ll have a think about it and get back to you. Fuck knows I won’t have anything else to do for days on end from December 24 onwards.