Bah bloody humbug

Bloody hell. It's bloody Christmas abloodygain.

I'm not a complete Grinch. Really. There are things I like about Western Consumer Holiday, the licence to go out to lunch and not come back being chief among them. Prawns, gingerbread and Bing Crosby are high on the list, too, though preferably not served on the same plate. However, boozy afternoons, prawns and Bing aside, there are things I really hate about the season.

People turning their houses into sideshow alley
I have no argument with Christmas trees or door wreaths. They're fine and they look quite cheerful. I can even cope with little some little fairy lights on the front of your house or in your trees. It's this sort of caper that scares the bejesus out of me:

WTFF?

There's a guy living here in Adelaide who's been lighting up his house and yard every Christmas for years. He puts up thousands of bulbs every year and creates little sound and light shows with music and whirlygigs and crap that covers every square centimetre of his front yard. He's a wee bit eccentric, obviously, and spends all year getting ready for Christmas. His neighbours probably hate him to death, because it means their street is full of people every night in December, but they can't complain because otherwise they'll look like Grinches.

Light Guy used to be an oddity, but now Christmas lights has become a competitive sport. If it goes any further, people will be lobbying for it to replace squash in the Olympics. A visit to K-mart or Bunnings and you've got pretty much all the shite you need to turn your house into a monstrosity of light pollution and plastic. Two-foot tall plastic candy canes, icicle lights, disembodied plastic santa heads, reindeer, all-singing all-dancing life-sized santas, angels, bloody snowmen - you name it, you can get it. Giant, inflatable Santas are very much the go at the moment. You can even get one that has a little motor in-built, so that Santa's inflatable head rises up out of an inflatable chimney. If only someone thought to team it with the soundtrack from The Shining, the effect would be complete. I seem to remember that last year or the year before, a local family was horribly upset because someone stabbed their Santa and killed Christmas. (And no, it wasn't me!)

I'm sure it's all lovely for the kiddies, but we didn't have any of this nonsense when I was a little tacker. We used to live in a rolled-up newspaper on the side of the road - no bloody Christmas lights there, thank you very bloody much.

Shopping
I hate shopping. The only thing I actually enjoy shopping for is books. I'm not interested in shopping for clothes, shoes, handbags, toys, tools, homewares, electronics or anything else. If I need something, I'll make a half-arsed attempt to buy it, but more than likely I'll lose the will to live after looking in two shops and will have to come home and have a stiff drink. I know it's very un-female of me, but the consumer urge just isn't there.

As you might imagine, when it comes to Christmas, I am forced to shop until I have something for everyone and I become downright depressed. Perhaps the crappy carols have something to do with it. (If there was more Bing, I'm sure Christmas would be a better place.) But it's the decorations that really do my head. We own a Christmas tree and some cat-attracting gee-gaws to hang on it, but it's not likely to go up until about a week before Christmas. In the shops, the trees and garlands and bits of other fluff go up in October, giving you that unpleasant sense of foreboding (cue the music from The Shining again). Then the fruit mince pies appear and you know you're buggered. Massed racks of tinsel and baubles and little strings of beads and glittery angels and giant pink foil Christmas trees make me want to slash my wrists.

Plus there's the consideration that no-one actually needs anything. It gives the ordeal that is Christmas shopping a sense of high farce: they don't need it, you don't want to have to look for it but there you are. I live in fear of the random homewares that will inevitably have my name on them this year. If any of my family is reading this, please, for the love of Ford, don't do it! I don't need them!

So, the equation is fairly simple. Shopping = bad. Decorations = bad. Other crazy shoppers and screaming kids = bad. Buying crap that no-one needs = bad. Even for the numerically-challenged, that's a whole lot of nasty. In the end, Christmas shopping boils down to something of an endurance test. It's not unlike trying to eat 85 hotdogs in two minutes and has the same outcome.

Weird marketing ploys
I present Exhibit A. Behold, the upside-down Christmas tree:

This one is quite modest, as the species goes. At least it's green and looks to be made of some sort of fake piney material. I saw one the other day in Hell Mall that was made from purple tinsel. "Aww, darl, won't this give the lounge a bit of class for Chrissie?" Really, what brain surgeon came up with this idea? Obviously it's a nasty, cynical marketing ploy hatched with the intention of making people believe that their perfectly serviceable normal Christmas trees are passe. Apparently, the trend started in the US and is quite popular there because it means there's plenty of room for presents underneath. If you have that many presents that they're piling up and poking into the branches, you're buying too damned much. Give gift vouchers. For books. Or better still, piglets to people in the Third World. And forgive me for being crude, but that upside down tree resembles nothing so much as a muff that's been neglected over the winter and now needs whipper-snippering. Wax alone just won't do the job on that puppy. To borrow a phrase from the Fug Girls, it just looks like someone stepped in a big pile of crazy.

Office Christmas parties
(See: eating 85 hotdogs in two minutes.) Invariably, these turn pear-shaped, especially when the booze is turned on for free. Last year's party was unusually sucessful from my point of view, because I did manage to wreak vengeance on an ad rep who had been giving me unwarranted grief all year. I poured a a pint of the Coopers' best into his lap. It looked accidental until the accomplice who bumped me gave me a high five in front of him. This was all done with a cracked rib and a headful of painkillers and dryo whoite wine. This was, however, an aberration. On the whole, office parties either turn out to be boring as batshit, or end up with something cringeworthy happening. You get a little too merry, you tell the boss or a colleague exactly where they can shove that mince pie and then you have to spend your holidays worrying about what everyone will say when you go back to work.

New Year's Eve is now way too close
In my experience, NYE is the biggest let-down of the year. You're under far too much pressure to have a good time and it usually fizzles, leaving you with that creeping feeling of failure. After all, on the funnest fun-fun night of the year, you haven't had a good time? What's the matter with you? I'd be happy to just cancel it altogether. Ideally, I settle down with a DVD, a bag of crisps and a bottle of wine and read about the arrests the next day in the paper.

But have a lovely WCH, anyway. Get into the spirit of the season and try not to kill any of your family members when you get together for ritualised over-eating.