Christmas Again
Cliff Richardson once sang “Christmas time, camel toe and wine.” I have no idea why he did that.
Christmas changes as you get older, is possibly the most obvious statement ever made in a blog or anywhere else. Stop saying it!
When you’re a kid, Christmas is almost overwhelmingly exciting. You lay in bed on Christmas eve imagining all the presents waiting for you downstairs. In my house we would leave a pillowcase out for Father Christmas and it would always be brimming on Christmas morning with dozens of perfectly chosen gifts. Then the big present. The big present was generally something electronic and expensive such as a games console or computer. It was always the last one to be unwrapped and would usually cause me to do a strange jumpy dance. However it came with strings attaches, not because it was a puppet but because I would be expected to share it with Laura, my little sister. This was fine because my sister would often lose interest in them quite quickly (I assume), so I’d just play with them until they fell apart. Though I still have the Acorn Electron we got for Christmas in 1984, it still works too, just.
Then comes your late teens and your twenties where Christmas stops being about the presents and becomes about get drunk with your friends. Quite often you’ll wolf down your Christmas dinner before zooming off in an expensive taxi to your mates house to drink gallons of the cheapest Bailey’s substitute known to man while watching The Muppet Christmas Carol. Then you’ll crawl home and go to bed before tolerating a boxing day stand pie with the parent of your choice.
Before you know it you’re in your thirties and you friends and siblings get married and have kids. This changes everything because Christmas become about being a kid again. I’ve always identified far more with children than adults, they’re much more sensible about eating and rolling around on the floor. So you go to your parents’ house and eat too much and play peak-a-boo until the kids start crying and are put to bed. Then you drink yourself insensible with proper Bailey’s and nod off on the sofa until you’re woken up and driven home.
Before you know it you’re in your forties and Christmas changes again. Now the booze and presents don’t really matter, it’s about seeing the people you care about the most and drinking yourself silly. Yes I lied, booze always matters.
I know this is very early for a Christmas blog but I also want to plug possibly the best podcast episode that we’ve ever done. We call it A Christmas Barrels and it is an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ most famous story, after Oliver Twerp, Great Explosions and A Tale of Ten Charlies.
You can listen on the website, download it on iTunes or Soundcloud or just press play on the playing thing below this line of words, it’s that easy.
Merry Christmas.
