The Festive Spirit

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Well it’s Christmas. And as a Christmas present to my readers, I’m going to give a happy blog. Yes, while you may look to this as your weekly dose of conflict and hatred, this week you are disappointed. This is going to be a blog focusing on something positive.

Well that was the plan anyway. It became clear pretty soon that this was not going to be the case. Whenever I thought of something, it was impossible to make it even barely interesting, let alone funny. So I thought a bit more and decided that this blog was going to be a comparing one. “YES!” I thought, “That’ll be vaguely neutral at least, and I could probably make it funny as well”. This also came to nothing; since there was nothing that I could think to compare that would interest you, or be relevant in any way. So I simply thought “fuck it” and decided to do my usual thing of focusing on all the crapper bits of life. This time: Christmas.

While I know that this is supposed to be a time of love and giving, and it does indeed do that in places, there are also a lot of things to piss off the innocent festive celebrator.

So here’s the top 3 things that piss me off at Christmastime (because if there’s anything people like reading, it’s a good list)

3. Tags

Yes, kicking off the list at number 3 is tags. The midgety little bastards that hang off the present as if to say “Merry Christmas asshole! I’m here to make sure you can’t open this properly!” I mean, sure they let the people know who sit around the tree who the present is for, but this could be achieved much easier by sorting into piles, or even put in bags so they can easily be handed out. And it’s much worse for the poor wrapper, having to write out 22 tags saying almost the exact same thing does not make Christmas the happiest time of year.

2. Pointless Cards

The idea of a card is good. It’s an amuse-bouché to the big scene, the presents. But then communism is also a good idea, and that doesn’t work either. Every year I open a card and find nothing but “to Luke, from Gran”. Bloody hell, if you’re going to go to that little bother, don’t do it in the first place. You don’t even have to write your own Christmas message, because it comes free with the card. And while you might argue that the picture on the card might be nice, I doubt this is why the person bought it. Every year all I do is grab some 29p suitable cards from card factory and hope they’re okay. So it’s probably the same story at the other end. The way I like to get around the pointless bit is to… annotate them a bit. For example, when my sister opens her card this year (I’m writing this Christmas Eve so it’s in the future tense) she’ll see a creepy picture of Nixon with his arms in a V shape and a creepy smile, with some text that says “FROM THE PRESSSSIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERRRICAA”. Full credit to Amir for thinking that up J

1. Tradition

It’s the big one, tradition. And its not just Christmas traditions that piss me off, it’s all year round. “We’ve got to do it this way because we always have” is the bane of my existence. Brussels sprouts for instance, which are essentially crap onions, are supposedly tasty. Fine. But if these shitty little fart bombs are so nice, why don’t we have them all year round? The answer is simple. Tradition. It doesn’t help that I have a passionate hatred for sprouts either. Another fine example of this is the dreaded Christmas CD tracks. While they might be good the first few times round, after 15 years I have come to loath them. While my ITunes is full of the likes of Lamb of God and Sepultra, I firmly believe that I would detest these songs even if I wasn’t a metalhead. Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade was good the first time round. The second was enjoyable as well. But not the 80^th. People need to know that enough is enough for these songs.

To finish I just want to say that I do like Christmas, but like everything else, there’s still a big gaping hole that screams “FUCK YOU” for 12 glorious days. Hope you have a good Christmas, and enjoy whatever bits you can.

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Next time is blog number 10. Any ideas?