My Thoughts on Christmas

So another Christmas period has slunk off leaving our wallets empty and stomachs soft and bloated, our livers screaming and our brains fried from the constant tinny jingling of christmas muzak which stores seem obsessed on playing, presumably to drive us into some sort of seasonal madness which will result on us buying useless christmas crap. It seems to work, at no other time of the year do I eat figs or dates but at Christmas the house is stuffed with the bloody things. They do help me shit though which is vital. Why do stores play this interminable dirge though? I guess I can understand (in a bitter, hate filled way) why a Toy shop or a shopping centre might play Christmas music. They need people to feel christmassy to help drive sales, and maybe a few overheard bars of 'White Christmas' would spark some brain cells and bring back a childhood memory of innocent Christmas joy, and spur you on to buy your beloved little ratbaby child the 'Awesome-o-matic Death Warrior 3000 now with real projectile blood spurting'. However I've been in hardware stores which seem to delight in playing christmas music, and they should never play anything that obnoxious and ear grating when someone is considering buying an Axe or a woodchipper.

An Ax-cellent gift!...Yeah, i'm good

I'm not one of those miserablist fucks who seem to gain a self satisfied pleasure by boasting about how much they hate Christmas. These are the worst types of people and are probably the same ones who feel superior by saying that The Beatles are 'overrated' and think they're ever so clever by referring to people as 'sheeple', the tiny minded little pigfuckers that they are. However nor am I someone who dances around merrily, waving mistletoe in their hands and bursting into song every few minutes and who laughs and claps when that goddamn Coke christmas advert comes on. 'Now it's Christmas' they'll laughingly proclaim, until I smash a Pepsi bottle into their face. No it's not you drooling epitome of consumer culture. Stop being attracted to the shiny lights of marketing you pathetic demographic, I hope your teeth rot and you choke on them. God I despise the Lowest Common Denominator, even more so when I see reflections of myself in it. There's nothing worse than seeing hints of your own, miserable inferiority. Anyway, I digress…I do enjoy Christmas, but mainly just the actual day. Gifts around the tree, food and drink and pulling crackers, it's a nice day and I feel happy at the end of it. All of the huge, pressure filled build up though, that's too much for me.

Christmas in an office environment is always a strange experience. Offices are weird enough as it is, as I've mentioned in several, annoyingly similar blog posts in the past, but at Christmas it goes into overdrive. The office is soon bedecked by bedraggled looking christmas decorations, dragged out of storage in the basement where the mice have been having festive themed shits for the past 11 months. Tinsel covers my desk 'wall', lights drape across the window and streamers hang from the ceiling, where they inevitably fall down twice a day and suddenly make everything look bleak and unloved. Just before Christmas a row of desks decided to hold a little in office 'party'. They brought in those sausage rolls that are filled with pasty, tasteless reformed meat and rusk, and there was cake and doughnuts and christmas music (Oh joy!) and all the usual crap.They all put on cheerful christmas hats and reindeer antlers and had a merry little lunch break. Of course afterwards they went back to work, but they kept wearing their cheerful christmas hats and reindeer antlers because, oh gosh, it's Christmas. I have nothing against that, I've been known to enjoy a novelty hat, but it's still strangely disturbing to see a middle aged man wearing flashing reindeer antlers as he screams profanity down the phone at some hapless colleague who hasn't filed a report. It's like a Ray Winstone Christmas, before he turned into the cuddly type he is now.

Eat your fucking sprouts

If you walk around any major shopping centre (or mall if you insist on being American) at Christmas and it will usually have, pride of place in the centre, some sort of 'Santa's Grotto', where rosy cheeked children are ushered breathlessly inside to meet with a kindly and twinkly eyed Father Christmas, who with a loving hug and a good natured chuckle will ask about the child's Christmas wishes and make vague but well meaning promises, and usher the child out with a photograph and a small present. The magic and sense of wonder will fill the child with a real sense of the uniqueness of the occasion and no doubt they will sleep well that night. Of course, as ever, the reality is a horrible mockery of what should be a special occasion. The winter wonderland that has been set up in whatever gum strewn spare space they have usually looks like a nightmarish acid trip populated with bastardised rip offs from the Chucky films. As you approach the grotto (often made out like some snow strewn cottage) you'll see an army of dead eyed animatronic elves, listlessly repeating the same jerking motions back and forth, with no discernible aim. As if cursed by a terrible God they stand frozen to the spot, slowly waving their arms in an attempt to gain your attention, and they would no doubt be screaming if their tongues hadn't been ripped out by vengeful harpies. A few of them are inevitably broken and can only be assumed by the terror filled child to be dead, worked to an early grave by the terrible master that lies within. The child then waits in a queue, all the time watching nervously the nearest elf for signs of life, when suddenly some spotty and bored teenager, also done out like an elf but inexplicably twice the size of the robot ones, looms out and ushers them inside the doom cottage of snow. When inside though surely all will be well, with the kind and all loving embrace of Father Christmas.

Come and give Santa a hugsy

But it's not like that anymore. Thanks to everyone assuming that everyone else is some greasy faced paedophile and that they cannot wait to fuck their ugly little children, there is no reassuring sitting on the lap anymore, lest a thousand questing penises thrust up. The child is simply presented to the man (or 16 year old boy who pulled the short straw as is often the case) who mutters a ho, ho, ho, chucks them a badly wrapped toy of miserable cheapness and has a quick photograph taken (whilst maintaining a non-child touching distance) of the no doubt screaming child, by another teenage elf who then kicks them out to keep the money making procession continuing. The entire thing is a cheap and shitty farce and probably raises all sorts of questions as to why the fake bearded figure they peered at through the gloom seems so different to the magical, laughing and flying Father Christmas they know and love so dearly from terrible american films.

Still lying to and deceiving children is probably one of the few sick pleasures parents get from Christmas what with the inter-family fights, money burning and awkward confessions about what really happened on that camping trip with Uncle so many years ago.

Anyway, i hope you all had a nice Christmas

The more it snows, tiddly pom

As the more observant amongst you may have noticed it's been snowing a tad bit recently, in fact it's been snowing so much that the country has descended into chaos, with hordes of cannibalistic nomads roaming the artic blasted tundra to harvest the soft fleshed survivors for their blubber farms. The ground is choked with the frozen corpses of the weak and the poor and the air is filled with terror filled rumours of wolf skin wearing marauders from the Northern lands descending upon us, their battles axes wet with blood as they ride their Death Bears into battle.

This is our reality

Of course only part of this is true. The majority of people make it into work (if they bother going) with some minor annoyances (like delayed trains and icy roads) but really this isn't much of an event, not really a story, it's all terribly mundane and normal. But as I sit in my office and I prick up my handsome ears to the words of my colleagues you'd imagine some once in a lifetime disaster had occurred. I repeatedly hear them talk in hushed tones about how it took them 5 minutes to de-ice their car and at how they had to wear 2, yes 2, jumpers to stay warm. Stories which could have been summed up with, 'The train was cancelled so I got a bus which is why I'm 20 minutes late', turn into half hour epics with witless asides about their boots and a man who kept sneezing, which is regaled to a starry eyed crowd who listen, only as they are chomping at the bit to give their own counter story which is quickly embellished with additional boring facts in the endless struggle to out-do eachother, 'That's nothing, I fell over twice and walked 2 miles in the snow and saw a frozen lake and cars skidding'. It ends up as an awful version of 'The Four Yorkshireman' sketch with all the wit, delivery and timing taken out and replaced with a steadily growing urge to kill them and then yourself, possibly with an icicle for poetic reasons.


Of course some people do have genuinely exciting stories about surviving the horrific onslaught of crystallised water, sent by a vengeful and humourless God. I for one hiked 20 miles through an ice storm, my hands slowly freezing around the whale bone handles of my ice picks, my skin burning with an intense fire at the white world that surrounded me. Then suddenly out of the corner of my eye I spot teeth and claws. It was a Polar bear, 25 feet tall, it's face reddened with the blood of many orphaned children, it's claws tangled in the flesh of many Nuns. But I slayed the fearful beast with my bare (geddit!) hands and surfed his body across the ice realms to freedom and victory and office work! I also slaughtered some Eskimos and punched a wolf

I'll do anything to survive