Be festive … or the reindeer gets it

By now, you must have real­ised that I’m not the greatest fan of the fest­ive sea­son. Pos­sibly less appar­ent, how­ever, is that I remain open to being con­vinced oth­er­wise. Hon­estly, I’m not such a bit­ter and twis­ted cynic as you’d think.

From the moment I first read the famil­iar story, I’ve been a fan of Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Carol. I never tire of watch­ing the huge num­ber of film adapt­a­tions, because secretly I would rather like to exper­i­ence Scrooge’s fairytale moment: to wake up on the morn­ing of Decem­ber 25 with a new out­look, a sud­den and spir­ited appre­ci­ation of what the whole Christ­mas thing is all about (although, of course, if I were to throw open my win­dow and sum­mon a young Vic­torian urchin to go to the nearest shop and buy the biggest goose on offer, he would quite rightly tell me to piss off and do it myself).

It seems, how­ever, that Other People aren’t going to change my mind.

Much against my bet­ter judge­ment, I ven­tured out of my warm flat this morn­ing to browse round the local shops. It was only when I was greeted by the manic, bust­ling throng of people that I remembered the date: the last week­end before Christ­mas. Not the best time to avoid crowds, then. Yet I was still will­ing to be con­vinced about the joy­ous fest­iv­it­ies of the, er, fest­ive sea­son, so I observed my fel­low shop­pers rush­ing from store to store, loaded down with bags and lists. Go on, show me what I’m miss­ing. Sell the whole Christ­mas exper­i­ence to me. Go on.

But they couldn’t, because the expres­sions on their faces told a very dif­fer­ent story. Every­one seemed to look either miser­able, tired or stressed — and in some cases, all three. Like they would rather be any­where else than out in the bit­ing cold doing their Christ­mas shop­ping, in fact.

At least that was one thing on which we could agree. So I turned round and quickly made my way home. It had taken only a few minutes’ expos­ure to the pre-Christmas rush for me to once again yearn for peace and solitude. I couldn’t wait to close the door on the fren­etic fest­ive mad­ness tak­ing place outside.

Maybe next year I’ll under­stand why. Maybe.