Janet Christie's Mum's the Word - Christmas comes early

Hot on the heels of Halloween comes ho ho ho

Mum's the Word. Pic: Adobe

I’m nailing my santa hat to the ‘too soon!’ nail this year.

By my reckoning we’re already four weeks into “Christmas”, that’s if you ignore the emails that started around Festival time back in August (I did) and already I’ve got festivities fatigue.

Round my way the lights started blinking in bushes the day after Halloween and yes they’re pretty, but I’d rather gaze at the stars on a crisp winter night and watch the ice crystals forming on the pavements than be dazzled by way too previous garish blue lights hanging off any available shrubbery. I’m just not ready.

I can’t help feeling manipulated by the early onset as my inbox fills with deals and scams designed to part us from our cash in the depths of a cost of living crisis, this bid by struggling retailers to extend the shopping window. Trigger the panic shopping now and we’ll help fill the hole in their profit stocking as we slide further into debt.

And so the adverts begin, images of Christmas trees and bad knitwear, faux heartwarming messages, groaning tables of beige buffets and the whiff of manipulation from the annual aspirational insult of high-end fashion brands whose clothes no-one can afford peddling a few crumbs from the designer table - no you can’t afford Prada or Yves Saint Laurent clothing collection and jump on a speedboat, lose five stone and dance around the Eiffel Tower in tin foil but you can maybe stretch to a bottle of perfume, ok eau de cologne. Sob.

I’m moaning about this to my online exercise buddies first thing when Dundee Man appears onscreen in the background behind Dundee Woman making his breakfast and reiterates his solution - make it like the Olympics, once every four years in the country who wins the bid and anyone who wants to squeeze into wear-it-once Christmas jumper can go there and celebrate and leave everyone else in peace (to all men, women and non-binaries).

He might be onto something. “Yes, if there was a referendum I’m sure people would vote for that,” I say. “But then if there was a referendum on hanging, people would vote for that too.”

“Oh no,” he says, “they can’t have both. It’s one or the other, hanging or swerve Christmas”.

And we laugh in a bleak mid-winter way. Maybe it is time to lighten up and string up the fairy lights after all.

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