Christmas Cheer? Not here.

Christmas has come around again. I thought I’d start by writing that since, with so few adverts about it on TV every year, you could miss it. Oh wait a second of course you can’t. Christmas comes out of its hibernation about mid-November and punches you, and everyone around you square in the face. It then precedes to jump on top of you, pin you down, and torture you until all you can think about is how many days are left of Christmas and what to buy for that old Aunty you’ve never actually had a full conversation too. It’s at that point the battle is lost.

The other day I was thinking about how much I don’t like Christmas – what’s the comparison? Well, I think I’ve worked it out: it’s like mixing the entirety of the BNP with every Tottenham Hotspurs fan in the country – then you’re about half way to the amount of hatred.

Bah Humbug, and all the rest of it, I know what you’re thinking: “but it’s Christmas, you just need to get into the spirit of it”. The only days when I get into the spirit of it at all is between Christmas Eve to the end of Boxing Day. That’s it. Every other day and I’m not interested, at all. If it’s not on the TV it’s in music, if it’s not in music it’s in the shops (every shop) and if it’s not in the shops it’s covering the Internet, interrupting you from doing anything normally – in fact, wordpress.com has snow falling from the top of the page as part of this festive season. It’s not cute, it’s not intelligent, it’s just annoying.

I think I’ve managed to get around all of it this year. I’ve steered clear of the shops as much as possible and haven’t actually been Christmas shopping outside of my lounge this year. Yes, thanks to the miracle of the Internet I miss the furious, enraging shopping centres, filled to the brim and never shutting.

Prams seem to come out in force at Christmas. Throughout the year there’s an annoying pram every now and then, but nothing on the scale of Christmas. Walking through an average shop is like dodging land mines on the Gaza strip – impossible. You can never safely get through a shop with Christmas Shoppers with prams.

But it’s not just prams that cause hassle when out shopping for Christmas, it’s the shoppers themselves. For some reason on every other day of the year shops are filled with ‘normal’ people. Not psychopaths desperate to find and get the one thing that they need from a shop, at all costs and with no respect for anyone around them. Most of them don’t even have the spatial awareness to realise anyone is around them, but what a lovely time Christmas is….

This year the tension in the shops and the pure anger from the average shopper or Christmas attendee has been heightened thanks to the thereat of an arctic blizzard. By insinuating that there’s going to be a brand new Siberia just outside of your door and that the traffic on every single road will cause accidents and every road will be slower than walking, the media has scared us so much that those who do make it out are instantly angry.

They’re angry at the 15 hour drive to the shops or the fact that the snow has caused everyone to drive badly, or my personal favourite, that the council has failed them by not gritting the roads. I cannot wait for this all to be over.

I’ll concede, once you get out of the shops and once you return home to a warm house, with a few customary beers with the family it gets a lot better. I like that side of Christmas, the bit where it’s all eating and drinking and watching the Christmas specials – that’s always nice. But everything leading up to that makes me want to rip my eyes from their sockets and blend them into an edible smoothie.