Terry Prone: Indulging insanity for the sake of Christmas traditions
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Words such as "brat" may be more popular, in fairness, but I yield to nobody in selecting, as the most boring words in the dictionary, these two: Government formation.
The minute you hear a radio presenter use them, the very second you read them in a headline, despair hits.
Boring doesn’t begin to describe a politician not directly involved in the negotiations, earnestly describing the three layers of topics to be addressed in the government formation chat.
Why the hell do we in media spend such time and space and attention to this dross? And what kind of pathetic earnestness makes otherwise sensible hacks anxiously ask the uninvolved politician how long it’s going to take?
It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We’re doing grand with the interim Government, except for the challenge the concept poses for the broadcasters who can’t pronounce it. Some of the highest-profile microphone wielders announce it as “interm”. Which it SO isn’t.
Producers and editors are earnest by nature. Dutiful. Public-spirited. They are possessed of a conviction that they must educate the public, who, left ignorant, would go to hell in a hand basket.
Hence the government formation items that will relentlessly run up to and beyond Christmas Day. Although “run” might be euphemistic. Those items will do a slow march in diving boots while the rest of us concentrate on the domestic equivalent of government formation: Maintaining Christmas traditions.
Maintaining Christmas traditions requires, inter alia, creating desserts such as plum pudding which we know to be health hazards, while wasting good brandy in order to create blue flames which are neither here nor there.
When I asked a friend why she was bothering making six puddings, she shrugged. “It’s just,” she said helplessly and inconclusively. It’s just that her mother did it and she feels she’d be abandoning a precious aspect of family tradition if she didn’t follow through for the current generation.
She seemed to believe that the grandchildren would develop a reverence for uneaten Christmas pudding through osmosis. As if a pudding with a heart attack threat in every bite came with its own halo, somehow.
It’s the same with iced Christmas cakes. Thousands of women up and down this country have spent several weeks creating Christmas cakes which, pretty soon, will be covered in marzipan and hardened sugar.
Many of those women will have insisted — in order to keep a hand on the banisters of the tradition — that they make their own icing, rather than buy pre-made, even though precious few humans could tell the difference once it’s on the cake.
Nobody is ever going to compete to get the first slice of Christmas cake any more than they’re going to fight each other, elbows out, for the first of the Brussels sprouts.
It just doesn’t happen. Yet, in the name of tradition, women every year commit themselves to creating a perfect thing very few people want. It is as if they believe the labour itself was a kind of sacrament, an open and visible sign of their determination to stand by family traditions.
The thing is that technology has done away with some of those traditions — and fair weather after them.
Take the tree lights. My every recollection of my childhood Christmases is tainted by the memory of my father painstakingly going bulb by bulb through a string of lights to identify the one that had mutinied.
In the perverse nature of things, the mutineer was always the last or second last in the string. This was just to spite him and to see how long he could go without swearing, which drew my mother on him because of another widespread tradition.
This is the belief that adults mustn’t swear in front of the children, despite the fact that the children are fluent in swear and could outdo any adult if push came to profanity.
That miserable bulb-checking tradition has died. These days, bulbs don’t mutiny, and tree lights are so cheap you could toss them if you got a dud string.
Some of the traditions most loved by children today aren’t local traditions at all. Candy canes have no history in Ireland, yet seven-year-olds now insist that they be included in the decorations.
But then some of the adult traditions aren’t of long-standing either. I’ve been told by three separate real-tree-lovers that the thing to do the moment you get your tree set up in the red bucket filled with water is to make with the aspirin and hairspray.
The aspirin goes in the bucket like hangover prevention for the tree, and the hairspray is distributed all over before ornaments go on — in order to keep the needles attached to the branches.
The terrible thing is that even when the actions that become traditions were a) hated and b) now redundant, a little part of us kind of misses them. Like grating lard for the Christmas pudding, one of the tasks traditionally shared by younger family members whether or not they volunteered.
You ended up grating half your hand into the mix, with your father making unfunny jokes about your blood adding to the protein levels of the pud.
The other factor making Christmas much easier than it was in the past are the banks of gift tokens and money cards in every major supermarket, and also in every post office, allowing you to give everything from book tokens to a weekend in a hotel without having to do a tour of retail outlets.
The cards also cover cash, which raises the game above crumply bank notes — although crumply bank notes are not to be sneezed at.
Nobody has any problem receiving one of these little envelopes, unless it is accompanied by the traditional insult.
That’s where the giver does an elaborate shrug and asks aloud: “Sure what do you give the person who has everything?”
The question actually covers the fact that the giver couldn’t be bothered to do a bit of research to identify the one book that would make all the difference to the recipient, or the brand they really love, or the investment — whether in a gym or learning to drive — that might change their life.
The giver decided they were too difficult and not worth troubling a little self-indulgent head over, and so they went the voucher route.
No problem with that, but you don’t need to insult the recipient by implying they are spoiled rotten and pose a problem to every gift-giver.
Nobody can stop you thinking that, but pretty please with holly on top, don’t say it. Just don’t.