Suzanne Harrington: We're forced to inhale Christmas like microplastics — I give up
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If a symptom of PTSD is being troubled by recurring mental images, then a fat man crossing the road with a giant turkey on his head – a joke festive one made of beige shiny fabric – has done it for me.
I can’t get it out of my head. Not just a fat man in a hideous Christmas jumper wearing a joke turkey hat in public, but the fact that it happened in November.
It's won, hasn’t it? The Christmas industrial complex. It’s won. It’s beaten us down, worn us out, so now we accept that Christmas isn’t a 48 hour thing in late December, but starts the day after Halloween. Two full months, instead of two days.
Clanging telly adverts in full swing at the start of November. Shops stocking mince pies in October. Who eats mince pies in October?
Me, that’s who. Like 1984’s Winston Smith, I have given up, given in, surrendered to the onslaught – and I don’t even like mince pies. Or Christmas.
It has become like micro-plastics; we’re inhaling it.
A posh acquaintance used to insist that the only proper time to erect a tree in one’s drawing room was Christmas Eve – anything earlier was common.
I think of them as I grimly haul a cheap tree out of a cheap supermarket on November 30, horrified at myself, yet knowing if I wait much longer all the cheap trees will sell out and I will have to pay triple for something I don’t want and don’t care about, yet feel obliged to participate in.
Like the mince pies in October, I have capitulated. Caved in. Abandoned hope.
You want us to deck the halls a month or two in advance? Go on then. Resistance has proved futile. Pass the baubles.
There’s a something vaguely desperate about this earlier and earlier start, a kind of fiddling when Rome burns.
If we wrap a bit of tinsel around our handcart as it hurtles towards hell, if we obediently spend and consume, everything will be fine… won’t it?
We’d literally rather elbow each other in the Adam’s apple in our scuffle to bag the most loot, rather than step back and ask ourselves if this whole festive circus hasn’t all got a bit, you know, too much. A bit insane, a bit mindless.
The Christmas industrial complex has Americanised the fronts of our houses – flashing Santas you can see from space – and colonised our minds. If we’re not going all out, we’re doing it wrong.
It’s intrusive and coercive, repetitive as a dripping tap, and if you don’t embrace it you’re a grinch.
Back in 1973 when Wizzard released I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Da-aay, did anyone think that 50 years on, their wish would have come true?
That for every two months out of 12, it’d be Christmas whether we liked it or not? Who voted for this?
