December 1st (A.K.A. I'm doing an Advent Calendar)

So THIS is Christmas…

And what have you done!

You will probably recognise these as the first two lines from John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Festive hit, ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’. What a classic.

(Interesting fact about this song, at the beginning you hear John and Yoko whisper Merry Christmas to their children from previous marriages, Yoko Whispers ‘Merry Christmas Kyoko’ and John follows by whispering ‘Merry Christmas Julian’. Most people believe that they say Merry Christmas to each other… erroneously mishearing the words as ‘Merry Christmas Yoko’, Merry Christmas John’. Idiots)

When I read the lines ‘So this is Christmas, and what have you done’ I do not immediately think of John and Yoko’s festive hit. No, I always imagine an exacerbated mother awoken at 5:17 in the morning on Christmas day by sounds downstairs. Forgetting the date she immediately assumes its intruders so tries to wake her husband. He grunts and rolls over and immediately starts snoring, she is beginning to wish she had kissed Paul from accounts at the work ‘non-denominational mid-winter festive gathering’ the week before, of course she would have regretted it over time but she hasn’t had any excitement from Gary for a few years now and perhaps snogging another man would have led to more passion at home… or a divorce. Thinking about the ‘non-denominational mid-winter festive gathering’, or NDMWFG if you will, reminds her that this is no ordinary day.

It is Christmas day.

She wonders for a moment how she had let that slip her mind during her first 30 seconds of consciousness but solves this mystery immediately by looking at the clock and realising that at this point she has had less than 4 hours sleep. Of course her mother had insisted on her going to midnight mass the night before, “It is my first Christmas without your dad” her mother had stated with an enormous sense of self-pity, she did consider mentioning to her mother that her father had never actually attended midnight mass with her whilst he’d been alive but she found herself, as always, too tired to argue. So she had gone to midnight mass with her mother. When she had returned, Gary had not managed to get the boys to bed yet, opting instead to allow the 6 and 8 year olds to stay up watching Die Hard. After an hour spent putting Trey and Kyle to bed whilst shouting at the elder for screaming “yippie kay yay mother fucker’ at the top of his lungs repeatedly, she found herself finally going to bed at 1:23. So now, 3 hours and 54 minutes later she realises firstly that the noise downstairs is probably Trey and Kyle already up, and secondly that she has 12 members of assorted family, from both sides, arriving later in the day, she decides to make her way downstairs. As she opens the door to the living room she is already thinking about the fact she is about to spend a day cooking for 16, clearing up wrapping paper, putting together toys, untwiddling toys from their boxes, comforting crying children whose new toys have already broken, missing the ‘call the midwife’ special that she’d hoped to see and making idle chit-chat with her step-father-in-law who is, let’s face it, a bit racist. She will need to do all these things having had only 4 hours sleep the night before, after a long, exhausting December buying, wrapping and distributing presents for what seems to be an infinite amount of family and friends. Why does she even need to buy a present for her uni friend Barbara’s daughter Kim? She has only met her once and Kim was only 4 months old! She walks into the living room to see Trey amongst a sea of already unwrapped presents, chocolate all round his face, disappointedly looking at two Transform-a-kill trains he’d insisted he’d wanted in November but that he ‘doesn’t really care for’ as of the 23^rd of December. It is at this point she frustradedly says to herself “So THIS is Christmas”, she then turns to see Kyle emerge from a smoke filled kitchen covered in, what she hopes is, cranberry sauce and she screams “AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!”

I imagine many of you think the same.

When I awoke this morning, on the 1^st of December I thought “So this IS Christmas!”

It’s not though is it? If we are being technical it is only Christmas on the 25^th of December. But Christmas does seem, as an epoch, to last much longer. For instance I put a Christmas tree up on the 25^th of November and you can scoff at that if you like if you are prone to scoffing.

SCOFF

But I simply do not care. My room looks nicer and any scoffing you do won’t have any more effect on me than the fact I have had to change the position of my laundry bin because of the Christmas tree. I am sure that after a while muscle memory can be changed and I will stop throwing pants at my Christmas tree at the end of each day.

So if this ISN’T technically Christmas? What is it?

I will tell you what it is. It is Advent.

And what better way to count down to the day on which we celebrate the birth of Jesus than by me writing things daily that are, in some way, tenuously related.

Let’s see if I make it!

Happy December 1^st