Hardly the most wonderful time of the year

Reece Goodall tells us why he doesn’t like Christmas…

Christmas is, as the song goes, the most wonderful time of the year, and who can fail to be excited when the festive season rolls in? Well, me, for one – I don’t like Christmas!

Call me a Grinch, Scrooge, or whatever, but I don’t see a massive amount of joy to be found in this holiday. A lot of this is my mother’s fault – in our house Christmas starts in August. By the time it’s December, I’ve already been subjected to an unending plethora of crappy Christmas films and can practically take no more – her idea of a quality film is any old shit with a bit of tinsel in it, like Single Santa Seeks Mrs Claus. The lesson here is to start celebrating at a sensible time, or you’ll be fed up long before
Christmas.

Presents are another thing I can do without. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford everything I need, so I don’t want anything. Even so, I receive tons of gifts that I’ll never use, simply because “you have to have something to open”. Now I feel ungrateful for not having enjoyed receiving something I’d neither wanted nor needed.

This is a holiday that truly brings out the worst in people, but it seems okay because ‘it’s Christmas!’…

I’d rather this, though, in comparison to the greed you witness at this time of year – I can’t go out shopping in December for fear I’ll go to punch some whiny little toerag demanding some crappy toy they’ll break straight away and never touch again. The moral of A Christmas Carol is meant to be that giving is good, but I prefer the alternative reading that people only started giving a toss about Scrooge once he started buying them stuff – it’s shallow, really.

This is a holiday that truly brings out the worst in people, but it seems okay because ‘it’s Christmas!’ It’s basically a massive celebration of excess, and excess is in no way good. You spend a day being greedy, gorging yourself on more than enough food and spending so much money on waste. I mean, look at some of the stuff you buy – take tinsel. What is tinsel? If you hung that around your house any other day of the year, you’d be mad, especially if it’s still attached to the dead fern you’ve erected in your living room. Don’t even get me started on what goes on outside the house – the only good thing about sticking lights outside your house is that people know to avoid it.

While this rant offers only a slice of what is wrong with Christmas, there are a few simple messages to take from this. Don’t celebrate months in advance. Don’t go stupidly excessive. Don’t be so wasteful. At the end of the day, Christmas is just another day of the year, and is it so much to ask that people deal with it a bit more proportionally? Maybe I’m being a curmudgeon, or maybe everyone else can’t see the wood for the Christmas trees.