Tis the season to be
shopping, fa la la la la, la la la la.
I fucking hate
Christmas Shopping, fa la la la la, la la la la.
To be honest, I hate all shopping, fa la la, fa la la, fa laa laa.
I'm a grumpy
middle-aged bastard, fa la la la la, la la la la.
This
is the Christmas tree in the town where I live this year
presented
without comment
My earliest memories
of going Christmas shopping involve getting the train up to London
from Guildford, going round Hamleys (which was very much like a
fantasy dream sequence from a movie at the time, all trains and
tinsel and elves and magic) and then going to watch ET at the
pictures. I'm pretty sure this memory is utterly garbled with a whole
load of others, particularly since we lived in Cranleigh when ET came
out. I was only five, so I think I'm allowed to misremember this
stuff.
Once we were safely
relocated to Devon, the Christmas tradition became a family car ride
to Barnstaple (seriously, we lived in Bideford, and if you couldn't
get it in Woolworths or Jimbos you probably couldn't get it in
Bideford) where we would all split off to buy gifts, before meeting
up outside Marks and Spencers in time to go home: where my mother
would berate me for having bought nothing but Transformers and
comics. Gifts are hard.
By the 90s, I was
taking my Christmas shopping trips to Barnstaple on the bus, without
parental assistance. This meant that my mother was unable to berate
me for spending the whole afternoon in Second Spin and coming home
with nothing other than Black Sabbath records (original first
pressing Vertigo) because she didn't know. Thus began my 90s
tradition of running round Gateways on Christmas eve and buying
everyone shit biscuits.
Come the millennium
everything changed. I don't mean the advent of online shopping, I
mean I began my future of working in jobs that are relentless all day
every day slog right up until Christmas Day itself. I was a postman
then, and on reflection it was much easier than being in the
personalised tat industry where I find myself now. The bus to
Barnstaple continued to be ridden – though in more of a rush, and
usually on a Thursday afternoon – I got an 180g Vinyl repressing of
Meet The Residents, and everybody else got biscuits from Somerfield.
Then I moved to the
middle of nowhere, the bus to Barnstaple (or anywhere really) only
went once a month, if the moon was fat and the wolves were running,
and the job in the tat industry began. Thank you internet shopping.
In all honesty, once I had moved in with my now wife, then
girlfriend, my Christmas shopping became more a matter of handing
over money since I could now inhabit an ages old male stereotype and
leave the shopping to the missus. She is still not happy about this
arrangement, I still use the job as an excuse. I can only get away on
Sunday afternoons at best. I still forget that shops open on Sundays
now. I am old.
If
you go googling for images to illustrate Christmas Shopping
all
you get is smug wankers with shiny bags like this
This
is nobody's reality
I do still have to
buy gifts for the wonderful woman who does the hard work of real
christmas shopping, so I am glad of the internet. Working long hours
at a computer screen in November/December means you can have a window
open on amazon and shop while you work. This used to be the perfect
solution. Sadly, Ebay/Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. now log everything
you have looked at, and blast it into the pop-up ads of every page
you see. I now have to cradle my laptop away from my wife for the
whole of December in case it flashes up ads for every single thing I
have idly browsed in consideration of gift buying. I think I'm
getting away with it by alternately telling her she wouldn't like the
German Scheizer porn I'm watching and that I'm looking for her
replacement on Guardian Soulmates.
When it comes to
receiving gifts, I am a relatively well off forty year old man. I
genuinely have everything I need/want except for a whole bunch of
records and books, and the only way to find out which ones I would
like would be for me to put together some kind of fucking wedding
list for you, like a total prick might. The entire point of buying
gifts is to show how well you know someone, give them a thing you
think that they will like. I don't like things, give your money to
Amnesty or chuck it in a homeless guy's coffee cup (as long as it's
not the one he's drinking out of). That's the Christmas spirit, not
some novelty plastic tat that I will rewrap and give to some other
person I want to pretend to care about next year.
I like seeing the
people I care about, I like sitting around having drinks with them, I
like Christmas movies, I will always cry like a girl watching It's
a Wonderful Life, every year.
I like family Christmas Cocktail hour (it's never just an hour) and I
like Christmas. I still hate the fucking gifts though, don't get me
any. Humbug to all of you.
Here
is my dog Sky in a Christmas hat
She
hates Christmas too
And
yes, that is The Box of Delights
on in the background
