Caroline O'Donoghue: Three crap Christmases
I recently read Mariah Carey’s autobiography. In it, Carey reveals how horrible her childhood Christmases tended to be. How her split family would come together, and the results would be intense bickering that could sometimes lead to violence. How, as the youngest, she felt powerless to stop anything that was happening. How she really didn’t want a lot for Christmas, there was just one thing she needed, and it was not to have dinner interrupted by the police. She ends the segment with “people put too much pressure on Christmas".
All my life, I’ve been frantically queuing up on December 23rd, trying to justify a Jamie Oliver branded egg cup as a suitable present for my mother, listening to as it blasts through a department store speaker. Even the woman who soundtracks our highly pressurised Christmas believes that too much pressure is put on Christmas.
Everything might be different in 2020, but one thing is the same: people are putting too much pressure on Christmas. And why wouldn’t they? It’s a well-known phenomenon that the ailing elderly and sick often hang on for ‘one last Christmas’, then quickly fade before February ends. There has been so much misery and isolation this year that the concept of togetherness and screaming tears over a game of Articulate seems attractive. Everyone I know seems to be deconstructing their December so that Christmas Day can be perfect, isolating for weeks in strange parts of the country, or creating jerry-rigged routes of travel so that they are relying entirely on lifts and not on crowded trains. Everyone is trying their best, in short, to find an intersection in the Venn diagram where one circle is ‘Christmas’ and the other circle is ‘social responsibility’.
And the kicker?
They might still have a crap Christmas.
We all have crap Christmases. Even though we try so hard to avoid them. Even though we deserve a nice Christmas. It is a simple fact of human life that some Christmases are a bit crap, and strangely enough, they don’t kill you. They just become the Christmas you talk about most.
I’m pretty sure I wrote about this for last year’s Christmas edition of the Examiner, so I won’t go into massive detail for this re-tread.
Suffice to say, my brothers and I once kept a stray cat a secret from my parents by keeping it in the garage. This was a real feature of the 1990s: stray dogs and cats being part of the fabric of the community, like milkmen or the local pervert. It was back when neutering or spaying pets was notions.
Anyway, the cat escaped the garage on Christmas day, ate the turkey on the kitchen counter, and then sprayed tsunami levels of diarrhoea all over it.
Less offensive than 'cat shit Christmas', but had more annoying levels of admin. One year, during the many in which my dad simply forgot that my mum works in retail and hence was not available for Christmas errands, he forgot to get a turkey.
We realised this at precisely 8pm on Christmas Eve, and we were due to have a dozen people for Christmas the next day. After a few phone calls, it was discovered that my brother’s girlfriend’s father had a topside of beef in his freezer. In Tipperary.
My dad and brother got in the car, and we had a slab of beef defrosting in the bathtub by midnight. By lunchtime on Christmas day, everyone was tucking into a plate of shoe leather. The gravy, however — which had to be applied liberally to soften up the beef — was perfect.
This — my most recent crap Christmas — is my most gleaming golden anecdote, and re-told more than the birth of Jesus. Last year, my boyfriend and his family decided to do a hotel Christmas. For a change.
My boyfriend promptly got norovirus. I, actually, had a lovely time: I spent most of it in the spa, and met a wonderful girl called Gabby who I got drunk with. This is not the point of the story.
On Stephen’s Day, the hotel had promised a ‘black tie Gala dinner’, encouraging all of its 100 guests to get dressed up to the nines for ‘live entertainment’. Descending the stairs was the most elegant array of Conservative voters middle England has ever seen: 80-year-old women in floor-length red sequins, men in three-piece suits — only for the hotel to realise it had gloriously over-sold its Gala dinner. The ‘live entertainment’ was a local girl playing on her acoustic guitar.
Everything was finished by 9pm and the hotel sent most of its staff home and closed the bar. Pure rage swept the hotel like a bush fire. There is nothing quite as furious as a mob of under-entertained Tories. A gang of them — and I really do mean gang — cornered the Hungarian night manager, demanding he provide some kind of entertainment.
The night manager, who had already formed a relationship with my boyfriend and his brother, Ash, based on the fact that they were the only other young-ish men at the hotel, begged them for help. “Do you have an AUX cable?” Ash asked. “We can put Spotify on the speakers?” The night manager found a cable and gave his phone to Ash. Ash opened the phone to find that there was no Spotify, but there was the Youtube app. He plugged in the app to the speakers, and the last video that was played started belching out into the room.
The video was called: 3 hours of farting.
I’m really not making this up. A compilation video of fart sounds played over the speakers, to the confusion and fury of the guests.
It was quickly changed to , and some resentful dancing occurred until everyone went to bed.
