Suzanne Harrington: Covid-19 has killed my inner Grinch 

Finally back in face-to-face 12-step meetings, after months in the Zoom wilderness, where meetings seemed more like the intro to The Muppet Show, or, if poorly attended, The Brady Bunch — sorry, younger readers, you may have to google that one. There is a palpable excitement in the room about the time of year. Yet, it's barely December.

"I've bought my cat a Christmas present," confides one lady. We compare notes. I've got the dog a glow-in-the-dark LED collar for dark winter walks; it is now hidden amid the growing pile of goodies in the back of a cupboard. Hidden from whom? 

These days, my children are young adults, with driving licences and Deliveroo accounts, and the dog, like Melania Trump, really doesn't care. Also, it's barely December.

But Covid-19 has killed my Grinch. It seems to have killed everyone else's Grinch, too, if the fizz of festive excitement is anything to go by. Outdoor fairy lights are harder to find than loo roll was during lockdown 1.0, and people are already stockpiling chocolate coins and Lindt reindeers. Or maybe that's just me.

In the past — that is, pre-2020 — Christmas often felt like a set of hoops to jump through and logistics to be managed, especially if you were a secular single parent who resented mandated jollity; the pay-off was always the joy of small children pinging off the walls on Christmas morning. You'd have crawled through broken baubles for that.

With teens, however, Christmas meant handing over gift-wrapped lumps of tech to moody, spotty strangers, who no longer wanted to watch Home Alone or Elf, and who moaned about not being able to see their friends for a whole day, while eating everything not nailed down and complaining that there were only orange creams left in the chocolate box. Not this year. 

This year, we are dancing like chimps on Ritalin around the kitchen and to the very Christmas tunes that usually make our teeth splinter. 

The teens, no longer moody or spotty, have undergone a kind of decynicalisation during lockdown — like deradicalization, except for sarcasm instead of extremism — and are almost, but not quite, writing excited letters to Santa. We all are.

Gone is the snobbery around those eejits who put their tree up too early; evidently, we are all those eejits in 2020, vaccinating ourselves with premature Christmas cheer, because, Christ on a bike, do we need it. Even the Grinchiest Grinches have been stringing up the twinkly lights and dragging the hideous Christmas jumpers from the top of the wardrobe. 

Gift-making and menu-planning are already happening in our house, the air full of vodka fumes at nine in the morning as the older one sets up a homemade limoncello factory on the kitchen table. The younger one is in his room, in a one-click present-ordering frenzy. (At least, I hope that’s what he's doing). We are decking the halls. 

And it's barely December.