Suzanne Harrington: Jumping through the Christmas hoops!
It’s Christmas Week! What fun! And so relaxing! Just a few more hoops to jump through before you can pop on your ironic Christmas jumper and mix yourself a congratulatory cocktail, unless you’re an alcoholic, in which case have a 0.0% beer. Yay! Nearly there! And if you keep adding exclamation marks to everything, then it makes it all seem fun, right? Er, right!
Anyway, hoops! Flump yourself through them like an arthritic seal, eyes on the prize of the raw fish that will be another fun Christmas with the fam. Great that you decided to leave so much to the last minute – not like those people who get everything done by mid-November. Psychopaths. Kidding!
No, you’re just a bit more – what’s another word for haphazard – spontaneous! All you need to do is the food and presents – too late now for online, but at least you’ll get to hear all your favourite Christmas songs in the busy, busy shops. Over and over and over, at high volume. So festive!
And great idea deciding to fill your own crackers. It’s all those fiddly little details that make Christmas so special – trying to find items small enough to poke through the hole in the cracker alongside the jokes and the paper hats, like shoving toothpaste back in the tube, while catering for a range of ages and tastes. Condoms? Could always tell your partner’s small kids they’re balloons. Folded strips of Prozac? They’d definitely fit.
Nearly there! All that’s left is the menu planning, the food shopping, the food prep, the main present buying, the lesser present buying, the wrapping, the post office queue to send stuff that will never arrive because Brexit, the stocking fillers, the dogs’ stocking fillers (of course they get a stocking – they’d phone Dogs Trust if they didn’t), and some other things you can’t remember and should probably have written down.
Oh, and Christmas cards! How Christmassy! Actual cards made of paper and written on in actual handwriting, with postage stamps that cost more than hiring a crack squadron of carrier pigeons. Another trip to the post office, where you will stand behind someone sending garden furniture to Latvia, but hey, it’s peace and goodwill to all men, right? Right!
Come on now. Stay in the zone! You’re surrounded by people shouting five more sleeps to Christmaaaaaas even when there are no children within earshot – don’t get all Grinchy, whatever you do. This is fun! Fun, fun, fun!
Oooops - the tree! Are there any left anywhere? Quick, wrestle the last one in Northern Europe into the car – stumpy and shedding, and costing more than the car itself – get it home, prop it up, and fling crap on it. Lovely! All done. You can sit down now, maybe crack open that fake beer. But there’s something else. A nagging suspicion of further hoops. Curse you, menopause, for hiding stuff down the back of the brain sofa.
Oh yes. Three work deadlines and a Covid booster.
Fa-la-la-la-laaaaaaaaaaa.
