Terry Prone: Raise a glass (and maybe a tasty turkey sandwich) to slobs on St Stephen's Day 

On the second day of Christmas, every family in Ireland replaces the elf on the shelf with the slouch on the couch

The slob settles the smallies down to watch ‘The Muppets Christmas Carol’, oblivious to how terrifying one sequence is — because of course the slob has always slept through the second half of the movie.

Raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, for a toast. To the slobs of the world. Every family has one or more of them. It’s not generally known, but today is their day.

St Stephen’s Day is when they sit on the couch like they were superglued to it, the nearest thing to exercise demanded of them the lifting of their feet — straight-legged — off the floor to let the hoover go underneath. Uncomplaining, they are, planted, eyes glued to sport on the television, unbothered by the hoover noise.

Deserve a bit of R&R, they do. Sure didn’t they come through like heroes yesterday? 

Who else would have had a Phillips screwdriver available to assemble the red plastic walkie-talkie for the six-year-old?

Who else would have gone out to Spar to get batteries and made no issue about the journey, although they could, in fairness, have pointed out that Aunty Marie, if she had the brains she was born with, could’ve worked out that the walkie-talkies were going to require some kind of power.

Not that the slob who went for the batteries would ever say that out loud.

No prizes, but can you spot the slob in this picture? Yes, that's him on the couch, remote control in hand, as the prosecco and leftovers begin to appear on St Stephen's Day. File picture: iStock

Slobs are expert at not drawing trouble on themselves. On Christmas Day, the slob sits the younger ones down in front of The Muppet Christmas Carol, not warning anyone about how nightmare-inducing is the final ghost-without-a-face, partly because of not drawing trouble on themselves and partly because they have always slept through that section of the movie at Christmas so they don’t actually know about the scary bit.

The slob knows that getting through Christmas Day requires offers to help, those offers cunningly disguised as rhetorical questions: “D’you need a hand?” The answer, of course, is “yes” but the person who doesn’t answer in the affirmative stays quiet because they are too damn busy to be dealing with offers that aren’t offers.

You will note, by the way, that the put-upon person and the slob are gender interchangeable.

It was not so in the past, children.

In the past, it was The Mother of the family who was put upon, while the father sat on his ar- — well, never mind, children, Christmas is not a time for rude words. Do not miss, however, the capital letters: The Mother.

The gender of the put-upon and the slob are interchangeable. But someone in this delightful festive scene will end up asking 'd'you need a hand?' without meaning it. Picture: Jupiter/PA

The Mother always earned those capital letters by undertaking the tasks everybody else thought were a complete waste of time, starting with consequential Christmas cards. 

Christmas cards have to have consequences. Recipients must be smote by the generosity of the sender, manifest in the message on the back of the card indicating that its purchase contributed to a charity. 

They must be smote, also, by realising they haven’t sent a card to the sender, which is why the sender posts the card good and early, so it can smite in a timely manner, causing the unfortunate to rush out and get a return card when there’s nothing in the shops other than mangy robins.

When you’re down to robins unconnected to a charity, you are, to mix an avian metaphor, goosed.

Those forced to buy a manky old card at the last minute (generally a snap of a robin with no known connection to any charity) have been wrong-footed by the card-aware among us. Picture: iStock

Even that isn’t enough for the put-upon one in the family. Nope. The put-upon one has to display the incoming cards in an aesthetic unique to each household. The ones who hang them sideways off a red flock ribbon look down on the ones who just stick them standing on the mantelpiece.

Of course, the ones who put them on the mantelpiece, unadorned and unsecured, are slobs who don’t care that they fall off every time someone opens the door and that the new puppy chews them, ingesting enough glitter to make it throw up but not enough to cause a vet visit. (The slob in the house is good at reassuring worried relatives. The slob has always seen worse and survived it.)

Slobs don’t even stir themselves conversationally on Christmas Day. They’ll do the “C’min, c’min” thing at the front door and they might even rise to “well, look at you!” when a coat, removed from a child, reveals a sparkly Rudolf dress but, after that, it’s “what are you having?” with the occasional “fair dues”, the latter serving as extravagant praise for the culinary skills of the put-upon one. Accompanied, of course, by a gleck. You know a gleck?

Santy is barely finished his night's work delivering presents, bless him, but our slob is already flicking through the channels while tucking into a turkey/ham/whatever sandwich. Picture: iStock

Yes, you do. 

It’s that head tilt/half wink characteristic of conspiratorial appreciation patented by slobs. The gleck implies, without supportive evidence, that we’re all in this together, even though the height of the slob’s commitedness was being dragged to Smyths Toys to carry the box containing a pink-white carriage pulled by a unicorn with platinum hair and colour co-ordinated tail (the unicorn, not the slob).

The slob knows that a good gleck is the safe way to go when opinions are called for.

Say that you’ve had it up to here with bloody unicorns and you’re in trouble. Say that it seems a little costly, and you’re in worse trouble. Say that this thing has an engine that is going to scare the hell out of the new puppy and you’re done for. The slob job description demands parts assembly, not judgement.

Get the thing to work and break up the packaging.

If you’re an outstanding slob, as opposed to being just an average slob, someone else, doing that long-suffering sigh with eyes closed, will do the assembly and all you’ll have to do is get the box bits into the re-cycling bin. 

It’s a Yule Rule: The put-upon person asks the view of the slob only as a catalyst for the expression of their own opinions which reinforce the incredible wisdom of their original action. 

The other thing the slob can do well at Christmas is lift the injured.

Unlike the St Stephen's Day tradition of hunting the wren (like these North Cork wran boys in the 1960s) the slob does nothing of merit and does nothing to disguise it. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive

Let’s say someone who doesn’t think things through gives a six-year-old a rubber sausage dog which can be stretched to infinity and beyond. 

Let’s say somebody (possibly even the slob) holds the kid to give them purchase while another relative (fill in the blank yourself) does the same with a kid at the rubber canine’s other end and at a signal, the stretching begins. Within seconds, the inevitable happens. 

One side loses its grip and the over-extended rubber animal recoils like a rocket launcher, smacking the first child in the face and causing the paediatric nose-bleed without which no Christmas is complete. 

In that situation, the slob’s task is to lift the haemorrhaging toddler and hand it to a put-upon person. Minimal participation, maximal payoff.

The day after Christmas Day, for the put-upon, is tidy-up day. For the slob, though, it’s a day where leftovers in aluminium foil crowd the fridge, ready to be crafted into sangers at the drop of an appetite. It’s a day when — with luck — others can be persuaded to make and deliver a sandwich with the slob simply specifying the amount of stuffing to be included.

So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the slobs of Ireland. On this, their special day...