Bah Humbug!

It's two weeks until Christmas, give or take. I could only tell this from a calendar; from my perspective, it's been Christmas since about November. There are things I enjoy about this. I enjoy ambling through the city centre and smiling up at the decorations. I enjoy making fun of the huge, rather unsettling Santa who watches over Albert Square. I enjoy carolling in the freezing cold, strangely enough. I enjoy going round the markets with friends or my partner and picking out nice gifts.

Seriously the creepiest Santa I have ever seen
Those eyes...they haunt me.

What I really don't enjoy is the pressure surrounding Christmas. There's so much pressure to make Christmas magical; to get everyone the perfect gifts, to cook the perfect traditional meal, to be a perfect happy family, and what usually ends up happening is not knowing what gifts to get, being thoroughly sick of turkey by the end of the month and sniping at each other. And alcohol. So much alcohol.

In my family, Christmas was like any other day and I chilled out on celebrating Hanukkah a long time ago, so there was far less pressure to make things perfect (indeed they often weren't; I have a rather...interesting relationship with my parents). I've come to value that; I was never one for forced jollity. Remember that a day you might consider happy and joyous might come with a great deal of sadness for someone else; I know I'll probably never be a ray of sunshine on Boxing Day (my late grandfather's birthday).

I know it's not the done thing to say you don't enjoy Christmas, and it would be horrid of me to demand that other people stop enjoying their traditions. So I'm going to blatantly sidestep this by saying that I prefer to celebrate non-traditionally.

This is the lovely, taxing handful in question. She's in the spot she loves best - the windowsill, nagging people for food.

This Christmas, I am not going to socialise with a lot of people, nor am I going to wake up early to open presents under our seriously tiny, 20cm tall plastic tree that's been there for as long as I can remember. I am going to sleep in blissfully, obnoxiously late, spend the day with my parents and cat (who counts as two or three people anyway, because she's lovely but also a handful), eat a reasonable amount of food, possibly have some wine but almost certainly not before 6pm, try not to argue with my parents too much, send my friend random pictures and chat to my boyfriend. For an introvert like me, that sounds positively magical. Just because I'm a grouch doesn't mean I can't have fun too, sometimes.

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