My Christmas non-negotiables: After Eights, Stuff the Balls and The Good Life Christmas Special | Grace Tooth
Through headlines about sky-high heating bills and daily news about restaurant closings, the Christmas juggernaut thunders, peeling its merry horn. In a land of uncertainty, here is a certain one: December and all its excesses. Let's be honest: Christmas is all about too much. Its false charm is alive in abundance, in groaning refrigerators and aching hands from carrying shopping bags. What heralds little baby Jesus more than a huge all-butter, ganache-coated Yule log that sits stale during Twixtmas, when the first pangs of overspending kick in? Usually this is when you notice that a guest has forgotten to take that assortment of £20 bath cubes you bought them at a Christmas party. You didn't want to pay for it at the time, and they forgot you gave it to them. Merry Bloody Christmas.
This year, however, I swore things would be different. “Don't buy me presents, I don't need them. I just want to see you,” I told my loved ones in October, hoping to save them from New Years debt and the planet from choking on even more plastic. I looked like the puritanical fanatic Lady Whiteadder of Blackadder: “With us Nathaniel sits on a spike… I sit on Nathaniel. Two spikes would be an extravagance! This is the danger of calling Christmas time. Nobody thanks you. And we, as a country, are far too attached to waste, to swapping sweaters too small and too rough to suffer, to hand creams that smell of fox urine and to three-jar sets of mustard from Dijon, each more abrasive and inedible than the last.
Any attempt to reduce this gift seems miserable and unrewarding, and I feel sheepish now about how we have ribbed my old grandma back in the 1990s when she told us not to buy her anything that year. She'd been through two world wars, wasn't one to splurge, waste or shop, and certainly didn't want any more lavender talcum powder; she especially hated the expensive wrapping paper just thrown in the trash. But all her frugality only provided our family with a slogan: "No presents for me!" I'll just stare at this wall and listen to Perry Como's tape! we'd boo, then buy him more chocolate covered macadamia nuts anyway.
Now it's 2022, and I'm sorry, Gran: you had a point on the an array of trifles and profiterole towers that started popping up in our home in the mid-80s to furnish family members who “just didn’t feel like Christmas pudding.” In the late 2000s, like many families, we basically had a “dessert section,” with a different pudding for each of us lined up along the Formica as a sweet assortment. Gran saw no joy in the supermarket's cut-price sticker aisle on Christmas Eve, from which the Dents brought home eight pints of spare milk and a whole wheel of wensleydale with cranberries , only to store it in the garden put back for the next week because the fridge was already full of special offer apricot stuffing.
Somewhere along the way, “ way too much" became the focal point of Christmas. And, like me this year, you might prefer the money to go somewhere useful; to a charity, for example, or a really useful but boring gift ("Merry Christmas! I paid for your annual Microsoft 365 subscription!"). , wanton extravagance of keeping the radiators on from January to April. Luxury.
Don't even get me started on those party rinks: £20 a head to skid on Moves Like Jagger on half-melted slush next to a shopping center shopping, plus an additional £7 for a 'deluxe' hot chocolate. I'm putting that aside this year, along with trips to winter wonderland with moss-spitting snow cannons and the exact same ghost houses they had in the summer, only with a few garlands around the gazebos "pay here".
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Through headlines about sky-high heating bills and daily news about restaurant closings, the Christmas juggernaut thunders, peeling its merry horn. In a land of uncertainty, here is a certain one: December and all its excesses. Let's be honest: Christmas is all about too much. Its false charm is alive in abundance, in groaning refrigerators and aching hands from carrying shopping bags. What heralds little baby Jesus more than a huge all-butter, ganache-coated Yule log that sits stale during Twixtmas, when the first pangs of overspending kick in? Usually this is when you notice that a guest has forgotten to take that assortment of £20 bath cubes you bought them at a Christmas party. You didn't want to pay for it at the time, and they forgot you gave it to them. Merry Bloody Christmas.
This year, however, I swore things would be different. “Don't buy me presents, I don't need them. I just want to see you,” I told my loved ones in October, hoping to save them from New Years debt and the planet from choking on even more plastic. I looked like the puritanical fanatic Lady Whiteadder of Blackadder: “With us Nathaniel sits on a spike… I sit on Nathaniel. Two spikes would be an extravagance! This is the danger of calling Christmas time. Nobody thanks you. And we, as a country, are far too attached to waste, to swapping sweaters too small and too rough to suffer, to hand creams that smell of fox urine and to three-jar sets of mustard from Dijon, each more abrasive and inedible than the last.
Any attempt to reduce this gift seems miserable and unrewarding, and I feel sheepish now about how we have ribbed my old grandma back in the 1990s when she told us not to buy her anything that year. She'd been through two world wars, wasn't one to splurge, waste or shop, and certainly didn't want any more lavender talcum powder; she especially hated the expensive wrapping paper just thrown in the trash. But all her frugality only provided our family with a slogan: "No presents for me!" I'll just stare at this wall and listen to Perry Como's tape! we'd boo, then buy him more chocolate covered macadamia nuts anyway.
Now it's 2022, and I'm sorry, Gran: you had a point on the an array of trifles and profiterole towers that started popping up in our home in the mid-80s to furnish family members who “just didn’t feel like Christmas pudding.” In the late 2000s, like many families, we basically had a “dessert section,” with a different pudding for each of us lined up along the Formica as a sweet assortment. Gran saw no joy in the supermarket's cut-price sticker aisle on Christmas Eve, from which the Dents brought home eight pints of spare milk and a whole wheel of wensleydale with cranberries , only to store it in the garden put back for the next week because the fridge was already full of special offer apricot stuffing.
Somewhere along the way, “ way too much" became the focal point of Christmas. And, like me this year, you might prefer the money to go somewhere useful; to a charity, for example, or a really useful but boring gift ("Merry Christmas! I paid for your annual Microsoft 365 subscription!"). , wanton extravagance of keeping the radiators on from January to April. Luxury.
Don't even get me started on those party rinks: £20 a head to skid on Moves Like Jagger on half-melted slush next to a shopping center shopping, plus an additional £7 for a 'deluxe' hot chocolate. I'm putting that aside this year, along with trips to winter wonderland with moss-spitting snow cannons and the exact same ghost houses they had in the summer, only with a few garlands around the gazebos "pay here".
< figure id="758f5dfd-c1bc-46ae-adb5-045c1a794b22" data-spacefinder-role="thumbnail" data-spacefinder-type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr -1nnthro">What's Your Reaction?
