Look At Me!

There is not much these days that is not over-hyped to the point of annoyance. Even a straightforward thing like the presents, food and drink extravaganza that is Christmas has become one long advertising period where various supermarkets compete with each other over who has the most luxurious mince pies and bombard us with adverts of increasing lavishness, but – seemingly by some unwritten law - each must end with the money shot of a turkey the size of a heavily pregnant zeppelin emerging from its hanger cooker. There adverts start as soon as they have got the Halloween/bonfire night stuff out of the way around the second week in November. So by the time of Christmas almost two months later everyone is heartily sick of the whole thing and just glad it is all over…. Then the January sales adverts begin… then the holiday adverts.

Everything, and now with social media and… yes, blogs everyone, it seems is always scrabbling for our attention, look at me, look at me. I exist only when you pay attention to me.

The problem is that everything is so over-hyped that nothing can live up to its billing, the claims that are made for it. Each Christmas will be just like – more or less – the ones that precede it and the ones that follow it. If you aren’t heartily sick of watching turkeys emerging orgasmically from hot advert ovens by then, there will still be that perennial post-Christmas question, why do people have turkey and sprouts if no-one really likes them, why spend so long in a kitchen cooking something no-one really enjoys, and the kids never even touch because they are filled up on the chocolate from a multitude of selection boxes, and the adults have spent so long waiting for it they are already beginning the hangover from far too much early morning sherry?

Well, don’t ask me, because I quite like* Christmas, that is as long as we can keep the irrelevance that is religion out of it.

 

*Well, the way that we have organised ours free from religion, relatives, turkey, excessive extravagance and all else we dislike.