Christmas brings out the naff in all of us. Shane Hegarty celebrates tinsel, TV comedy specials and toilet-roll angels on top of the tree.
Christmas - a time for peace and goodwill to all mankind, nice slacks for the man, holly hairclips for the lady and a reindeer babygrow for the child. It's a time to deck the halls with boughs of holly. And while you're at it, why not throw in a forest of gold-painted twigs and three miles of tinsel.
Christmas brings out the naff in all of us. It teases out the tastelessness and releases the kitsch. You can try and have a tasteful Christmas. You can buy your decorations in Harvey Nichols and matching place settings in Meadows & Byrne. You can colour-code the lights and insist on only Brown Thomas crackers, but it will fool no one. You crossed the line when you put a giant tree in the living room and threw a toilet-roll angel on top.
Christmas is the time of year that reaches into our sentimental soul and drags out the patterned-jumper wearer lurking in there. When else would you prop a crepe-paper hat on your head and be wowed by a free toenail clipper that's fallen from a cracker? You mightn't think of putting anything other than Baby Gap on your child for 11 months of the year, but come Christmas and he's wheeled down to the Christmas Day swim in an elf hat, with tinsel trailing from his buggy.
What makes it such a special time of year is that it liberates us from the stress of trying to live a life straight out of a Habitat catalogue. There's no need to be cool or refined; minimalism gets drowned and neutral colours swamped, and instead, we get to revel in wanton gaudiness and unapologetic naffness. There's a reason why they put bad jokes in the crackers, and it's not because they can't think of better ones.
Every year, the style experts like to tell us "this Christmas, tinsel is back!". It was away? Maybe in the clean-lined apartments where they do their fashion shoots, but not in real houses. There's still nothing better than choking a tree in tinsel, or adding 7kg of baubles to it until its branches droop with exhaustion. From the beginning of December, estates and streets have started to glow. Anyone who puts up decorations before this is seen as a bit odd, because there is only a narrow window during which the trappings of Christmas are allowed trample the previously delicate aesthetic of modern interior design. We also like nothing more than to sneer at the people up the road who have lit up their house like a landing site for aliens, before we go home to our own beautifully decorated homes and switch on enough lights to drain the national grid of a small country.
After which we pop in the Christmas CD. It's the one time of the year when everyone from ravers and moshers to rap fans and indie kids will get misty-eyed over music they know was recorded by a crooner standing at a fireplace with a pipe in his hand. The first hearing of Fairytale of New York has become the new benchmark for the arrival of Christmas, but that song is rare in its bleak sentiment and general lack of sleigh bells and children's choirs. David Bowie singing Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby remains the epitome of what Christmas does to a person's musical judgment. Would Bowie - only a short time after his sexually ambiguous Ziggy Stardust phase - have joined Bing in a duet to celebrate the wonders of Easter? Not on your rum pum pum pum.
That duet has also offered one of those particularly seasonal television moments, when celebrity and sentiment meet head on. We demand that Christmas TV be satisfactorily cloying, just as we would refuse to leave the house without watching at least the last 10 minutes of It's a Wonderful Life and promising that next year we'll finally watch the whole thing.
In a season of excess, Christmas TV is just something else to gorge on. Comedies seem particularly ripe for the Christmas special, and usually go for an hour-long episode that reminds you of why they usually just keep it to 30 minutes. Watch The Vicar of Dibley Christmas Special in May and it doesn't seem half as funny as it wasn't in the first place anyway. Celebrity versions of quiz shows are also popular, even if they usually feature reassuringly anodyne personalities. The odds of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty doing this year's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are probably less than those of a white Christmas in Dubai.
You can bet that even that couple, though, buy each other naff presents. A hot water bottle holder for Kate; a nice bonsai set for Pete. Unlike a birthday, which makes you focus on buying a specific gift to match a personality, having to buy lots of things for lots of people guarantees an interesting pick 'n' mix of predictable and off-the-wall.
Novelty wine items are good for the parents; a Lynx gift set the obvious choice for the teenage brother. Something from the Gadget Store always gets the family talking. Oh great, a heated steering wheel cover! Golfers seem to attract particularly naff presents, because of the assumption that every Sunday hacker wants a "ball and tee" set or club head cover shaped like a giraffe. It has become somewhat of a cliche for dads everywhere to get socks, but they do get them, every year without fail. It is to the credit of emotionally repressed Irish men of a certain age that they have managed to look both surprised and delighted at this for over three decades.
Meanwhile, buying a single present for an entire family has always proved problematic, which is why if they ever do a large-scale survey of the nation's attics, they'll find at least 60 per cent of space is given over to unplayed board games.
By the start of January, the naffness will be over and we'll have all come to our senses. The tree will suddenly look anachronistic, the decorations a bit unrefined. The USA biscuits will have been munched and the crackers cracked. It'll be time to strip back the tinsel and once again step into the catalogue world. But until then, have yourself a cliched little Christmas and a naff New Year.
