The old 'Christmas gets earlier and earlier every year' adage just doesn't ring true any more, writes DONALD CLARKE
CHRISTMAS COMES later and later every year, does it not? We’re more than halfway through November and I have yet to hear Noddy Holder hollering in my ear hole.
Television commercials featuring drunken uncles in paper hats still appear oddly thin on the ground. You can get down Grafton Street without recourse to flame throwers.
This is not how it used to be. Only a few short years ago, we could count on the odd preliminary Yuletide flourish in mid-October.
Newspapers would begin printing panicky fillers about this year’s must-have toy.
Awful autobiographies of formerly alcoholic comedians advanced on bookshops in clotted heaps. Halloween marked the border between preliminary skirmishes and the full advance of the holiday artillery. ’Twas then very much the season to be jolly.
It all seems that bit quieter now. Why, it’s almost as if Christmas is still a month away. Is this because shops and services have finally gained a proper grasp of the calendar? Have they responded to the perennial gripes from disgruntled citizens? Yeah, right. That’s what it is.
If history has taught us anything it is that sensitivity and good taste oil the wheels of capitalism. That’s why fast food is so nutritious and Saturday night television teems with documentaries on French symbolist poetry. The great selling machine has gained a conscience.
Not really. Several lacklustre Christmas seasons have convinced merchants that there is little profit in launching overly elaborate marketing campaigns at obscenely early points in the year.
We don’t want to spoil things for the children, but the Megaflog Corporation actually has to pay that hitherto out-of-work actor to wear a red suit and make with the merry. The television companies don’t give out advertising space for free.
Now, you could argue that the relatively sluggish rollout of contemporary Christmases is one of the unexpected bonuses of the recession. After all, it’s not as if anybody over the age of eight actually enjoys the ghastly season.
For most of the year there is no compulsion to make any contact with your repulsive relatives or to behave warmly towards your tedious friends. All that ends in December.
Suddenly the urban gentleperson, otherwise left in blissful isolation, finds himself or herself compelled to shake unwanted hands and generate unconvincing enthusiasm for ancient anecdotes. Why can’t the Cratchits mind their own business? Stuff their bleeding goose.
There are things to dislike about summer – being forced to go outside, excessive exposure to sport, cinemas clogged with films about giant robots. That season though does still allow the law- abiding citizen a degree of privacy.
The warm months roll by without any pressure being applied to share Twiglets with Caroline (or is it Catherine?) in human resources.
So, should we all rejoice that after a century of steady advance towards blameless autumn, the invading Christmas forces have finally being repelled? The recession is, perhaps, like Stalingrad.
Okay, a great deal of suffering has taken place, but the tide has been turned. Give it another few years and we’ll actually be allowed to go to work on December 25th. We may never have to see dropsied Auntie Maureen ever again.
And yet – there is a downside to the retreat. If this continues we are in serious danger of losing the true meaning of Christmas. The more the season contracts around late December, the more we have to hear this mad myth concerning that Middle-Eastern baby and his implausibly virginal mother. Christians have been trying to colonise Christmas for more than 2,000 years. This will only encourage them.
For centuries, druids had, come Yuletide, been happily dancing in the nude while setting fire to Edward Woodward. (All my knowledge of pagan religion is garnered from the 1970s horror film The Wicker Man.)
These hooded ancients had, as I understand it, a settled grasp of what Christmas should really be about – the Beano annual, Noel Edmunds pestering sick children, The Great Escape, luxury foods in Marks and Spencer that, although intended for group consumption, I buy and eat greedily on my own.
Then the Christians came along and messed it all up with carol services and nativity plays and midnight Masses. Before long they had taken over Easter as well. The current shrinkage of proper, commercial Christmas is sure to lead to a revival in the bogus religious version. That can’t be a good thing.
There is, however, an even more serious consequence of the phenomenon. At this special time of the year, please spare a thought for the most vulnerable members of society: those beleaguered, misunderstood newspaper columnists. Not only is the advance of online media squeezing them, but they now have to endure the annihilation of an ancient, hitherto reliable seasonal topic.
What are we going to do without the “Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year” article? Oh, hang on. I’ve got an idea. Please return to the top of this piece.