This Christmas.

Christmas is hard work. As I’m writing this I’m full and bursting with food, my eyelids are threatening to close up shop for the evening and i can feel the snores coming on already. I should mention it’s only 4pm. We just arrived home from visiting the people you generally only see once a year at Christmas, ones you can’t decide if you only visit them at Christmas because they are so special or if there’s a reason you only see them once a year.

I know Christmas, the season of festive frivolity, can be a terrible time of year. I know that in some houses Christmases are remarkable for the absence of food and piles of wrapping paper. In so many ways we who stuff and overstuff ourselves are amazingly blessed, blessed with the opportunity to go back for seconds, to float in the pool and nap in the sunchair.

And this is not all that is bad about Christmas. Christmas sucks when you’re an adult. It’s magic gets checked out at the shop counter where you maxed out your credit card. No one can be bothered to put the tree up, tiny hands don’t tug on Dads pinkie begging to pull the decorations out anymore, the suspense has fizzled out of the month of December because you aren’t counting off the days till Santa visits. Somebody eventually puts the tree up anyway, like a priest who’s forgotten why he prays but remembers where to put his hands. Then suddenly the 23rd is upon you and so to the realisation that the tree doesn’t sparkle anymore, it’s all just plastic and that’s some terrible type of fake. You whinge about the terrible time of year, and everyone agrees, the stress, the total absence of car parks, the wait in the queue at the post office, which is the only queue longer than the one at the bank. Christmas is not only so far removed from the religious celebration of the holy myth, it’s a grand consumerist orgy. In this credit crunching cult people who already have so much have a Christmas splash out that’s more like a king tide, so devoid of meaning it feels we are adrift in a sea of plastic cups and broken toys.

And yet, and yet and yet, it’s still something so much more than this. On the beach watching my dog run here and there at a dizzying pace stealing everybody else’s ball, there are big dogs and small dogs, fat men and pretty women, children running and somebody kayaking, people are smiling and sharing drinks out of eskies, dogs are barking and prancing about with tinsel collars and the cool blue waters are a welcome respite. The narrow beach was full of people celebrating life and enjoying the very best of a summers day with family they might only see once a year, maybe because that’s about all they can handle.

Christmas is all these things at once and it only happens once a year, once a year to over indulge, once a year to put plastic tinsel on plastic trees and put up with long queues in supermarkets. Speeding along the road on the way home, past fire engines and the smoking cinders of someone’s Christmas lunch gone up in flames, I feel asleep in the car like a 5 year old, a very happy 5 year old on Christmas evening.