A favourite flower...

It's been a wet and dreary November week, so far it has been a busy Saturday and I'm sitting here at the computer feeling fed up to the back teeth of Christmas and IT'S NOT EVEN DECEMBER YET!!!

My friend Annie has written a great post about the food adverts on TV driving her mad and it's true; it's relentless! The supermarkets are stuffed to the gills with party food and drink and we are all being urged by the minute to buy buy BUY! Are we not in recession? Is the financial meltdown not about to continue with all this trouble in Dubai? Just forget it and go and buy a million mini-toad in the holes in ASDA!

I used to really love Christmas; many of my favourite memories are to do with Christmas. My mum and dad used to decorate my bedroom and tell me the fairies had done it while I was at school/college/work and this went on until I was (I admit it!) 25! The first few Christmasses after we had kids were especially wonderful and even now I'll say Christmas Eve is my favourite day of the year. But these days Christmas starts so early that I'm bored with it before it even arrives.

Here are some things I hate about Christmas:

• Christmas decorations going up ANYWHERE before 1st December. Our TESCO had it's tree up in October. Someone down the road has already got their outside lights up and switched on. In December, it's wonderful. But not before!
  
• Christmas stuff in the shops in August. Primark start selling their Christmas range then, I promise you...
• People who struggle round the supermarket pushing TWO trolleys heaped with stuff on Christmas Eve, WHY???????? The shops are usually open again on Boxing Day....who are they feeding?
  
• "Santa stop here" signs. God, I HATE these. I want to pull down each one I see and snap it into little bits. But i have no idea why...they affect me they way those "Baby on Board" car stickers do...
• Christmas food and drink adverts. We are getting fatter. We don't need encouraging to eat MORE.
• Those big boxes of Roses, Quality Street, Celebrations and Heroes. I cannot resist them. Yet there are around 55 calories in each bloody chocolate...and they lurk everywhere at Christmas.
• Gift sets of obscure toiletries with scents like "Winter Musk" - ugh.
• Those magazine features on "Perfect gifts for him/her". One I read recently featured a dinky vanity case for her for £700!! Plus a suggestion that hubbys buy their wives a "weekend spa voucher" to help them "recover after the festivities"...I'd like to see Phil's face if I suggested that to him!
• Christmas cards - buying them, writing them, displaying them. I quite like getting them, oddly enough!
• Wrapping presents. I can't do it. I have wrapping dyspraxia. And it seems such a waste of effort. What about those articles you read where people get all creative with raffia/brown paper etc and spray bay leaves gold to stick on the fab parcels ....makes me feel inadequate.
• Crowded shops full of Christmas shoppers in bad tempers- surely a foretaste of Hell? Thank God for internet shopping.
• Photocopied "round robin" Christmas letters from people you never see, full of arch boasting and one-up-manship.
• Getting out the tree lights - oh God, I can feel my IBS revving up as I type. The sick feeling in my stomach as Phil spreads them out, plugs them in and they FAIL TO LIGHT UP! The long period as he fiddles and twiddles with each bulb, while the girls and I sit in tense silence. The realisation that we have to go out and buy ANOTHER set of lights from an overcrowded garden centre YET AGAIN. When I was little we had the same two strings of lights every year; they never failed. It's weird...
• The way we seem to have avoid any possible religious element to Christmas in case we offend other faiths who I'm sure are far too sensible and secure in their own beliefs to care about ours!
• The word "Xmas".
• Doing aerobics to disco versions of Christmas carols ( it's just wrong and no fun at all!!) Bring back Beyonce & Lady Gaga
  

But despite all these things, there is a "something" about Christmas that still retains it's magic. I am, in my quiet way, a Christian, and the story of the nativity always fills me with joy and wonder. I love being with my family and friends, to eat and drink with them (but not until I'm in a stupor!) I love Christmas trees and Christmas lights and tinsel and all those tacky Christmas songs. I love carols and mince pies and filling stockings. Oh, and Jane's mince pies. Yum!!! They are THE BEST.

But not yet. It would be all the sweeter if it lasted only a couple of weeks instead of half a dozen.

Bah humbug...