Dear Santa…





Santa Claus

The Grotto

Lapland

Near the North Pole. 

 

Dear Santa,

It’s a very long time since I last wrote to you.  I suspect my last letter was asking for a diving suit for my Action Man.  My spelling was probably a bit dodgy but I probably used my very best joined up writing.  You must have read it though because the diving suit showed up on Christmas morning.  You also ate the mince pie and drank the little glass of sherry (man, you must have been pissed when you got back to Lapland).  Rudolph even ate some of the carrot.

But you didn’t turn up again this year did you Santa?  It was just the same with the tooth fairy earlier this year when I had a wisdom tooth removed.  You mythical characters are a bunch of slackers!

No, Christmas isn’t what it used to be.

Nonetheless, my wife adores Christmas.  To be more accurate, my wife adores Christmas from February to November.  She spends December doing what you, Santa, are supposed to be doing (and bankrupting the household in the process).  In January, she gets counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder.

I hate Christmas.

Even as I began typing this, Santa, some warm-hearted pillock has just knocked and my door and separated me from another £2 of my hard-earned cash for a crappy snowman pin badge in aid of some hitherto unheard of charity caring for unspecified children suffering unspecified misfortunes in unspecified locations.  He's probably just screwed me and my money is going towards a mighty Christmas piss-up in the next village but in this season of goodwill to all men, I couldn't exactly tell him to shove his little snowman up his own private ice hole (tempting as that might have been). 

And now, to make matters worse, the Sellotape dispenser has gone missing again.  Little wonder when we have a spare bedroom dedicated to the art of industrial scale wrapping and known at this time of year as the ‘Wrapping Room’.  It’s not as if we have a huge family or hundreds of friends but it’s like the Amazon.com warehouse in there.  No wonder my beloved family can’t find the bloody Selloptape.  “Try aisle 36 – ‘Presents for Distant Relatives and Work Colleagues that Didn’t Piss Us Off This Year!!”, I shout helpfully.

God, I hate Christmas. 

People do such weird things at Christmas.

By way of example, my wife and daughter have erected in our living room an eight foot tall, largely plastic, replica of a pine tree, having first rearranged all the furniture to accommodate it.  They then covered said replica tree in shiny balls of glass and plastic following which they spent two hours untangling about 40 yards of lights and establishing which of the 400 little bulbs didn’t work.  Having finally located the broken bulb, they spent a further two hours locating the spare ones before they finally got the lights working.  They tell me that they enjoy this annual ritual. 

I hate the Christmas Tree Ritual.

The only time I enjoyed the Christmas Tree Ritual was when we chose a real pine tree and unbeknown to us, there was a bat asleep inside the tree.  Its peaceful hibernation was rudely interrupted when the 400 little lights were switched on and it began screeching[1] around the living room at 400 miles per hour, spraying bat droppings as it went.  Seeing my wife hit the floor in less than a nanosecond and attempting to lie as flat as a sheet of lasagne was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. 

Since we got the plastic tree, it just hasn’t been the same.

However, despite the undeniable artificiality of the tree, the cat now thinks that the living room is a garden.  In that the cat also thinks that a garden is a toilet, this is far from ideal.  As a result, the cat and I do not get on well at Christmas. 

That doesn’t stop the cat from getting a present from the Wrapping Room of course.

My wife buys the cat a little packet of Cat Nip.  In case you don’t know, Santa, Cat Nip is rather like a feline version of LSD – laced with Viagra.  I like to sprinkle the stuff around the cat’s scratching pole.  Watching the little fur ball trying to have sex with a roll of carpet is almost as funny as watching my wife avoiding a low-flying bat.

When you hate Christmas as much as I do, Santa, you have to find your amusement where you can. 

Because at Christmas, Santa, the world goes completely crazy.

For instance, why is it that at Christmas, we can never get enough satsumas?  At any other time of year, no one gives a stuff about these crappy, nondescript citrus fruits but at this time year, the entire country starts buying huge orange string bags full of the bloody things as if our very lives depend on it.  Why?

The same goes for mulled wine.  11 months of the year and we’re content to drink our plonk chilled or at room temperature.  December arrives and suddenly, we’re boiling it up and sticking cloves and cinnamon sticks in it.  And you know what?  It’s bloody disgusting.  It’s like drinking hot Pot Pourri.

And then there’s the Christmas turkey.  Why in God’s name do hundreds of millions of people eat this pug-ugly and completely tasteless bird on the same day each year?[2]  Why, for instance, don’t we eat penguins?  At least they would be in keeping with the snowy Christmas theme.  There are millions and millions of them.  David Attenborough said so.

Personally, I’d rather have a curry.  I hate Christmas dinner.

I hate Christmas cards too.  My wife sends Christmas cards to people we haven’t seen for thirty years!  Some of them are probably dead!  Most of those who are still alive have probably forgotten who we are.  My wife also puts Christmas cards on display.  We have them on window sills and shelves all over the house.  I open them and throw them away.  I figure if she thinks a few people haven’t sent us a card, it will save a few stamps next year.

Most of all though, I hate Christmas songs.  There is simply no escape from the mind-numbing, all-pervading crappiness emanating, it seems, from every single loud speaker in the world.  Every time I hear ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Bloody Reindeer’, I want to rip his antlers off and stab myself with them.

Do you know what I got for Christmas, Santa?  I got credit card debts, that’s what. 

Great big red-nosed credit card debts with bloody Jingle Bells on. 

All because you can’t be arsed to show up!

You lazy sod!

Yours,

Anthony.

PS.  Merry Christmas!