All I want for Christmas is.....

my two front teeth.

Actually all I want for Christmas is for it all to be over for another year - bah humbug!

The never ending adverts for stuff you do not need to have a good Christmas. Since when does a new sofa or TV make Christmas better for you and yours? The never ending blahness of food advertising or Festive Gluttony Brainwashing as I prefer to call it. It is ONE day, you have no need to stock the larder until it bursts or you have enough to feed and booze up your entire street. Then there is the panic to buy all this stuff you do not need. Scary people with more than one overflowing trolley, two weeks before the actual holiday, the actual holiday that is, I repeat, ONE day. The shops are open til late on the 24th and re-open early on the 26th! Why do people feel the need to scramble over packets of fat full biscuits and cheap crap filled crackers. Fook me are a snap, a joke and a naff paper hat really essential for Christmas to be a success?

And all this panic and preparation - it is one day!

OK if your entire family/friend group is descending on you, then I understand the need for preparation and mild panic, but even so when you look at it, it is just a slightly more fancy roast dinner. Do you start your prep for a normal Sunday roast on Monday morning? If you forget the mint sauce is the world going to end? I think not. It is one day and one dinner.

Next whinge. Do people really need all the stuff that they get given that they would never buy for themselves? Do I need a mug (that doesn't match any I own) filled with a sachet of drinking chocolate and handful of stale tasting sweets? Not really. Do I need another packet of overloaded with cinnamon pot pourri? Nope. It is the thought that counts, but how much thought do people actually give in this commercialised buying frenzy. It just adds to the landfill. I'd rather someone gave me a copy of their favourite poem or gave their time for a chat or a meet up and shared a cup of hot chocolate in a nice cafe with me then buried me alive under a pile of cheap tat I do not want.

Finally, back to food. So many of the ads make me shudder. How do some of the retailers sell such large amounts so cheaply? Think of the shop where Bjork might have been born. What quality is the products that they use in the food - just think what sort of life the animals in those products might have had. Ask yourself - what else could they use in this to pad it out? All that cheap food. What conditions/wages are daily life for the people who work for the manufacturers?
IMHO it doesn't bear thinking about....ewwwww and yuck. Yet we are brainwashed into wanting and needing all that excess. Surely less is more in this case. I would rather have less food that is of a higher quality than eat cheap stuff that has been factory farmed, had stuff added I don't want to eat and been manufactured for slavery wages in dodgy factories.

We are made to believe that we need stuff to have a good holiday. We need to have loads of everything to enjoy the festive season and if you don't, if you buck the trend, then you are a Scrooge, a weirdo and a party pooper. That you are not normal.

I therefore am now known as Mrs Scrooge McWeirdo-partypooper-abnormal-Bah Humbug.

Merry Christmas.