Feeling a Lot Like Christmas...?

Well, the festive spirit has finally hit The Sleaze, with our first seasonal story - The Twelve Lays of Christmas - finally up on the site. I was hoping that posting the story might make me feel a bit more festive. With every passing year I find it increasingly difficult to get excited about Christmas. Nothing seems to do it any more, not the appearance of lights and decorations as December progresses, not the appearance of seasonal adverts on television, not even the domination of local supermarket shelves by festive goods. I even seem to have become immune to repeated radio play of Slade and Wizzard's traditional Christmas hits. OK, I know that I'm a jaded and cynical old bastard, who resents the way Christmas has increasingly become simply a marketing strategy for retailers to shift more crap, and despises the false bonhomie which permeates both the media and workplace at this time of year. But I really want to like Christmas. Really, I do. I know that I can never recapture the joyfulness of childhood Christmases, that vanished forever with my youth. But it would be nice to just feel some genuine seasonal warmth at this time of year.

In an attempt to feel Christmassy (is that really a word?), I even bought a Christmas tree this year, reversing a policy of some sixteen years standing of not having Christmas decorations of any kind in the house. Many people have misinterpreted this lack of decorations as evidence of my curmudgeonly attitude toward the season. The reality is that I've always found it profoundly depressing when the decorations come down on twelfth night, and I try and avoid anything which might trigger a depressive episode. Anyway, getting back to this tree, it cost me all of £1.96 from Asda and must be scruffiest looking artificial tree I've ever seen. However, it is a bloody tree. I've even put lights on it (96p from Asda). What more do people want me to do to prove that I'm not anti-Christmas? More to the point, when is having the damn thing sitting in my front room going to make it feel like Christmas? Clearly, I need to try different tactics. I'll just have to write some more seasonal sleaze for the main site. Perhaps a traditional Christmas ghost story featuring spectral sex offenders. That should the trick...