The Lights are Coming on All Over Crapchester...

Well, it seems to be official: Christmas has started.  It seems that the media have decided that noe that it is December, the festive season is officially open.  Which means ever more intensive attempts to sell us stuff.  After the horrors of the entirely spurious (in the UK, at least) 'Black Friday' (I still don't see how we can have a 'Black Friday' when we didn't have Thanksgiving the day before), today we had 'Cyber Monday'.  Not, as I thought it might be, the day the Cybermen invade or, indeed, the day that the Cybermen do their Christmas shopping.  Instead, it the day when retailers try to convince us that we just have to buy these online deals now.   The fact that most of these 'deals' are neither that good nor exclusive to 'Cyber Monday' is neither here nor there.  You just have to buy, something.  Anything.  Naturally, I've ignored 'Cyber Monday'.  I exhausted myself over the weekend fighting the crowds to buy my great nieces their presents and wrap them.  (For complex logistical reasons, it was necessary that I had their presents, bought, wrapped and despatched by Sunday).  I might have been knackered, but at least I could feel smug at having completed a huge chunk of my Christmas shopping before December.

But it isn't just the media who appear to have decided that Christmas has arrived: the decorations are going up everywhere.  Sure, I know that the municipal lights and decorations have been up in town centres for what seems an age already, but today I walked into my office to find decorations up.  Actually, I have to say that I hate Christmas decorations in the workplace - inappropriate and unprofessional.  Seriously, I detest the attempt to make the workplace seem something it isn't: cheery and welcoming.  It's a lie.  But getting back to the point, today was the day that all those external lights on people's houses seem to have been switched on en masse.  From what I saw today, many of the old favourites are back, but I'm hoping to see some new stuff - not just the really amazing artistic displays, but some really crap stuff too.  You know what I mean, the sort of displays which look as if someone has loaded every Christmas light, illuminated Santa, glowing reindeer and flashing elf into a blunderbuss and then fired it at the front of their house, creating a random spattering of lights.  Personally, I don't put my decorations (such as they are) up until about a week before Christmas - and I restrict myself to the interior of the house.  This isn't because I'm a total curmudgeon, it's just that when I was a kid nobody put up their decorations until, at the earliest, mid-December, with many (like my family) waiting until a bit later.  So, you see, I'm just a Christmas traditionalist.