Christmas Passed

Well, how was it for you?  Did the earth move, or was it just a regular Christmas for you?  Apparently today is Sunday, two days have elapsed since Christmas Day itself.  I must admit that I've completely lost track of exactly which day of the week it is - which is a sure sign that I've had a pretty decent Christmas.  I did go out to my local pub on Christmas Eve, where I ran into some people I hadn't seen for a while and had a few pints with them.  All-in-all a pretty enjoyable evening.  I say evening, it was just past midnight when I finally left.  Since then, it's all been about kicking back and relaxing - the only glitch being a movie I rented via You Tube refusing to play on my so-called 'Smart' TV.  We got ten minutes in and then it froze.  Any attempt to restart it resulted in the 'loading' message.  In the end I was forced to watch it on my laptop.  Even then, it would only play properly in the Edge browser.  So, renting via You Tube isn't an exercise I'll be repeating in a hurry.  Apart from that, I've caught up with a lot of old films and eaten too much - which is surely what Christmas is about, isn't it?

But now we're nearly at the end of the extended Christmas weekend, with only tomorrow'sdelayed  Boxing Day bank holiday, (because the real Boxing Day fell on a Saturday this year), before we get into that stange hinterland that exists between Christmas and New Year.  Even the media don't know how to handle it, with the half-festive, half-normal TV schedules reflecting the fact that whilst many of us are still off work, some have had to go back for a few days before the next bank holiday.  It's the period when the move to try and shrug off Christmas and put it behind us starts to gather momentum.  As I've noted before, I find it most perplexing that everyone spends so much time building up to Christmas, once the day itself has arrived, we can't seem to want to see the back of it quick enough.  It's meant to be a time of joy and celebration, but increasingly, our leaders and media pressure us into cutting it short.  Once they've got your money in the pre-Christmas build up and immediately post-Christmas sales, that's it - they want you back at work.  I'm sure that's the real reason that the sales now start on Boxing Day rather than New Year's Day - so that they can end the holiday period earlier.  I know that every year I hark back to this point, but Christmas is meant to be a twelve day festival, ending on twelfth night - surely if we went back to this and spread the celebrations out over the twelve days, it would all be much easier.  Not only would the build up be less frenzied, but the neccessity for some people to work over some of Christmas wouldn't be such an issue, as they wouldn't be missing all of the celebrations.  But hey, what do i know?  In an ideal world we'd just take all twelve days off over Christmas and say to hell with it all.  Impractical, but fun.