Nearly the End of the Year

Nearly at the end of another year.  Which means that if I watch any of those TV shows covering the turn of the year on New Year's Eve, I'll have to put up with continuity announcers and presenters patronisingly extending their sympathies to 'people on their own at this time'.  For God's sake, just fuck off.  I've already had to put up with this shit all over Christmas, all the faux worries about 'loneliness at Christmas' expressed by the media.  Why can't they just accept that many, if not most, of us on our own at Christmas are on our own by choice.  As I've chronicled here before, I gave up on family Christmases decades ago after one too many argument resulting in yet another miserable Christmas.  Since making that decision, I've actually enjoyed Christmas: I can do what I bloody well like, when I like, without some miserable cousin/uncle/sibling etc moaning about it.  It's all part and parcel of this country's obsession, or rather, this country's media's obsession that there is only one correct way to celebrate Christmas and if you do something different then you are a sad, miserable bastard.

Interestingly, Marks and Spencer's Christmas TV ad campaign was based around the idea that people should throw away those seasonal 'traditions' you dislike and establish your own instead, (just so long as they involve M&S products, of course).  Which is basically what I've been doing for years.  Anyway, it was notable the hostility it generated in some quarters.  We even had that weird mad woman who purports to be a head teacher of some kind writing letters to The Times (or something like that), denouncing Marks and Spencer for undermining traditional values.  (She really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the education of children, should she?)  But is it really such an outrageous idea that people should be allowed to celebrate Christmas any way they like, (so long as they don't shove it in everyone else's face as the only way to celebrate the season), and is it so strange that for some us, that involves enjoying it on our own?  OK, I know that I'm some kind of weird loner, you know, the sort of person the Daily Mail always stigmatises as being a potential serial killer or terrorist, but if you aren't sufficiently at ease with yourself that you can't enjoy your own company, what does that say about you?