Bah, Humbug!

On the subject of 'It starts earlier every year', last weekend I heard some TV presenter or other saying something along the lines of 'if you've just been putting up the tree..'  Jesus, I thought, who the hell puts up Christmas decorations this early?  It's still only the middle of November, for God's sake!  Well, a stroll down my street on Monday answered that question - I'd forgotten that there are a couple of houses that always put up their decorations early.  Already, you can see the Christmas lights in their living rooms blazing away through their windows.  One of them even has 'Happy Christmas' spelt out in letters stuck to their front window.  Mind you, only the week before it had said 'Happy Halloween' as they hadn't taken down their Halloween decorations, so they just kept the 'Happy' bit and swapped 'Halloween' for 'Christmas'.  I suspect that come the New Year it will change again, this time to 'Happy Easter'.  Still, to be fair, they were only following the precedent of the municipal decorations, which had appeared in the town centre that same weekend.  But municipal decorations follow different rules - obviously they have to go up in November to make their presence worthwhile and to be able to properly promote local retailers' seasonal sales campaigns.  As ever, they made a big production of them being set up, with the town centre being clogged up with 'Festive Friday' that day - basically a large collection of market stalls selling overpriced seasonal tat and people dressed as polar bears wandering around.

'You can take your 'Festive Friday' and stick it up your arse', I muttered as I struggled through the crowds milling around these dubious attractions, thereby exercising one of my Christmas traditions: being curmudgeonly.  It's a long tradition - I started off being a young curmudgeon, then grew into a middle aged curmudgeon and am now, apparently, an old curmudgeon.   Personally, I always mark the beginning of Crapchester's Christmas season from the moment that the German sausage stall appears opposite Tesco Metro.  It's there every year from early November until well into the New Year.  The smell of those sausages being fried in a big pan is the harbinger of the festive season, as far as I'm concerned.  That and the appearance of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK cronies rocking up and shouting 'Noooo!  Brexit means Brexit!  We didn't leave the EU just to be invaded by foreign meat products!  British bangers only!'  Of course, he sneaks back several hours later, clad in lederhosen, an alpine hat and sporting a false moustache, to buy his favourite knockwurst.  'Nein, nein,' he protests as people accuse him of hypocrisy.  'You are mistaken!  I am not this Farage person you speak of - Ich bein Nikolas Frattenfarger from Munich!'  Because there's nothing he likes better than getting his lips around one of those huge German sausages, incognito.  Then he goes home and puts that illuminated swastika up on top of his Christmas tree.  Anyway, getting back to the original point, I still maintain that household Christmas decorations shouldn't go up before December.  Do it in November then, by the time the actual festive period rolls around, they will have lost their novelty value.  Personally, I always used the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year as a guide - it used to air on the last Sunday before Christmas, so that's when I'd put those decorations up.  But they've moved it to an earlier, mid-week, slot in recent years.  So now I just stick the decorations up when I remember to.