The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I'm all for Christmas. I like the twinkly lights, the mince pies, and especially the time off work.

But we do need to acknowledge that there are some aspects of Christmas that need to fuck off. In this post, I will tell you what these things are.

Christmas cards

I used to love Christmas cards as a kid. I had a big stack of cards and I'd write my friends' names in them, sign them, and lick the envelopes. At school, we had a paper-mache postbox, where we'd post the cards to each other throughout December. On the last day of school before Christmas, the teacher would open the postbox and distribute the cards out to the class. At home, my mom would help me hang the cards up by tieing a piece of string to two lamps. It was a lovely tradition.

So where has the magic gone? Sending Christmas cards now, as an adult, has become an expensive balls ache. It's partly my own fault. I went overboard and started making personalized Christmas cards, cards where I'm dressed as Santa and the rest of my family are elves, stuff like that.

Do you know how much a personalised card costs? On funkypigeon.com, each card costs £2.29, plus postage. What the hell? I've bought actual presents that were cheaper than that. You can get a whole pasty at Greggs for less than that. Christmas cards should cost no more than 10 pence each. Any more is thievery and against the spirit of Christmas.

Jesus said that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. If that's true, then the founder of Funkypigeon is definitely going to burn to hell. Yep, he'll be burning in hell for all eternity for selling expensive Christmas cards. Jesus said that, not me.

And another thing: these greeting card websites are hard to use. I almost made a mistake one year by almost ordering cards that don't open because they don't have an actual inside; you only get the front of the card. What good's that? They might as well be postcards. Who's ever heard of a Christmas postcard? Another year, I couldn't find a blank card so I had to make do by clicking on a (I'm not making this up) "Happy Birthday to your Pet" card and then dragging my image over it, like putting a rug over a stain on the floor.

Well, today I had an epiphany. An idea that I've never had before. It came into my head like a bright light of understanding.

I said to Girlfriend, "You know how we send out Christmas cards every year?"

She said, "Yes, I know that."

I said, "Well, what if this year, instead of sending out Christmas cards — what if, what if we don't send out Christmas cards?"

She looked at me without saying anything. She was probably thinking that I was a genius.

Finally, she said, "You know that Spanish people don't send out cards? It's just a weird British thing. No one outside of the UK sends cards. Literally only British people do it."

She's right. Think about it. Every single shopping centre in the UK has a greeting cards shop. This is without exception. In every shopping centre you go to, there will be a Boots, a WH Smiths, and then a greeting cards shop like Card Factory, Clintons, or Hallmark. Why? Other countries don't have greeting cards shops. Instead of a greeting cards shop, they'll have something useful, like a pharmacy or a paella store.

And it all makes sense. The British are known for eccentricities. And sending cards is the most eccentric thing you can do. Because why send a simple text message or an email when you can post a card instead? A card that will cost you 2 pounds plus 59 p postage and then take four days to arrive? Only the most eccentric people would do that.

So I've decided this year, I'm not sending out Christmas cards. Fuck the Christmas cards. I'm done. I'm like one of the rich millionaires on Dragon's Den, sitting behind a large pile of cash, except instead of a nervous entrepreneur standing in front of me about to shit his pants, there's a giant anthropomorphic Christmas card. With arms, legs and a hat. And I'm turning to that card and saying "I'm out". Then the Christmas card takes the walk of shame back down the cast-iron winding staircase (if it'll even fit down the staircase, which it probably wouldn't, because it's a huge, giant-sized card. With legs and a hat) where it'll do a tearful debrief interview about what a cunt I am and how it never wanted to come on Dragon's Den in the first place. Next contestant!

We have instant communication technology now. You can send a message to someone from the other side of the world and it'll get there instantaneously. So why do we need Christmas cards? Answer: we don't.

And who even likes greetings cards? Kids don't like them, that's for sure. Kids are apathetic toward them, or at least, the cards that don't have money inside. The cards are just something to put on a shelf for a few days until you throw them away.

So I say: don't even send cards at all. Do a tree a favour and leave that greetings card on the shelf in Clinton's Cards where it belongs.

But all this has got me thinking. If I can get rid of Christmas cards, then what other Christmas traditions can I get rid of?

Christmas trees

O Christmas tree! O fucking Christmas tree! What a pain are thy branches!

Christmas trees are fun when you're a kid, sure. Nothing beats the excitement of taking the plastic Christmas tree out of the loft, pulling out shiny baubles and bits of tinsel from an old cardboard box, and hanging them off the tree.

But I'm not a kid anymore. I'm an adult, and at some point during adulthood, Christmas trees stop being exciting and they become a fucking chore instead. I call this point in life 'the point of Christmas tree exhaustion'. It's when you get so old that you can't be arsed to put your Christmas tree up anymore.

For my dad, this point happened when he was 49. I remember the Christmas when I asked Dad when he was putting the Christmas tree up, he said, "I'm not putting it up this year", to the utter shock and disbelief of me and my siblings. Not putting the tree? It was unthinkable.

Unthinkable, that is, until now. Because now I understand how he feels.

Christmas trees don't make sense anymore. Maybe they made sense when we were living next to forests and trees were abundant. All you had to do was go outside and chop down a real tree a few metres from your cabin. Then you'd drag the tree indoors, put a few candles on it (health and safety wasn't a big thing back in those days) and then sit back and bask in the glow of your own real Christmas tree. Moments before the tree catches alight and burns down your log cabin, with you, your wife and kids still inside.

Nowadays, if I wanted to chop down a tree, the council would probably have something to say about it. So instead, nowadays the steps involve:

• Drag the Christmas tree out from its storage place, which is usually someplace wholly impractical and inaccessible, like under some boxes of magazines in the very far corner of your loft
• Put the fucking tree together in the living room, even though one of the crucial parts of the tree broke years ago and now the tree leans to one side like its drunk. You once tried to fix it with sellotape but it didn't work
• Put ornaments on the tree, even though the strings of the ornaments are so thin and fiddly that it's like trying to put split atoms with your fingertips
• Forget you were supposed to put the lights on first, but fuck it, the ornaments are on now, so just stick the lights on for Christ's sake and then we can all just get back to our actual lives
• Put the star on the tree. (You know that magical moment when you put the star on top of your Christmas tree and your children are stupefied with delight and amazement? Well, that didn't happen this year, because I couldn't get the star on top of the tree, it kept falling off.)
• For the next four weeks, keep looking over at the tree and wishing it was dead. But it can't die. Because it's just plastic
• Finally, at the end of Christmas, store the Christmas tree somewhere for another 11 months, even though your house is small and you don't really have enough room to store a bloody great big plastic tree

Plastic tree - it's an oxymoron because trees aren't plastic. You know, plastic? The material that gives you cancer if it's heated up and ingested? Or even if you look at it too long? It's so depressing that Radiohead even wrote a song about it: Fake Plastic Trees. Come to think of it, they should do a Christmas version, for charity, called Fake Plastic Christmas Trees. It'd give us all something cheerful to take our minds off how depressing our lives have become. For three minutes anyway, at which point you can play the song again.

Ideally we should get rid of Christmas trees. Throw them all in a big hole somewhere and set fire to them. But the problem is, I don't think we can actually get rid of Christmas trees. And the reason is that Christmas trees are useful. They serve as a visual reminder that it's Christmas - whenever you see a Christmas tree, you go, "Oh yeah, it's Christmas, isn't it?" Without the tree, your living room would just look normal. Without the tree, you'd forget it's Christmas. When Bob Geldof wrote "Do they know it's Christmas?" he was referring to the people without Christmas trees, because without a tree, you'd probably think it's July and try to go out and sunbathe. Of course, on some level you'd know it's Christmas, but on another level, a more primal level, you wouldn't know it's Christmas at all. This would leave you confused. You'd be like a bird on an unusually warm winter's day - is it supposed to be winter? Or is it spring? Shall I hibernate or should I start looking for worms? Finally, your brain gets so confused that you end up stabbing yourself in the eye over and over with a potato peeler at 3 am. And you don't want that to happen.

Maybe the solution is to have a real tree instead of a plastic one. And with real trees, there's the added bonus of the smell of pine, which can cover up the smell of pollution coming from the traffic outside.

Presents for adults

So we get rid of Christmas cards and we get rid of Christmas trees. Is there anything else from Christmas we can jettison for a saner, happier Christmas?

Yes: Christmas presents for adults. Now, I'm all for buying Christmas presents for kids. That's fine. The whole point of Christmas, surely, is for children worldwide to tear open presents on Christmas day in a frenzy of screams and torn wrapping paper, and then to feel bored for the rest of the day because none of the presents was what they wanted. That's the true meaning of Christmas. But what I don't understand is why adults need presents too.

Adults can buy things for themselves. They have money. If you want something, and you're an adult, you can usually afford to just buy it yourself. So why do adults have to give gifts to one another? It makes no sense. Even worse, it's wasteful, because the gifts inevitably turn out to be crap and thoughtless.

Here's a quote from Bridget Jones. (Yes, I read Bridget Jones.)

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely.

Last year, all the adults in my family agreed to stop buying presents for each other, and it was really lovely, just as Bridget Jones said it would be. It took away the stress of having to think of presents for people who I don't even know that well.

So if you're an adult, and you're still giving Christmas gifts to other adults, then stop. It's good for your wallet and good for your mental health.

Christmas traditions I want to keep doing

I'm not entirely against Christmas. There are some traditions that I like and I want to continue. Such as:

• Every year, I write a letter to my son. I write about things that we've done that year, things that he likes and things he's looking forward to. Then we keep all the letters, so he can read them when he's older. Either that or he'll chuck them all in the bin. I'm not sure which one yet.
• Jumping in the ocean on New Year's Day. I've never done it before but it sounds nice. The sea would be cold, of course, but that's the idea, I suppose. Also, there is the very slight chance you could be eaten by a shark. The element of danger adds to the fun.
• I like to walk around the streets at night and look at the Christmas lights. It stirs up strange emotions inside me, like 'happiness' and 'goodwill towards others'. Makes a change from the rage I otherwise feel all the time.
• Kick baby Jesus. So I just made this one up. We all go to a field, right, and we take a baby (doesn't have to be a real baby — could be a doll) and we all see how hard we can kick it down the field. Whoever kicks it furthest, wins.

Conclusion

Or maybe we should just give up Christmas altogether. The year is 2021 so I think Jesus has had enough birthdays by this point. He's over 2,000 years old now. He can't even eat figgy pudding anymore, he has to have it blended up so he can drink it through a straw.

Or maybe we could choose some other prick to celebrate. What about John Lennon? He’s already a semi-Messiah. And he looks like Jesus. Let's change Christmas to Lennon-day instead. Imagine that. Imagine.