So we're going to die this week.
I really should be doing more than watching an old repeat of Have I got news for you and get my affairs in order. But then again, why? If nothing is going to exist after the the 21st of December then this is hardly the time to be sorting out the spare room. This is the time to be either sobbing uncontrollably or finally finding out what it's like to drink cheap whiskey out of a brown paper bag. I've seen films, it's what you do when the world is ending. That it coincides with black Friday means that you wont be able to tell who's drinking to forget their impending doom and who's forgotten what the date is and is drinking to celebrate ten days off work and Dr Who being on the telly in four days time. Well, maybe that last one is just me, but you get the idea. The Apocalypse, of course does bring the conundrum of if you haven't bought Christmas presents yet, should you bother?
The obvious answer is of course, yes. If anyone actually believes that bollocks, then they should just kill themselves anyway to avoid the embarrassment. The same goes for the Flat earth society and people who think that the moon landings didn't take place. I'm sorry I'm normally a forgiving person but those people...
Anyway, go buy your Christmas presents and be with your family, but remember that being with family is the most important aspect of this time of year. It was either this year or last year when I realized that how much the commercial side of Christmas has had a grip on me for much longer than I care to admit. It's ten or twenty minutes of opening presents and after that, well, you tell me.
One of the things I've also realized is that my Christmases are in a state of flux. Since the boys have been born, Christmas has been different. The first one with the boy was when he was only three weeks old, so you on Christmas day you could have told us that it was June 7th 2015 and we wouldn't have known the difference from sleep deprivation. Since then it's been watching the boys and waiting for when they're big enough to understand what's going on. This is probably the last year in which the boy will not be fully aware of the scary elf bastard who sneaks into everybody's house. So next year he'll be full of things for Father Christmas to bring him and us pointing at the cheaper alternatives saying that he might not have room on the sleigh for all that big expensive stuff. The new boy will still be impressed by the boxes.
But I've come to realise this is the exciting part. For the next several years I get to experience the young, untarnished joy of the boys thinking that there's a wonderful selfless person that will give them presents for being good. No doubt it will make me remember things that I had forgotten about that made me look forward to Christmas when I was younger and make me reevaluate the things that my parents did that made some wonderful memories of being young. But one of my best Christmas memories will always be the year that it was just me and my wife, just in the home and sporadically giving each other presents and being in each other's company. Before the boys, after some years with drunken mother/grandmother incidents. It was just us and it was perfect. Plus we watched Die Hard, which is the best Christmas film ever. In your face, Capra....
So as usual, I haven't really got a point, I just hope that everyone I care about is happy on Christmas day; which I think is all that anyone should ever want.
Of course if the world does end on the 21st, grab the nearest bottle and jump off the side of the earth, just avoid the turtle on the way down; he's probably got enough to worry about...
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