Countdown to Christmas and The High Street

From mid-November onwards, a curious phenomenon occurs in certain towns.  The outdoor market, which is sometimes branded as a German Market, but actually resembles a shed show with a very limited choice of styles available.

Before the criticism of town centres was that all the shops seemed to be closing, the criticism of town centres was that all the shops were opening and that each High Street, which in the fantasy Daily Mail readers like to construct for themselves consisted of independent shops staffed by cheery and attentive white folk, was becoming homogenised.  Where you used to be able to wander from greengrocer to butcher to farrier to witchfinder, you now drove to an out of town mothership of a superstore and got all your food and horseshoes there, meaning that the High Street became the home to Our Price, Woolworths and C&A.

This led to every High Street looking the same.

Luckily, at Christmas, with the arrival of the seasonal market, the High Street has the opportunity to once again attain some individuality.  Of course this does not actually happen because while there may be a way to make a High Street look unique, setting up 100 identical sheds selling sausage, cheese or very ugly wooden toys ain’t it.

Christmas Eve on the High Street can still be a special time.  From the bloke who stayed too long in the boozer banging on the door of a shutting and shuttering Perfume Shop to the pleased parent with a list consisting of ticked items, who is fourteen short hours away from discovering the difference between AA and AAA batteries.

Some think the High Street has had its day.  In turn, the out of town retail park is being buggered by broadband as people do their shopping from their sofa.  The centre of commerce has moved from the high street to the out of town superstore and now to the way out of town megawarehouse, the apogee of free market capitalism where thanks to zero hours contracts the warehouse workers don’t earn on toilet breaks, essentially paying to pee.  Thanks Thatcher.

Now I’m not so sure.  Maybe there is a place for the High Street.  The town centre, for instance.

Christmas Eve and we needed last minute gadget shopping.  It looked as though the only person capable of delivering it quickly enough was a fat bloke in a red suit.  Plan A was writing a letter and posting it up the chimney.  Plan B was Argos.

A quick internet search showed that Argos stocked the gadget in question.  In store.  In their store.  In the town centre.  On the High Street.  We ordered on line and promptly followed the stream of electrons to the High Street where the lights of the store shone brightly.

Argos on Christmas Eve is an interesting place.  It’s surprisingly quiet and relaxed, possibly because the sort of people who shop at Argos are the sort of people who have their shit together and who ordered that Wendy house weeks ago, collected it days ago and are currently in their garage assembling the fucker.  The most stressed person in the shop was me, having raced there on my push bike and keen to collect my clicked gadget.

Is there anything Argos doesn’t stock?  That catalogue is really, really thick.  I just used to look at Castle Greyskull and walkmans (walkmen?).  Who knows what the hell else is in there?  Mail order brides?  Cockatoos?  Small arms?

I paid, collected and was off in about ten minutes.

The only other collection I noted, waiting there on the shelves for some generous and thoughtful gift-giver, were two 8kg kettle bells.  Good luck getting those home.

There is a place for the High Street then.  It’s in the centre of town.  It’s not in a retail park, or in a vast warehouse, or online.  It’s a place where you can go and you can shop and you can get what you need and people are friendly and where you walk away from the shop with your stuff and a smile.

The High Street was there when I needed it.  Maybe in future I should be there when it needs me.

Countdown to Christmas and A Ghost Story for Christmas

What’s scary?  Fashions in fear change.  Back when film was black and white by necessity rather than some half arsed artistic choice, fear was Universal in the sense that the Dracula and mummy and Wolfman franchises scared cinema-goers.  Then came Hammer and Technicolor blood.  Then came less gothic and much less subtle fear, usually involving college girls running round a lake being chased by somebody with a personality disorder and a utensil.  Things took a turn for the sexy with the Twilight movies, where the cheekbones of the male lead were more important than the fake fangs, and we have just recently come out of an ironically apparently unkillable trend in zombie movies and television.  Somewhere, things stopped being scary and became either thrilling or thought-provoking or, God help us, sensitive.  Vampires and zombies became just another group with food intolerances (garlic) and a specific dietary requirement (Type O, brains).  Like vegans, but healthier looking and less likely to bang on about it.

Fashions change but traditions are maintained, the Christmas ghost story being one of them.  There is a convention that the Christmas Ghost Story was invented by Charles Dickens, and perfected by M R James and arguably the BBC.  Some might contend that the practice of telling weird tales at Christmas might well pre-date Christmas, when a storyteller round a campfire might choose to spook the hell out of an audience on a long winter night by telling them when might be waiting for them in the shadows, in the darkness or beyond the cave mouth, tent flap or door depending on your epoch or cultural frame of reference.

Certainly though Dickens, in ‘A Christmas Carol’ refined and defined the Christmas Ghost Story.  It has ghosts, it has a redemptive message of new life which is so necessary in a midwinter’s tale, it has a strong social message about combating want and ignorance, an enduring message for the sort of people who read it in the comfort of their own homes while others are in want or ignorance, a contrast always particularly sharp at Christmas.  And it’s actually fairly scary, if you don’t find the notion of knockers transforming or being visited by ghosts in the middle of the night terrifying, then I’d question whether you are the sort of person who has the emotional development required to be allowed unfettered access to a knife draw.

M R James was a school-master and a writer of ghost stories.  Every Christmas Eve he would invite schoolboys to his study and read a ghost story to them.  Behaviour that was charming then is, of course, the sort of thing that would land you with a visit from Ofsted, possibly the local constabulary and probably reporters from certain tabloids today.  And the world is the worse for that.

Luckily, the BBC embarked on a series of programmes in the 1970’s and 1980’s that allowed all of us to attend James’s study, with their classic ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand.  Some were dramatisations of M R James stories, the best was Robert Powell as a schoolmaster, telling a James story, like the scariest episodes of Jackanory ever broadcast.

The attraction is, I suppose, twofold.  Firstly, certainly in the James tradition where the protagonist comes to a sticky spectral end, the protagonist somehow brings things upon himself, as does Scrooge.  Our viewer sitting at home need not fear such folly, but will at the conclusion of the tale hopefully consider how they can improve themselves.  The second is that Christmas is a time of dark nights, candlelight and port, all excellent accompaniments to a good ghost story.

The undisputed modern master of horror, Stephen King, recognised the importance of the ghost story for Christmas in ‘the Breathing Method’, where the horror story itself is nested within a tale far less conventional; that of a club for storytellers where there is a tradition of ghost stories for Christmas.  This, we learn, is about all that is traditional about the club.

Maybe it’s just that a good shiver in the dark makes us appreciate the light and the laughter of Christmas, makes us appreciate comfort and company, family and friends.  Makes us appreciate Christmas.

Countdown to Christmas and Selection Box Sets

Winter is, for certain mammals, a time of hibernation.  Snug in burrows or caves, they sleep away the long nights and the short days in blissful inactivity drawing on the fat reserves they have built up over the preceding year, possibly augmented by the occasional Ocado delivery depending on the sophistication of the mammal in question.

Christmas can also be a time involving, for certain mammals, human males in particular, long periods of inactivity and the wearing of pyjamas round the clock even though you are not ill.  The difference is that instead of combining this prolonged period of low metabolic activity with drawing on fat reserves, it’s very much combined by, if one is lucky, continually topping up those fat reserves by ingesting more cheese of more varieties in six days than one would normally consume in six months.  Simply put, it’s not normal for an average person to consume that much brie at all hours of the day, simply Because It’s There.

Christmas comes with its own dietary regime.  Firstly there is the food itself.  People eat things at Christmas they would not eat for the rest of the year.  Turkey.  If turkey is so great, why are we not eating it throughout the year?  Of course the answer is that we are, except that it its usually served in Twizzler form to children who have yet to develop the skill of sending food back.  Faced with a choice and the ability to be able to exercise that choice, an adult human will walk past the turkeys and pick out a nice joint of beef or lamb.  At Christmas, faced with the sort of pressure to conform usually only experienced by teenagers, we rush to the supermarket shelves and grab the biggest bird we can get our hands on, and then commence to pimp it out with stuffing, cranberry sauce and no doubt some day soon, little costumes.  We eat mince pies, we eat more nuts than a simian going ape in a nut shop and as mentioned, we eat so much cheese that when we perspire there’s a slight smell of cheddar.

And we drink.  We drink in the morning.  No better evidence of the suspension of normal rules is required than it being socially acceptable to drink before noon, usually the sole preserve of shift workers or people with problems.

Luckily, we offset this enhanced calorific intake with vigorous exercise, if you can call getting up from the sofa, padding into the kitchen and rummaging in the fridge every forty minutes or so vigorous exercise which, seasonally adjusted, it may well be.  And I do mean rummaging in the fridge.  Christmas is a time when the shops are closed for the day remember, an event that causes the modern consumer to prepare by stockpiling food and drink as if preparing for a zombie apocalypse, or Brexit.  In order to locate the afternoon snacking cheese, you first have to move the after dinner cheese out of the way on the cheese shelf, formally the salad shelf, a shelf that is redesigned as the cheese shelf for the festive period because the only green food permitted at Christmas are the brussel sprouts that are another example of a food only consumed during the yuletide festivities, and the grapes used to garnish the cheeseboard.

But more than turkey, more than cheese, more than even sprouts one tasty treat defines Christmas.  The selection box.  If you thought drinking before noon was a treat, then that’s as nothing to offing a Curlywurly before breakfast.  You could give a child a new bike, that flies, and their delight would still be eclipsed by their finding a perfect purple box of chocolate treats under the tree.  The bars may be smaller, gone is the game with the spinner on the back of the box and there may be a guilt twinge about all that plastic packaging but by God a bar of dairy milk first thing is glorious.

Presumably, the rise in popularity of the sporting of sleepwear in daylight hours at Christmas is due not just to a desire to hibernate, but to the comfort of a garment with an elasticised waistband.

Countdown to Christmas and Christmas Hits

Around this time of year, articles start to appear in newspapers and magazines, at least in the on-line editions, about Christmas Hits.  The articles tend to cover Christmas Hits up until about a decade ago, which is about the last time that what was Number One at Christmas had any impact on the national consciousness.

The articles allow the reporter to give their views on what the magic formula might be for achieving a seasonal classic, and to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in music journalism in an age where everyone is invited to review tracks on streaming services, and somebody with 70 years in the business, a fuck-off vinyl collection and a byline in ‘Rolling Stone’, ‘Kerrang’ or a purple-printed stinky fanzine has no more critical clout on iTunes than somebody who reviews the last Bowie album as ‘* Ya basik’.

Such articles also allow the artists in question to contribute a quote that reminds readers that they are still alive, and makes an impassioned plea for any remaining fans to come see the tour, tickets still available.  This is usually finessed into a remark about the Christmas Hit still being popular when they perform their December shows.

July gigs. Not so much.

There is also a list of favourite or most popular Christmas Hits, and again these usually run up to about ten years ago before stopping being a thing.

This is for two reasons.

The first is that while dark forces have always been at work in the music industry, it was only when they started judging talent shows, signing the winners to their labels and promoting the hell out of them to make sure they had sensational sales during the lucrative Christmas period, that people started to resent the hell out of it and journalists wanted to deny such people the oxygen of publicity, with even ITV restricting their activities to two hours of prime time on a Saturday and a results show on a Sunday.

The other reason is that on-line sales of music buggered the Christmas Single.

The reason the Christmas Single mattered was that it outsold all other record sales.  This was because people who never buy records would go to Woolies and buy a single for their young relatives.

Woolies going tits up was a disaster for more than the employees, the High Street and for people who liked to shoplift pick n’ mix on a Saturday.  It was a problem for record sales.  Woolies is a safe environment for the shopper.  Our Price, less so.

Downloads buggered things further.  Grandparents, even silver surfers, are unlikely to gift the kiddies a particular song.  More likely they will give them a pair of socks.  That’s right, they know iTunes vouchers exist but fuck you Jane and Johnny, I don’t recall a single costing £15.  When they bring out the 99p iTunes voucher, text us, we’ll be on a Viking River Cruise.

Then came streaming and who, basically, had a fucking clue about what constituted a record sale anymore?  The last time I checked, record sales consisted of physical sales, downloads, streams, airplay, mentions in the playgrounds of state funded schools, and the passing from one kid to another of a cassette with the song taped from the wireless with the DJ talking over the first and last ten seconds.

The Christmas Number One hasn’t mattered for many years now, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, rightly, everyone can listen to what they want to listen to and that the cultural measures like the chart countdown don’t really matter anymore.

The second?  Nobody is recording decent, bespoke, jingly, seasonal Christmas hits anymore.  Adele, step up.

The last important Christmas pop music event?  George Michael, who wrote and recorded the perfect Christmas Hit, died on 25 December 2016.  I remember turning on Radio 2 on Boxing Day, a tribute show, learning the news.  It was sad, it was uplifting, it was a radio community and a demonstration that radio is a medium like no other for marking these moments.

Oh, and ‘Fairytale of New York’ is the greatest Christmas Hit.  Unbelievably, some have sought to criticise it recently.  Beware these people.

Countdown to Christmas and Christmas Films

Back in the day, as J. P. Kenyon used to put it, there used to be something called the Elevator Pitch.  This was, as you can tell from the use of the word Elevator, an American thing, and was based around the idea that if you found yourself in a lift with a movie producer, you would have the time it takes for you to travel a few floors to pitch your idea for a movie.  Elevator Pitches are now things of the past, because today movie producers are so terrified of being implicated in a MeToo type scandal that they travel with packs of lawyers who ask anyone coming into contact with the producer to sign a disclaimer before engaging with the producer, and by the time the paperwork has been completed, the producer has reached the penthouse and the ride, and opportunity, is over.

Obviously though, the Elevator Pitch had not faded from being common industry practice before a number of encounters happened that resembled this conversation.

“Small town girl who now lives a successful but unfulfilling life in the big city returns to her small town, reconnects with the folksy folk, reunites with her childhood sweetheart and leans a valuable lesson about community.”

“That’s the plot of ‘Sweet Home Alabama”, idiot.”

“It’s set at Christmas.”

“Genius, let’s do it.”

Ping.  Penthouse.

Now, I like Christmas.  I like Netflix.  And I like a Christmas movie, so I have to say that the Algorithm In Chief is really pulling it out of the Santa hat at the moment.  Because I watched a documentary about the Swedish shoe trade, Netflix thinks I’d like ‘Holiday Homecoming’, ‘Christmas Homecoming’, ‘Homecoming at Christmas’, ‘Home Holiday Christmas’ and ‘Blonde Girl in Snowy Small Town’.  And while I resent the hell out of the presumption, I love the result.

How many times can you watch the same movie with slight variations?  As it turns out, about seventeen.

Here in England Wetherspoons is a successful chain of popular pubs with a business model including reasonably priced food and drink and serving cider at breakfast time, indoors.  In America, Witherspoons is the collective term for the clones of the popular actress that populate movies requiring a small town girl to return home and learn a valuable lesson about community.

Films at Christmas used to be a seasonal extravaganza of Technicolor, and black and white.  Technicolor for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, black and white for late night, usually a run of classics featuring Bogart.  Fun fact, from 1982 to 1991, fedora and trenchcoat sales in January were 12 – 17% higher than the rest of the year.

This also fed sales of three packs of blank VHS cassettes in December.  Nothing promoted family harmony quite like the ability to tape ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and a 30 minute comedy special one tape, to be stored, treasured and then thrown out thirty years later because you have not owned a VHS player in a decade.

There are films that are set at Christmas, and there are films with a Christmas theme.  The greatest Christmas film ever is, of course ‘Die Hard’.  This is because not only is it set at Christmas, but it also has a Christmas theme, family togetherness and throwing terrorists off of skyscrapers.  It also has a jingly soundtrack that neatly counterpoints the ballistic mayhem.

A close second is ‘Jingle All The Way’, in which Arnold plays a dad who promises to get his son a doll, sorry, action figure, for Christmas, but it turns out that this is the Must Have toy for Christmas and it’s really difficult to get hold of.  Much of the enjoyment of watching the movie is derived from watching Arnold flex his comedy muscles, which is not as much like watching a penguin trying to box as you might imagine.

If you need the plot of Die Hard explained to you, well, really.

Christmas is no time for cynicism and Home For The Holidays movies prove that it’s not just the Christmas diet that can be heartwarming.

Now.  I have an idea for a movie.  Witherspoon 127AAB/Beta is attached.  It’s set at…Thanksgiving.  Interested? 

Countdown to Christmas and Food and Drink

In the last blog post, it was suggested that the correct way to conclude a Christmas journey was to put aside the kettle (heresy!) and uncork some liquid festive cheer.  Certainly, this is accepted wisdom for the jolly fat chap who clocks up all those air miles on Christmas Eve, consuming so many glasses of sherry that it’s a wonder his nose isn’t as red as Rudolph’s.  And it’s good to note that with a properly prepared plate, there will be a mince pie for the old fella and a carrot, which used to be for the reindeer but is now considered the vegan option.

The term ‘vegan option’ is a somewhat contentious one at Christmas, traditionally a time for seeing just how many foods you can eat that contain, knowingly or unknowingly, suet.  Some consider using the term ‘vegan’ at Christmas on a par with using the word ‘Herod’.  Both put a downer on the whole festive experience but only one will go on Twitter to bloody moan about it if they feel in any way slighted because you are cooking dinner for twelve people and frankly have not got the time, energy, inclination or moral laxity necessary to have Quorn anywhere near your kitchen between 1^st December to 7^th January inclusive.

Remember a few years ago and it was suggested that it was fashionable to have an upside down Christmas tree?*  Would you have an upside down Christmas tree?  No.  No matter what glossy magazines are telling you, you would not have an upside down Christmas tree.  This is because if you are the sort or person that has a Christmas tree at all, you are a traditionalist and so your Christmas tree, and call me old fashioned here, your Christmas tree has the wide bit at the bottom and the pointy bit at the top.  You know, like trees have.  FFS.  Also, if you have your Christmas tree upside down, all the decorations would fall off.  Likewise, a traditionalist would not serve anything that has not been in some way made from, coated with, cooked in or soaked in some sort of animal product.  Case in point, roast potatoes.  Rest of the year, cook them with olive oil.  Christmas?  Goose fat.

There are certain foods that are exclusively consumed at Christmas, like dates.  There are certain drinks that are exclusively consumed at Christmas, like bucks fizz.  This is an excellent way of ruining two perfectly acceptable drinks, by combining them, and is only acceptable because it allows conformity to the Christmas social norm of drinking at breakfast.  The rest of the year, if you want to drink at breakfast, it’s vodka and tomato juice.  If you’re a vegan, you can have a sprig of celery too.  You are unlikely though to add Worcestershire Sauce.

So Christmas is a time for a traditional menu.  This is a problem for those who decide to go abroad for Christmas.  This is a fairly unwholesome practice in any case, as the only person who should be flying on Christmas Eve travels by sleigh.  I have never understood this compulsion to go to an airport, queue, get touched up in the security aisle, sit in a cramped seat and then decant somewhere unnaturally hot for December, only to be greeted on Christmas Morning by a slice of fruit and the promise of a beach barbeque later.

Unless you are flying home to see family, your place is at home, with your feet on the ground on Christmas Morning, with a glass of bucks fizz in your hand as you put the oven on and start peeling sprouts.

Christmas may be a time when we eat food we don’t eat at any other time of the year, but this should not include red snapper.

Many are in want.  If you are lucky enough to be able to serve your loved ones a traditional once-in-a-year dinner, then maybe take the opportunity to enjoy the tradition rather than rebel.  Just remember that the most important thing at the dinner table is each other.  Also, crackers.  Also, booze.

*Just Googled it.  Apparently it’s an Eastern European thing.  So not only is it wrong, it’s cultural appropriation.

Countdown to Christmas and Travel

Travelling at Christmas, especially travelling with gifts on Christmas Eve, is not restricted to a fat chap in a red suit.

Travel is famously connected to Christmas.  The whole thing started with a journey, when a young woman travelled on a donkey, a little donkey to be precise, with her husband to a small Middle Eastern town to take part in the census.  This was in more enlightened times, and the young woman was allowed to drive the donkey.  Also on the road that Christmas were three Oriental monarchs, using faith and what passed for sat-nav in 0BCE/0AD to guide them to the birthplace of the baby Jesus.  Add to this shepherds coming down from the hills, a little drummer boy and angels.

So the tradition continues.  Christmas is a time for visiting/inflicting yourself on relatives, and so the roads are full of folk who are going to spend various lengths of time with people they love, or people they are related to, or even people that are the reason Facebook was such a success, allowing people to keep in touch without actually having to spend time in one another’s company.

There are also, to be sure, those who actually enjoy the ritual of visiting at Christmas, and it’s the one time of the year when the parcel shelf at the back of a car actually fulfils the function it was named for.  Just as in September we see family cars on the motorway full of duvets and other paraphernalia of sending your sullen teen away to study so you can turn their bedroom into either a home gym, cinema room, or both, at Christmas you see cars with brightly wrapped prezzies in the back, a golden rule of hospitality being if you are going to spend three days at a relative’s house and you want to enjoy yourself, and enjoy the sporting subscriptions on their telly package that allows you to spend the wee small hours watching cricket beamed from a Caribbean clime, then you had best rock up with something substantial from John Lewis in a bow as a gift.  Of course a gift such as a crate of wine or a cheeseboard that weighs as much as a fully grown Labrador is also an excellent way of ensuring that you will have a fabulous Yule wherever you might be.

It’s a mystery why they shut down the train service on Christmas Day.  Executives who travel everywhere by BMW explain that it is because fewer people travel on bank holidays than at other times.  This is true for two reasons.  The first is a reduced or non-existent train service.  The other is that far fewer people are travelling to get to work.  Take it from me, if a train service ran on Christmas Day, people would use it and, what’s more, the people using it would all be happy to be using it.  If you want to shut down the rail network for two days for maintenance, can I suggest sometime in the second week of January, when everyone would be glad of a day or two off.

My favourite festive train journey was a few years ago, London to Ely on Christmas Eve.  There was a festive and upbeat atmosphere as people took their seats in the carriage, like a Christmassy version of everyone getting on the last helicopter off of the embassy roof, in this case everyone getting on one of the last trains leaving London before they closed down the network.  Lots of people had gifts, most were going home to loved ones, everyone had been drinking.

And car journeys can be pleasant too.  There’s traffic and there’s crap driving and there’s probably roadworks, but there’s the chance to put ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ on the car stereo, on a loop, and there is that sensation of turning off of the motorway, then turning off of the main roads and onto the minor roads before pulling up outside somewhere which, if all is as it should be, will be illuminated by twinkling lights and where somebody is putting on the kettle, thinking better of it, and uncorking the good stuff in anticipation of your arrival.