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.