Fruhzeitig - Early

It can’t be long before this country’s annual obsession with the early display Christmas decorations and advertising takes hold once more, filling our supermarkets with gaudy, worthless sparkly shit, and our television screens with a constant salvo of Buy This NOW Even If You Can’t Afford Your Gas Bill and Nag Your Single Parent For This Over-Priced Plastic Shit With Wheels And A Machine Gun. It was barely past August last year when my local supermarket started their dedicated festive isle, selling everything from tinsel and baubles to 8ft tall inflatable Santas. I almost considered buying one as a burglar deterrent - nobody’s going to break into a house with eight feet of St Nicholas swaying back and forth through the window. Any thief in their right mind would know that an occupant willing to buy something so ludicrously tacky will surely have a house-full of awful presents not worth nicking. Smearing faeces on the window would have a similar effect, but it starts to go off after a few days, and there’s nothing worse than poo gone bad. But anyway, the Santa was priced at eighty pounds, or to me and any other reasonably sane person, at £No-Fucking-Way. It’s mad though how there’d be Christmas cakes and mince pies on sale in October that would expire well before December 25th. See Ed Byrns’ set on reasons for early Christmases for numerous inspired jokes I can’t in good conscience steal. I’m sure they push it further and further back every year, so eventually they’ll be selling stuff for Christmas two years in the future in early March. It would be so much easier if everyone was either totally mean spirited, giving nothing to anyone ever, or the complete opposite. If everyone gave gifts to everyone else all year round, we wouldn’t have the redemption of our annual lack-of-gift-giving-guilt culminating on one sodding day in December.