How Early Is Too Early? And Can Good Things Come Too Fast?
… Get your minds out of the gutter, please, as whilst this is of course a space to discuss men’s problems, we are not discussing that specific problem today, rather the problem of ‘When is the right time to start planning Christmas?’
We’ve got two weeks until the clocks change and we start using words like ‘cozy’ and ‘snug’ to describe the hell that is the sun being down by 4:30pm and the fact you can’t leave the house without a coat. Pub benches are wet, rather than drying your washing on a line you have to cook it on a radiator, and coffee shops decide that, actually, you don’t want coffee that tastes like coffee anymore, you want a warm milkshake with more calories than a roast dinner that tastes somewhere between a carrot cake and a Horlicks.
If it’s not clear already, the man writing this article isn’t a fan of the colder months. If it didn’t mean famine and fires and generally the beginnings of the end of civilization, I’d probably be quite up for global warming, and if my life goes the way I want it to and Idris eventually becomes a multi-national chain with 12 stores across London and some dodgy brand deals with the Saudi’s, I’ll happily retire to Tenerife, never face a proper winter again and aim to get my skin the same colour and texture of an old leather boot by the time I’m 60. But as all of that is still looking unlikely, it’s time to pinch our noses, dig out the puffer coats and prepare for about 2 months of every bit of small talk starting with ‘So what are you guys doing for Christmas this year then?’
You can plot your life by how you answer that question. For about 25 years it’s ‘Going home to my parents’, then you get 5/10 years of experiencing a bit of dread as you say ‘Me and my partner are going to spend it with my parents’, or even more dread as you say ‘Me and my partner are going to spend it with their parents’, and then for many of us things get a bit simpler when you can say ‘we’re staying at ours, the kids are happiest at home with their toys’, completely removing all the politics of who’s parents you have to visit, and then I assume it’s going to become something about whether your kids are coming to visit or not and then whether the care home is serving Turkey or not. Sounds like bliss to be honest.
But what’s startling is how early these conversations are tending to happen. At first I thought I might have been having some kind of Christmas-Carol-esque hallucination, but after rubbing my eyes it was real - I saw a bus with a Christmas advert on it the other day. First week of October. I told Matt. He said that, in one of the weirder spots of his local Tesco, end of the isle or perhaps behind the kid’s clothes, he saw some mince pies the other day. And honestly, I’m not against it. As mentioned as briefly as I could earlier, the winter in this country is bleak and long, there’s a long way to go until park days and t-shirt weather is back, and the only way to get through it is to make the most of every little event, every little landmark.
Go big on your Halloween costume, buy extra sparklers for bonfire night, and why stop there, if you’ve got the time and the money, buy yourself a nice big rocket for about 40 quid from the fireworks shop on Stroud Green road, jump on the overground with your mates and a bag of tins, stay on the train until you start seeing fields, hop off, stand in the corner of the field with some cold tins and fingerless gloves and try to make more noise than the blitz. And don’t tell the police we suggested that. Get your Christmas tree up in November, do two advent calendars for November and December, do a dry Jan and then drink all the drinks you would have drunk over the course of the month in one night on the 31st, propose on Valentines day and then give them up for Lent, do it all and do it with all the energy and enthusiasm you have, until the pub benches have dried and we can all stop pretending that being ‘cozy’ is the same as being happy.
And on that note, yes, our books are now open for Christmas. Book in early if you can, we want you going back to your in-laws looking gorgeous.
