The Ghost of Christmas Past
And here we are again – another Christmas day almost upon us.
There is a sort of fever (or fervour?) that seems to grip the western nations at this time of year that has no basis in sanity. Everyone goes out buying extravagant and usually unaffordable gifts for their loved ones, often spending the rest of the year paying off the liberally used credit cards. And because? Well, because Christmas, innit! I used to be as guilty as most, caught up in the frenzy of ‘The Season of Goodwill’, paying out money I didn’t have for things that people didn’t need. It’s quite contagious.
And then there’s the food and the drink. Even here in Greece, Where Christmas plays second fiddle to Easter, looking at people’s shopping trolleys in the supermarket the past day or two, you’d think they were preparing for a siege. It’s like a collective madness descends, enveloping all, displacing our normal sense of reasoning and practicality, and sweeping all before it.
These days, I tend to be somewhat curmudgeonly about the whole affair, and find all the false bonhomie rather tiresome. Before I left UK this cynicism was already creeping in, although I would try to disguise it so as not to be impolite. But I heartily disliked all the “Merry Christmas”-ing from people I barely knew, and being expected to join in with their faux jollity. Likewise all the “Happy New Year”-ing. So it’s another year; so what? It probably won’t be much different from the last year, or the year before that, so what’s the big deal?
God, I’m a miserable bastard! Ha! But I’m not really miserable. Honest! I enjoy celebrating when there’s something tangible to celebrate, but Christmas and New Year (ok, maybe not so much New Year) are just over-hyped commercial spend-fests with nothing to really celebrate at all, unless you celebrate Christmas from a purely religious point of view, which is a different kind of celebration altogether. And being mugged by people in the street expecting me to join in with the charade used to quite piss me off.
I suppose it was different when I had young (and not so young) kids. The whole jamboree was for their pleasure; the decorations, the tree, the presents, the goodies. They, of course, loved it all. The excitement would build up for weeks beforehand. I can remember from when I was young what a big event Christmas was for me. The anticipation was almost unbearable. So much so, that the actual day, when it finally rolled around, tended to be a bit of an anticlimax.
But I suppose it’s an excuse for a bit of a knees-up. Get a bit pissed, eat far too much over-rich food, have to endure the bits of the family you spend most of the rest of the year avoiding, that sort of thing.
I was reading an article a couple of days ago, either on the BBC site or the Daily Telegraph, I can’t remember now, about a group of five(?) people who in 1967 as student teachers went travelling in a Land Rover overland to India, and it described how they spent Christmas Day 50 years ago in a desert somewhere in Iran. It caught my interest because it reminded me that that same Christmas Day 50 years ago, I was in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was my first Christmas away from home, and in a country that didn’t celebrate Christmas. I did get a small taste of Christmas though, as I’d made friends with an American guy who was working with the Peace Corps there, and he invited me to a Christmas Eve soirée at their headquarters (just a house, actually), where they had all the decorations up and so on. It was quite an agreeable evening, despite the fact that most of them were very straight, conventional, buttoned-up people, who I didn’t have much in common with. Christmas Day itself, I spent most of the day in Tibetan Joe’s café / restaurant (owned and run by a Tibetan guy called Joe, unsurprisingly), drinking tea, eating snacks, smoking dope and listening to his brand new copy of Sgt Peppers, which was pretty ok too. It was a marked change to my past experiences of Christmas, that’s for sure.
I guess many people of my generation stay in the Christmas loop because although their children have now grown up, their grandchildren keep it alive for them. I’m sure if I lived closer to my grandchildren, I wouldn’t be so ‘Bah! Humbug!’ in my attitude. However, with three of them living in Australia, and the other two in UK, I don’t get to spend Christmas with them. And these days, being married to an Asian woman with a Buddhist upbringing, and thus no real connection to, or experience of Christmas, it all tends to be very low-key.
I do recreate some of the things that traditionally are associated with the day, though, such as making a mid-morning brunch of smoked salmon and champagne, and I’ll be cooking a full roast meal which will be accompanied by a nice wine. Last year I cooked a goose. Christ, what a fucking palaver. If I’d known what I was doing, it would have helped, but I thought it was going to be like cooking a large chicken – piece of piss. But no, it wasn’t like a large chicken. It was much more complicated. I won’t bore you with the details, but it did tax my culinary skills. I managed, though, and it was a great meal. We were eating bloody goose stew for about a month after.
But this year it’s a capon. I know what I’m doing with chicken, which keeps the stress levels down. The only thing which takes a lot of time when I cook a roast is the gravy, which I always make from scratch with onions, rendered down in olive oil until they caramelise, and which forms the basis of the gravy. Then it’s stock, red wine and seasonings to make the sauce. But I usually cook a huge pot of the stuff, and freeze enough in containers for several meals.
So, you see, I’m not entirely Scrooge-like in my approach to the festive season!
Slightly off at a tangent, I read an article today which made me glad of my cultural background:
Iran’s moral police have arrested 230 people at two winter solstice celebration parties in Tehran.
Col Zulfikar Barfar, head of Tehran’s moral-security force, said the partygoers had been drinking and dancing at the mixed parties.
Drinking and dancing at a mixed party – how utterly, utterly sinful.
Such a shame; I had some good times in Tehran back before the revolution. There were some great bars downtown, and the people were for the most part friendly and fun. And there were a lot of attractive mini-skirted women around, too.
‘The Moral Police’. Has a nice ring to it, eh? Doubtless it’s what Public Health in the west aspires to. They’d love to raid Christmas parties, truncheons drawn, to arrest all those evil drinkers and smokers.
Anyhow, my curmudgeonliness (is that a word?) notwithstanding, I’d like to wish my readers a most enjoyable Christmas, and a happy and prosperous New Year. 2017 has been quite interesting, what with the shenanigans surrounding Trump and Brexit, and I think both those stories have a long way to run yet, so 2018 should prove to be equally entertaining.
Another good read mate! I have 40 year old drunken memory of hiring a death trap scooter on Corfu. I took it for a ride to nowhere in particular, negotiated a tight right hand bend onto a very steep slope. No brakes! Ended up bloodied on the beach. If you encounter a square meter of skin twisting slowly in the wind, it’s mine! I think that was nisaki?
By the way merry Christmas to you and yours. PS I’m in a critical care unit in Newcastle, and very happy to be here. No visiting in-laws, Christmas lunch and all the other bollocks. By the time I get out it will all have passed!
Nis, just stumbled across this which might interest you: http://www.messynessychic.com/2014/03/11/road-trip-to-afghanistan-snapshots-from-the-lost-hippie-trail/
” It was my first Christmas away from home, and in a country that didn’t celebrate Christmas.”
SNAP! In my case it was somewhere even more exotic and foreign than Nepal: Wolverhampton. A Xmas spent in the company of several young women and not so young women in a squat, Colonel Merrydown and James Beam. Memories blur but I recall a half naked Australian woman of Italian descent teaching me how to cook a real Spag Bol (found out years later that was bollocks btw), Sex to Vivaldi on the mono tape player and Austrian Xmas biscuits. It was also where I met the love of my life- Mistress Nicotiania.
I had a bar in Nisaki for a couple of years back in 2003 – 2005 (hence the username), but I didn’t notice any dried skin flapping around! 🙂
I don’t envy you being in hospital – I bloody hate hospitals, and do everything I can to avoid them. Sometimes, though, there is no choice in the matter. Last time for me was about 7 – 8 years ago, when I had to spend a few days in the hospital in Ioannina having a hernia repaired. I couldn’t get out of the place fast enough.
That’s a great link, BD. Those photos really take me back. I’ll bookmark that for future use.
The squat sounds like fun. Memories are made of stuff like that. I look back sometimes and think “How the fuck did I wind up in that situation?” The answer, of course, is that I was young, crazy, and seemingly immortal.
Way I see it, you’ve got the religious bit about a carpenter’s wife what knocked up by some form of rather arrogant ethereal force what made a big issue that his bastard be given a whole stack of attention, despite the fact its cuckolded “father” had fucked up and sprog was birthed in a filthy barn.
So the real father manages to light up the sky, day and night mind you, with a really bright light – and that results in a fantastic number of financial contributions from a whole stack of really rich people, so ensuring said carpenter and missus are set up for life.
Sprog of course disappears from view until it’s old enough to wreak havoc on the religious, political and social establishment, until he becomes such a pain in the arse that they arrange for him to be killed.
But they do it all right and proper, following Roman law and getting the local bigwig to sanction it, basically because the establishment managed to get a bunch of “protesters” to bray for his blood.
And they wanted the bastard shut up real fast, so the vinegar, then the spear bit.
Go along with that and 25 December allows you to allow in the only son sent to save us.
Or you can go with that business of Santa doing the whole planet in one night, slinging presents into socks and munching on mince pies at each and every stop over.
Works with kids until age 6, though they’ll go along with it because they’re manipulative buggers and they’ll get bigger, better presents if it’s seen they come through a middleman who they can write to. Used to be that list was bunged into the fireplace and Santa’s elves would make sense of it. Now they post it to Santa at the north Pole. (And here’s the address:
https://www.santaclausvillage.info/santa-claus/santa-claus-main-post-office/).
Being a little more prosaic, the shops are shut here on the 25th and 26th, so yes there’s reason to stock up just in case so and so drops by with the kids.
However as you’ll doubtless recall from your time as bar owner that many expat Brits are very lucrative business for a “traditional” Christmas Lunch, usually associated with stacks of mulled wine (uses up all the cheap and crappy stuff they couldn’t flog).
What’s amusing is it’s caught on big time in the UK, with some high end eateries charging up to 85 quid a head for food only – and you gotta book early!
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/restaurants/christmas-dinner-2017-the-best-festive-menus-in-london-a3657416.html
And all this on account of a carpenter’s wife being sexually violated a couple of thousand years ago!
“curmudgeonliness (is that a word?)”
I think you had it right with
” I tend to be somewhat curmudgeonly about the whole affair, and find all the false bonhomie rather tiresome.” -so, curmudgeonlyness, curmudgeonlyisness curmudgeonishness,curmudgeoness, who can tell… ?
It was a flat tired joke for me putting up the fake xmas tree here last week;- without spirit, but as a repeat, to see what came of it;-
I’d saved a boxed old 3-section 2m high artificial xmas tree from building demolition as I exited the old place 3 1/2 yrs ago, didn’t erect it the first year, but on the 2nd did, along with decorations gained free, for a laugh, a try-out, an affectionate touch-stone to long ago childhood times, the last time I remembered a Christmas tree – even though plastic – I did think of spraying with organic spruce or pine oil mist! ;- and after missing the 1st year I left it up all the way through the 2nd year;- colour, decoration.
Then I took it down early last year… and only last week got it out again.
In the same corner.
Oh well, it’s been background for the last few SBD appear ins!
But I had no real joy in it.
Maybe we really are up to date …
I’ve been much more enthusiastic about growing herbs and salad vegetables on the balcony.
That’s a great ongoing exercise! ;=})
Have to read up again on Companion Planting, next…
Later;-
Way I see it, you’ve got the religious bit about a carpenter’s wife what knocked up
Lots of translation errors, of course.
You’ve got this, as intro to a talk, advert, he’s dead now:
http://graal.co.uk/bloodlinelecture.php
(don’t lose patience, read down… )
and then this, an archived much more lovely presentation of the whole text.
http://www.karenlyster.com/bookish.html
Merry Xmas !!!
Vivaldi on mono can’t be too bad!
It is when someone is pressing their thighs over your ears…..
Cunnilingus -if you can hear the music you’redoing it wrong.
Happy Christmas Kevin !
All that and ‘Happy New Year’, we have made it, somehow, thru another one.
That is a real reason to celebrate, I guess.
Indeed, Gary. When you get to our age, you become acutely aware of the meaning of mortality, and reaching the end of yet another year comes as a pleasant surprise! 🙂
Christmas: what is so wonderful about a religion that started with adultery and ended in suicide?
Nisakiman, wishing you
Many sexual arousals
Cuddly toys in bed.
Gnomes in the kitchen.
Ducklings in the bath.
Pink elephants on the wallpaper.
But especially a fantastically beautiful,
cozy and brilliant year!
Well that list of good wishes is a little out of the ordinary, I must say! 🙂
Thanks, and same to you!