Opinion

Anita Robinson: Noddy Holder doesn't sound like Christmas to me

Women spend more than 300 hours preparing for Christmas, including swooping on the shops, according to a recent survey
Women spend more than 300 hours preparing for Christmas, including swooping on the shops, according to a recent survey Women spend more than 300 hours preparing for Christmas, including swooping on the shops, according to a recent survey

'TIS the season to be jolly, but my Grinch factor rises exponentially as Christmas approaches.

I like Christmas, in theory, but the energy-sapping reality of matching gift with recipient, card with addressee and ALL THAT WRAPPING, makes me long to lie down in a darkened room until it's over.

Worse, is the marathon food shopping that invests us all with a siege mentality.

We lay in jumbo packs of stuff we couldn't consume in a month of Sundays, because the shops will be closed for one whole day.

And isn't it odd that on 364 days of the year, a hot meal takes 60 minutes to make, but six hours on Christmas Day?

At the hairdressers, the euphoric effects of a peppermint scalp massage are suddenly negated by the junior administering it, who pipes up, "I've only two presents left to buy and that'll be me done."

The date? December 8. I'm seized by a sudden urge to smack her smartly around the legs with a wet towel.

The world is divided into people who do things calmly, systematically and in good time and throw the squawking, last-minute, headless-chicken rest of us into contagious panic.

I read with no surprise that a recent survey reports women spending 300-plus hours preparing for Christmas.

Like the proverbial piece of string, Christmas is as long as you want it to be, but year on year, retailers are stretching our elastic to breaking-point.

I admit with pride to being a veteran of the Procrastinators' League, refusing to be either harried or hurried into starting Christmas in September, and if enough people dug their heels in, we wouldn't be driven astray in the head by Slade's Noddy Holder bellowing at us in every shopping mall from Halloween onwards.

The media adopt a sympathetic approach to the seasonally challenged by projecting Christmas as a kind of ailment, for which they have the perfect antidote.

A succession of chefs and style gurus fill our screens: Nigella, queen of the wee shrunken cardigan knocking up calorie-laden cardiac arrests as alternatives to traditional Christmas pudding; Kirstie, torturing evergreen-ery into ghastly wreaths and garlands.

The tree, once carted home the day before Christmas Eve and wedged in a bucket, scented the whole house with pine resin.

From the attic came the battered box of decorations and the annual battle with the ancient fairylights ensued.

Now it comes complete in fibre-optic splendour, baubled and bowed in a colourway of your choice and a spring-loaded fairy.

Every suburban garden's got up like the Blackpool illuminations and the star of Bethlehem's lost in civic laser light.

Christmas anticipation, sustainable for 48 hours, disseminates over 48 days into peevishness with a timetable that purports to be all excitement, but proves to be only a tinsel-trimmed hamster-wheel of perpetual effort.

Stop people on the street and they will quote a list of Christmas irritants: the long throbbing procession of cars inching slowly towards the last too-small space in the multi-storey car park; exasperation mirrored in the cash desk to shop door queues of waiting-to-pay customers; a trailing skein of grimly exhausted mums, arms full of grizzing infants waiting admission to Santa's grotto.

Note the strained-faced crowds, purses gaping, circulating gloomily, like slowly stirred porridge.

While stoutly resisting the tyranny of commercial Christmas, I confess I have in my fridge already brandy sauce, brandy cream and brandy butter, because, as Auntie Mollie would say: "There'll be no buyin' of them nearer the time."

I wouldn't mind, but I haven't any pudding yet to put them on.

Come six o'clock on Christmas Eve, the frenzied beep of cash tills is silenced, car parks empty and store-fronts go dark - save for the fluorescent flare of posters proclaiming 'GIGANTIC SALE - STARTS BOXING DAY'.

And that's it. For better of worse, for richer or - more probably - poorer, we must make Christmas of what we have.

Now, compulsory enjoyment kicks in and in pubs, clubs and restaurants, Slade and Noddy Holder drown out the midnight peal of Nativity bells.