This is a wonderful commercial currently airing in the UK for John Lewis' department store. My cousin, Lisa, posted it on Facebook last weekend and - call me a complete softy and insatiable sucker for animals - it quite literally nearly made me cry. It's all things cute and adorable but watch out for that little hare, he'll tug hard at your heartstrings for sure.
Did you make it through without a lump in your throat? I didn't and it's taken me almost a week to dare watch it again for fear I'd start bawling. When did I become so hyper-emotional? (Though I can't deny, animals have always held that power over me.)
Anyhoo, back to business on the whole WTF with all this in-your-face overload on seasonal/festive/holiday/Christmas (yes, I dared say the C-word) stuff already?! Some of it started even before Halloween and certainly by Nov. 1st things kicked off in earnest. Cafes and hair salons had their decorations up by the strike of midnight, because we all know it's important to get coffee and a haircut on top of your wish list and hope to beat the stampede of Christmas shoppers. Horrendously cheesy 'holiday' pop songs, are being dutifully pumped out by the likes of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Mariah Carey et al and drilled into your brain from every angle of every store. Despite the pile of complaints this time last year about Shoppers Drug Mart, who burst out the Christmas tunes Nov. 1st, to the point they had no choice but to pull the music and wait...., it seems the holiday fever nevertheless begins the split second you utter your last "trick or treat". Same thing with TV - on your marks....get set.....November 1st - GO!!!!!
Decorations have popped up everywhere, seemingly overnight and even in some homes around our neighbourhood! What the....? And last night the Number 7 bus pulled up downtown fully decked out as Rudolph! I kid you not - lights, antlers, bells, even a ginormous red flashing nose. My first thought was, "Oh you've got to be kidding me! It's November, people! Seriously?!" Then I checked myself thinking, "oh well, it's for the kids I guess" but that was quickly followed up with, "But seriously, even kids shouldn't be brain-washed into believing Christmas Day is imminent." What's with all this rampant festive horniness? Why does everything have to be so over-commercialized and compounded by a relentless push to get us all in the shops, believing we'd better get swept up into the over-zealous frenzy to buy, buy, buy like our lives depend on it? I've already lost count of the number of people I've overheard or who've asked me directly if I'm ready/have any plans for the holidays. No I bloody-well do not! And why?, Because it's NOVEMBER! - Why not ask me again in a month!!! (And, I'll resist the urge to get on my annual high horse about the annoyingly creative ways that North Americans desperately skirt around the word "Christmas" like it's a dirty swear word, but you can sing out the words Hanukkah, Ramadan, Diwali etc. till your heart's content. I'm happy to acknowledge everyone else's holidays or festive season - I wouldn't be the slightest bit offended if someone told me they were celebrating Hanukkah so why, when it comes to Christmas that I grew up with, am I told I should find a different word to be more inclusive? Bah flippin' humbug, I say!
Perhaps part of what chokes me up about the heart-warming commercial above is that it hits on my inner child who desperately just wants Christmas to be Christmas again. I don't remember thinking about Christmas as a child until December 1st, when the excruciating wait throughout the next 24 days seemed to take for-EV-ERRRR!
Suffice to say, this time of year - every year without fail (even after 18 years living in Canada) - always makes me so terribly nostalgic for England, Europe and my family. Memories of being far too stuffed full of Quality Street, sprawled on the living room carpet and watching The Wizard of Oz, Sound of Music or Oliver Twist, for the umpteenth time - while desperately gagging for a pocket of non-smokey air beneath the fog of my parents, my nanna and Anders and any other visitors puffing away on cigarette after cigarette. In Anders' case it was cigars. I've never minded the smell (and even smoke one myself from time to time) but boy could they smog up a room like a 5-alarm fire. I miss the glass decorations that 'mysteriously' developed holes in them the year my older brother Terry got his hands on an air rifle. I miss the balloons that my dad always hung around the living room, where there would inevitably be one group made of two round balloons and a long thin one in-between. He'd stand, hands on hips, then point to it asking, "Who did that? Trini, did you do that? That's rude that is."
Christmas was also the one time of year where we had fruit in the house. Which is incredibly odd when you think about it, why wouldn't we have fruit any other time? "Because you lot get too greedy with it", my mum would say. In actual fact it was mostly Terry who devoured the fruit but we all got blamed (precious golden-boy Terry who could do no wrong).
My Aunty Pat and Uncle Roy ran a fruit/veg stall for years on Freeman Street Market - which seems nicer in the website photos than it ever has in real life. In fact my cousin, Tony, still runs the stall with his Dad but now in Cleethorpes Market Place, where we bumped into them during our visit last summer. Every Christmas my mum would order a massive box of fruit and veggies from them and we couldn't wait to dive in, especially on the satsumas. But we'd have to be careful - if we ate the fruit too fast we were greedy buggers, if we didn't eat it fast enough, it'd begin to spoil and there'd be threats of, "I'm not gonna bother with fruit next year if no bugger's going to eat it, it's too expensive to just throw away". Either way we were wrong.
Haha, I just remembered another festivus treat was After Eight mints, which I used to surreptitiously slide from their dark paper envelope carefully leaving the envelope in the box, so you could hardly tell how many had been eaten. Then I'd get a wave of nerves as my mum went to get one and discovered most were envelopes with no mint. That was usually a good time to offer up another cup of coffee and leave the room.Anyway, I could think of so many more treasured snippets from Christmasses past but it's really too early and the point of this post (not wanting to run on too long) was to let off some steam about why oh why are we being shoved aboard the high-speed holiday bandwaggon earlier and earlier each year and with increasing vehemence? What need is there for laundromats, coffee shops, MacDonald's and furniture stores to ramp up the Christmas rush? Heck, Starbucks is even advertising 'Buy one holiday coffee, get one free' and even Home Depot started prior to Halloween with their Fallidays campaign to get people thinking about home reno's as part of their Thanksgiving/Holiday preparations.
At this rate we'll be painting eggs and watching for the Easter Bunny by the weekend.
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