And so it came to pass, that the free park-and-ride service began again in my local town...
It's Christmas shopping time again. The truly organised have it finished - the rest of us are left to battle through the crowds of our own inadequacies, our lists crumpling in our pockets, despair and agitation mounting in our hearts as we discover that the very thing we've just realised would make the perfect present for that hard-to-buy-for friend sold out about a week ago. Not even the ginger cake in Starbucks can make us feel better now.
The expectations do not always match the dream. The Christmas tree in the seaside town where I live was already leaning over before anyone had had time to turn the lights on. Within a week or two it will - as always seems to happen - be lying at the side of the road, its tinsel flailing helplessly, its lights a parody of their own cheer - like a drunken reveller who didn't quite make it home from the office party - a casualty of the winter storms. All those idealised, iconic Christmas memories of snow and frost and clear skies darken to the steel grey of cloudscapes full of sleet and hail and disappointment. It's the coldness which stays in your bones for months and makes you shiver at the very thought - not the coldness of red cheeks and woolly gloves and roaring fires and toasted marshmallows.
A man in a clown costume was walking through my local shopping town yesterday, just as I was thinking that Christmas shopping really was part of the inner circle of Dante's Inferno. The incongruity of this contrast struck me as a moment of pure comedy genius. A clown, and hell unleashed. The jostling - the pushing - the shoving - the near impossibility of shopping for that person who, when asked for hints, just says, "Oh, you know - I don't really need anything. I don't really mind. Just, you know - surprise me." Those words of horror. Unleashing hell. And hell will never more certainly be unleashed than if you really surprise that person... by buying nothing.
And of course, Buy Nothing Day takes place in late November. It taunts us - mocks us. Its superiority of motive sneers at us from its pedestal of righteousness and we know we should be doing what it's telling us. We buy far too much, after all - far more than we need, than anybody needs. And yet what are we to do? Because these days, we all want more. Need more, somehow - and Christmas is the ultimate moment for excess. At Christmastime, everybody suddenly wants more. Wants it all. The adverts on the television and the radio make it clear. "This Christmas, get more. For less." "Buy three gifts - get one free." Pile your tables high with defrosted, fatty treats: "That's why mums go to Iceland". Unleash Hell! And anyway: what about all these cut price gifts and every third gift free. Does this mean that we give the free gift to the person we don't really like? So that when they say, "Oh, you shouldn't have..." you end up thinking, "Well, actually, I didn't really..."? Do the cut-price presents equate to cut-price feelings in a bargain bin of friendship and family loyalties? And don't start me on the thrifty souls who keep the labels on their presents, every year, then queue up in the early hours of Boxing Day, to return the items to the shops, and buy back twice as much for half the price?
Christmas isn't supposed to be just about the presents. But somehow it always is. Somehow the refrain of Goodwill to all Men seems to ring very hollow when that present you've chosen carefully ends up being thrown aside because it didn't cost enough or you got the colour wrong or they already had one. Decking the Halls with Boughs of Holly is just another disappointment if next door's illuminations are even brighter or twinklier or more tasteful. We need some joy in our bleak midwinter. It's not that there isn't room for presents in the face of the "true meaning of Christmas" which our clergymen teach us about - after all, the nativity story itself talks of gift-giving. It's more that the accelerating crescendo of the Christmas shopping frenzy generates its own whirlwind of exclamation marks - more! for less! hurry! - as we hurtle inexorably, faster and faster until it feels as though the brakes have failed, towards the festive red lights of December 25th. So that when we reach the supposedly magical date, we're just too tired and we don't care any more and there's a massive sense of anti-climax as we sink into that Christmas afternoon hibernation of relief.
Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow, we can go to the sales.