The northlondonhippy

Archive for December 26th, 2007

Happy fuck­ing xmas, fuckers!

I hope you all stuffed your faces and got got every­thing on your wish list; not lim­ited to, but prob­a­bly includ­ing: an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPod nano, a Mac­Book, a PSP, a PS3 and if you are seri­ously lucky, a Wii and if you are super lucky, nat­u­rally you found an nlh deluxe under your tree!

I’ve had a fairly nor­mal xmas, well nor­mal for me, because I’ve worked right through the hol­i­days and I ain’t fin­ished yet! I worked xmas eve, xmas day and I am work­ing tonight, box­ing day too.

Appar­ently, loads of peo­ple have to work over xmas, only I didn’t “have” to. I chose to and given the chance, I will prob­a­bly choose to again next year.

Next year is a long way, away. Who knows what the next 12 months may bring? Do you? If you answered yes, then email me with some horse rac­ing results for next week, or bet­ter yet the lot­tery num­bers for the next giant rollover. Please?

The first xmas I ever sold was 18 years ago. I was offered the chance to do a shift in a news­room in NYC for dou­ble pay, 400 cool dollaroonies.

Did I just type “dol­la­roonies”? I must be stoned.

I am.

I remem­ber ring­ing up my mother and inform­ing her that I was going to be a newswhore for xmas and I’d be miss­ing the usual fam­ily gath­er­ing. That was 1989. She was less than impressed, but ka-ching! That was a lot of money! It still is!

As a kid grow­ing up, xmas was a big deal and in my (now estranged) extended fam­ily, there was much cel­e­brat­ing to do with both my mother’s and father’s side of the family.

As I got older and we fell out with var­i­ous branches of our fam­ily tree, xmas’s were down­scaled, but still big events in my imme­di­ate family.

I liked it mainly for the gifts.

Xmas stopped being fun when I stopped get­ting bicycles.

The last xmas I shared with my par­ents was 1991 and every year since, I’ve either worked or just not gone. My dad died in Sept 2004, my mother is very dis­abled and has been con­fined to a bed, fol­low­ing a stroke in 2003 and now lives in a nurs­ing home. That’s 13 xmas’s avoided.

I tried to write about all of this last year and I couldn’t fin­ish it. I went into far more detail and skip­ping down mem­ory lane was dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble and I gave up. I still have what I wrote, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it again. Hey ho.

For most peo­ple, I think the hol­i­days are pure stress. All you need to do is visit your local high street or shop­ping dis­trict and watch how cunty every­one is to each other to see proof of this. Expec­ta­tions have to be met at all costs, even if it means elbow­ing some old lady out of the way, so you can get the last copy of Nigella Express.

Xmas for me, has come to mean my fam­ily, my imme­di­ate fam­ily. When I think about xmas, I think about the four of us, my par­ents, my younger brother and me.

I can remem­ber spend­ing many xmas eve’s unable to sleep, because I was so excited; adren­a­line cours­ing though my veins, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to rest.

I can remem­ber the smell of my mother’s home-baked xmas cookies.

I can remem­ber my dad swear­ing when he thought I couldn’t hear him, as he tried valiantly to assem­ble some crappy toy that wouldn’t sur­vive in one piece for more than a week.

And I can remem­ber my younger brother, just as excited as me, check­ing to see if our par­ents were awake at ridicu­lously early times, because we weren’t allowed to go down­stairs until they were ready to accom­pany us for the rit­ual rip­ping of the wrap­ping paper.

I can remem­ber more, much more, but it all just depresses me now because I’ll never have those times with my fam­ily again. I can’t.

These days, I don’t get excited about xmas, instead I count the sec­onds until it’s the 2nd of Jan­u­ary. Then its all over and I can exhale.

Though when I think about that first xmas I sold, back in 1989, for 400 dol­la­roonies, I wish I could give them a refund. Four hun­dred bucks for one more xmas with my fam­ily would be the bar­gain of the millennium!

I hope wher­ever you are, all your hol­i­day dreams came true and you spent it with peo­ple far less mis­er­able than me. Maybe hav­ing me trapped behind a desk over the hol­i­days is good for every­one, not just me. We’ll never know…