We're Here Tonight, And That's Enough

The Danbo, Greenplasticamy, 2011

Christmas seems like a thousand days ago. Maybe upward of four thousand. That's the last time I thought Christmas was for me - that is; the last time I felt I was in the targeted demographic, to use the marketing phraseology.

Long gone are the days when I was out of bed at 5am. As are the days I was out of bed at 9am. My noon awakenings hold up the unwrapping each year. It seems so far flung from the golden age I remember, but that might explain the emergence of traditions.

I'm usually the most eager to put up the tree because I remember coming home from primary school on the 12th each year and enjoying helping decorate. Similarly, every year before classes broke up for the holiday someone would bring in their Muppet Christmas Carol tape - ingrained enough in me that I have an opinion on the cutting of 'When Love is Gone'. For my brother and I, it's now a staple of Christmas Eve. I have my own odd tradition of watching Speed on the night of the 23rd... because the terrestrial première was the night before school finished for the holiday in my first year of high school. Occasionally I'll watch Die Hard given its minor Christmas theme, but so long as their isn't some kind of memory associated it'll never be a guarantee. The Santa Clause could make the playlist, but it's really the controller of BBC1's tradition not mine. I actually found myself disappointed that wasn't on this (last) year and that whatever station the office radio was tuned to hardly played any seasonal songs at all. It isn't Christmas until Noddy screams so, well, because that's what you heard each year.

Central Scotland isn't far North enough to warrant a festival of the return of the Sun or something suitably lengthy to stave off the dark of the Winter Solstice, yet the tinsel and lights erected in the build-up to the 25th are essential to keeping some of us going. However, once New Year's Day is past it starts to come down and return to the attic or basement. But the darkness remains. At best you hold onto the knowledge that in two or three months time the hours of daylight with have appreciably lengthened. Then the news reports begin marking this, that, or the other day of January as the most depressing of the year - and it is if we're talking about an annual display of lazy journalism.

I've been here before. If we define Christmas as festival of consumerism then the most materially satiated are children. From listening to colleagues with young children, it seems they enjoy the seasons almost vicariously. For me, trapped in an adolescence of the season, it's hard to find something meaningful. Once again I find myself in an awkward alliance with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Rome against the spectacle of materialism. I struggle to remember a year when I learnt by virtue of an advertising campaign that I had to have some toy, but I'm almost certain there must have been a time. Armed with the cynicism of ageing I know I could see through all the marketing and realise I had no need for pieces of plastic that would be discarded before Boxing Day and required my parents to work for hours in order to buy it. The only pieces of plastic I could ever be thankful for is Lego, which is a topic I'll cover soon.

Aside from the best thing Denmark ever gave the world, when I think of something I enjoyed playing with for a long time my mind recalled a sandpit. When my cousin moved to America around 1992 I inherited a large plastic orange coloured sandpit. As we didn't have any sand for it, I instead filled it with dirt. I made a complex of dams, canals, and reservoirs. I had pieces of PVC piping and sluice gates and created some kind of hydrological and hydrodynamical wonder to rival the Zuiderzee Works. Sometimes the cardboard box the overpriced item of Chinese export came in is far more entertaining. In fact, now that I've said that, I can remember it being true.

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