A Christmas blog post
It's Christmas, ho ho ho etc etc etc. I skipped my weeknotes again so I decided I'd write a post today instead. I can't decide if that format is working out for me or not but whatever, that's an issue for another time.
Anyway, yeah, 25th of December. I changed the background of the website to an old-school falling snow gif. Kind of wish I'd done this earlier tbh as it's pretty fun. Many years ago when I was at my first internet-making job, I jokingly suggested to my boss that we should do this to our (supposedly very professional) website, and she took the suggestion completely unironically and loved it and then I had to try to make a tasteful snowflake background. Now I wish I'd just gone all out and made it as tacky as possible. The one I picked for the Ratlands might be too subtle, but too much animation distracts my poor brain.
I am not a huge Christmas person. I like some of the movies and I like some of the food, but I often find it a bit stressful and my social battery tends to get a bit fried. So a quiet Christmas is preferable and thankfully that's what this year was.
Here is how my Christmas went today. I woke up around 8am and it was fucking freezing. Because I had an hour to kill before going over to my parents' house, I made myself a cup of tea and ate a cookie and watched "Seasonal Beatings", the Christmas episode of Peep Show.
"Seasonal Beatings" is a great episode. I like how it starts out by leaning into Mark's miserable bastard tendencies – getting Jeremy and Dobby each a pair of kitchen tongs for Christmas because they were on a two-for-one deal, refusing to acknowledge Dobby as his girlfriend, very slightly overreacting to the turkey joke – and then explains why he's such a miserable bastard by introducing his incredibly evil dad. Of course he's on edge. So when he gets a rare win in the end, even if it's a bit of a pyrrhic victory, you do feel happy for him.
The contrast between Mark and Jeremy's expectations for Christmas is also funny to me – Jeremy is desperately trying to recapture his childhood wonder (and childish petulance) while Mark is approaching the day as a horrible slog to be endured. But also everyone has their own traditions and feelings about the way the holiday should be spent, and we don't always realise how deeply ingrained these are until they clash with someone else's idea of Christmas.
My family, for example, are not very big gift givers, so our idea of a festive blowout is a Secret Santa with a £30 price cap. But my partner's family are huge on gifts, and so for the first Christmas where we were together, our gifts to each other were comically disproportionate.
So I mentioned to my parents at breakfast that I had watched this episode, and then I went home again for a few hours and wrote the preceding half of this post. When I came back my dad informed me that he had also decided to rewatch the episode, and he said – completely unprompted – that my partner was like Jeremy, getting everyone really nice, thoughtful gifts, and I was like Mark Corrigan. So thank you Dad for that. Unfortunately I'd had exactly the same thought watching it so I couldn't even argue with him.
(A brief digression back to Christmas traditions – my own favourite tradition we have is actually one from Christmas Eve, which is just that we sit around and play a board game and eat chocolate. Last night we played Carcassonne. I did not win, as my sister and I wrestled for control of The Big Field and her gambit was the one that paid off, but it was fun all the same.)
Anyway, once my dad had finished roasting me, we all ate Christmas dinner (no cauliflower, cauliflower is not traditional) and I did the washing-up.
After that my mum and I decided to revisit another old tradition by rewatching White Christmas, which is an incredibly goofy movie that we both love despite its many issues. Technicolor still just looks so damn good. I crave saturation!!! Also I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone have more fun on screen than Danny Kaye seems to be having in that reprise of "Sisters".
By this point my poor dog was just so completely done with everything and was desperate to go to bed, so I went home and now I am writing the rest of this post.
Overall I had a very nice day. But also I am looking forward to tomorrow's Boxing Day tradition of doing absolutely fuck all. 90% of the food I have in the house right now is chocolate. I think I'll probably make a start on that and the new series of Jet Lag.
Merry Christmas!
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