Prep

I really like Christmas. Always have. The best part of Christmas is… Christmas. The worst part is how it starts far too early. All of this is largely written in stone by now. What is relatively new is the preparation for Christmas and, more specifically, how much I’ve come to embrace and enjoy it.

Oh, I don’t mean the November hype that lands the exact moment that Halloween ends. I don’t like that at all. A whisper of a Christmas song an inch before December can give me profound shivers. I neither like nor want any of that.

But these days, the ten days or so before Christmas, I’ve come to embrace them as an integral part of the season and, yes, almost one of the best parts. Anticipation, expectation, even a little nervousness. Let the planes fly on time, let the nasty bugs keep at bay, at least until January. Getting there can be half the fun.

I think this valuing of the pre-Christmas melee has only really come along since the guys started to live elsewhere. One in Dublin, one in London now. It seemed to sneak up and become a real thing without ever fully announcing itself. I think their absence and the promise of their arriving back at the wreath-bedecked door makes the promise of the holiday almost as good as the fact.

You have to get the stuff out of the attic some days before you do anything with it. Otherwise, the coloured lights tend to suffer some kind of electronic heart attack and refuse to work. Until this year, I really thought that the annual deterioration of the box that contains the fake second Christmas tree was a feature particular to me. But, this year, I see memes and online pictures that confirms that the tatty, over taped, box is a largely universal thing. There is comfort in this. I’m not as slack as I thought or at least only as slack as many more of you.

The main tree is a real one. The man who sells the Christmas tree gives me my annual personal five-euro discount and recounts to whoever else is in the vicinity that I am indeed the ‘Man Who Gave His Christmas Tree Away’ (his capitals, not mine). It was nothing much. The tree man had just presented me with the most beautiful tree I had ever seen when a Mother and Child came into the shop and looked wistfully at it. She actually shed a tear when she saw my tree. “It would look so lovely in my window,’ she said. Call me foolish but I saw something deeper underlying her wish for the tree. Some unspoken grief perhaps... who knows? In any event, I gave her the tree and took another, slightly lesser one. I told her that the tree was too darned big for my front room anyway. It was nothing, really, it was a decade ago. But, every year, the tree man recounts the story with something close to awe and slips me a fiver back. This year, a friend, Coleman, was buying his tree and lining up to carry it the couple of streets to his house. I carried it with him. We chatted along the way, from pointy end of tree to butt end of tree, and it was pleasant and seasonal. The trees all seem a little light on top this year but it’s nothing that a couple of sets of pre-warmed-up lights can’t fix.

The word is out. The Baileys is on offer in Supervalu. Get down there and get a few bottles in.

The Christmas Radio Times is very expensive at over eight euro but the shopkeeper and me both agree it has to be done. The Irish version, the RTE Guide, is great but I love my RT too much to switch now. Bring it home and shake all the advert sections out. Put it under the tree but not before noting that the Christmas University Challenges have already started, and I’ve missed two already. Get a series link on the others. Only Connect too.

Put on Sky Cinema and cancel it again the day after so you have it for just the month. Catch up on all the movies you missed through the year. I’ve already really enjoyed The Fabelmans. What were you thinking of, not liking it?

Carols singers gather in the shopping arcade. Nobody has any money for them. We’re all tapping our cards and our phones these days. It’s a crisis in wassailing.

Work. Everybody wants everything by Christmas even though they won’t do anything with it until the New Year. Keep a cool head and a dry trouser. Holidays are coming.

Buy lots of books. Books are great. They are so easy to wrap up too. The corners of the sheet fold in at the ends so nicely.

This week, despite a spate of panics, the last day of work will surely come. I will be alone in the office as I shut it down and I will play Thomas Hampson singing 'O Tannenbaum', just as I always do. Then I will lock the door and it will be Christmas for real.

Enjoy it when it comes and enjoy the coming of it too.

Yeah?

Yeah.