It is worth putting up the Christmas decorations. My family subscribes to the ‘why bother’ theory when it comes to Christmas decorations – or indeed most things involving Christmas unless they can eat it, watch it or unwrap it. I ignored them (as I usually do) and put the decorations up anyway. Without decorations Christmas is just another week off and Christmas Day is just another day. This year I went light crazy and even Coco the elephant wasn’t spared. I’m still a little disappointed that he looks less like a festive decoration and more like an elephant with chickenpox. See if you can spot the subliminal advertising in our tree.
It is worth writing Christmas cards. Another Christmas tradition to come under the ‘why bother’ category, and this one is harder for me to support because unlike decorating the tree, I do find it a chore. To make it less of one, we have a family tradition (which I had to suffer as child) of all writing them together, each signing our own name. I think you can imagine how well this goes down with my teenage sons. We pick a date early in December, sit round a table, put on the Christmas CD and crack on. Well, that’s the theory. Each of us have our own area of responsibility, other than writing our names. Mine is to head the card ‘dear xxx’, one son stamps the card, one puts in the newsletter and finally my husband puts the address label on the envelope and the signed card inside. Easy huh? Well it should be, but when someone has to ‘urgently’ look at their phone, or go to the toilet, or generally gets distracted, the whole system falls down. The wrong cards are put in the wrong envelope, some go unsigned, some unstamped. So if you receive a card from me addressed to someone else and only signed by me, that the post office ask you to pay for, you’ll know why. Is it all worth it? Yes – it is a way of making sure you don’t lose touch with people you can’t easily see, but who are important to you.
I have a reason to watch formula one next season. It took McLaren several months to come up with what I’d decided in two seconds, but at least I can look forward to watching formula one again next year now that Jenson Button has been confirmed in their 2015 line up. Until then, I always have my cardboard cut out.
