Please Jesus, leave Christmas in December

IT is the Halloween weekend and I am walking without purpose through the Duty Free in Stansted Airport. Every now and again I stop to spray myself in perfume I have no intention of buying or slather expensive hand cream on my paws while trying to avoid the glare of omnipresent assistants. I am expertly squirting the remains of a £100 eye cream onto my fingertips when a spectre appears behind me. “Can I help with anything?” she squawks. I turn around with an expression like a puppy that’s been caught weeing on the carpet. She is wearing a lot of eye make-up. I can’t tell if it’s for Halloween or not. “Your skin is very dry,” she announces before launching into a spiel about peptides or reptiles or insecticides or whatever miracle ingredient is in this cream. I want to tell her I wrote about beauty for three years and this gloop is made up of the same basic ingredients as Pond’s Cold Cream except they blew a million having a celebrity in the ad hence its astronomical price, but instead I zone out and notice the song playing over the speakers. It sounds like... no, it couldn’t be. Oh, but yes it is, it’s bloody Christmas music. In October. This cannot be, I think, as I race to find a seating area out of earshot of Christina Aguilera singing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas when Halloween isn’t even over yet. And now ladies and germs, a short disclaimer before any of you have me drowned for being a Grinch. I love Christmas. It’s the one time of the year I get to see my most loved friends and family together. The weather might be cold but goddamn it our hearts are warm. And there’s bread sauce, which deserves a holiday of its own. But good God, let’s not allow advertisers or Christina Aguilera to drain every drop of joy out of it before November.