Pollyism of the week
It’s that time of year when you get a feeling the sun is lying to you. This is especially so in Wellington, where it feels like the sun is a total big fat yellow liar. Don’t you pretend it’s warm, you big golden orb! It’s eight degrees and feels like minus 10, and there you are, shining away like a Christmas bauble.
Which brings me to where I am at and where I want to be at – and that’s jolly well not Christmas! I want to talk about it at arm’s-length.
The Christmas decorations are already in the shops, awkwardly sitting there, knowing most of us are rolling our eyes and wishing we had another few months to get out of last year’s debt hole. Oh I hate the Yuletide debt that follows me around for at least nine months.
Every year I decide this Christmas will be basic and uncomplicated – one present each and just salads and a barbecue. Every year my mother says, “Oh, I do hope we’re having your lovely ‘turducken’ for Christmas lunch!”
This is a tradition we started seven years ago: the medieval treat of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey – all stuffed and delicious.
I start thawing it a week before Christmas, then spend almost an entire day cooking the beast. I can’t possibly disappoint Mum, though. The turducken is like the star of the show. Like Santa at the end of the good ol’ Farmers Christmas parade. Note to self: order turducken today.
In larger stores, Christmas decorations are already for sale and the chocolate advent calendars are sitting right by the check-out. You must be kidding me? If I buy an advent calendar this week, I’ll scoff it as emergency chocolate in the middle of the night for the next three days. Like fireworks, advent calendars are dangerous and shouldn’t be sold before the official countdown. No doubt I’ll go through 10 by the tenth of November.
What do I want for Christmas? Oh, some sexy, sexy stuff, please Santa. I’d like a new roof and kitchen cupboards that don’t have all the dumb covering peeling off. I’d also like my teeth fixed please St Nick. It might be a bit costly, like 10 grand (for just the teeth), but I’d be ever so grateful!
Oh, and Santa, a personal trainer too please, though if it’s between teeth and trainer, I’ll opt for the teeth, thanks.
The truth of the matter is, I’m desperate for a new roof. It’s been patched and re-patched so many times. In any decent storm, a leak appears somewhere ... sometimes even in a light fitting.
So Santa, if you and your reindeer buddies want a soft landing at mine, then the roof would be particularly fab.
What a sexy Christmas, huh? Mum having me slave over a barbaric, macabre bird arrangement, and my stocking filled with corrugated iron, improved teeth and a bossy woman in yoga pants. Well, ho ho, bloody ho!
Right, I’m starving. I think it might be time for a midmorning advent calendar. Care to join me?