WHY I HATE CHRISTMAS!

IT WAS IN 1977 MY DAD FOUND THE BODY OF OUR PET WOMBAT WEDGED IN THE CHIMNEY. APPARENTLY, SHE’D CLIMBED DOWN

THE CHIMNEY DRESSED AS SANTA TO SURPRISE US ON CHRISTMAS DAY,

BUT HER PLAN’D GONE TRAGICALLY WRONG, AND THE PUNGENT SMELL OF ROTTING WOMBAT’D CAUSED

HIM TO DISCOVER HER FORLORN SOOT-SMEARED CORPSE AT BREAKFAST TIME ON BOXING DAY.

Apparently,

Philippa, as she was called, didn’t get stuck in the chimney and slowly die of suffocation as we had first suspected though. In fact, her heart gave out under the strain of a virulent dose of syphilis she’d contracted from an itinerant barberpole painter from Preston. Being unaware of this at the time, we ate her for dinner, and we all had the screaming shits for a month. The combined excess of ‘runny-scutter’ produced by our mutual dose of Syphilitic Wombat Arse began to overload the local shit-recycling plant and this, in turn, triggered an explosion which, unfortunately, killed my uncle Marmalade, and my twin cousins Bumrag and Shagnasty. But that’s not why I hate Christmas.

At the funeral of my faecally-engulfed relatives, my lovely aunty Persephone (named after the ancient Greek goddess of the underworld because she’d been conceived in an air-raid shelter with the help of a Cypriot ratcatcher called Costos) fainted, and bashed her head on the gravestone of a local ferret wrangler who had died of ill-fitting clogs in 1840.

Several days later her head went septic, so had to be amputated, but, being a feisty old bugger, she put up a good fight, but eventually died three weeks later. We saw this as something of a blessing because she’d always loved wearing hats! But that’s still not why I hate Christmas.

At Aunt Persephone’s funeral my maternal grandmother, Attila the Inebriated, unsteady on her feet due to suffering from a chronic case of rum and Coke, tripped over a nomadic tortoise and went headlong into Aunt Persephone’s open grave. Due to the prevailing Health & Safety Regulations we weren’t allowed to risk back injuries by helping her out of the grave so, on the advice of my grandfather (who knew stuff), we had the hole filled in despite her somewhat strident, though ultimately futile, protestations. It was heart-rending watching her valiantly covering her two-litre glass of rum and Coke as the earth cascaded down on top of her purple Mohican haircut! You might think that this is why I detest Christmas, but it isn’t.

Granny’s demise distressed my sister, Albert the Bastard, so much that she committed suicide by dissolving herself in the Manchester Ship Canal. Obviously, this left us without a body to bury so we decided to have a memorial service at the canal where we dissolved some flowers, some old bike frames, and a stolen Tesco trolley that’d been cluttering up the shed (Dad said it’d be a shame to waste the opportunity of getting rid of a bit of rubbish, and my sister’d always suffered from a slight iron deficiency anyway). However, even this dreadful incident could not lay claim to being the reason why I hate Christmas.

Following her funeral, we had a wake in a pub called The Welder’s Scrotum on the banks of the River Mersey in the picturesque little harbour village of Chorlton-upon-Wanksock and, as we were in such close proximity to the river, my uncle Sherbet suggested we develop the photos of the service in its frothy and somewhat acerbic waters, thus saving us £4.85 and a trip to Boots the Chemist. Unfortunately, though I have to say somewhat predictably, a fight started when my dead sister’s boyfriend, Bell-End Billy, tried to sell her clothes to a big fat transvestite called Colin the Man-Beast. My brother, Sterile Steven, accused Bell-End Billy of suggesting that our sister Albert was overweight and, in the ensuing brawl, Bell-End Billy’s head became dislodged and rolled under a table where my pet pelican, Flappy Bob, mistook it for a bag of haddock and promptly tried to swallow it whole. Generally speaking, a pelican has a rather impressive swallowing capability (we were very close, Flappy Bob and I…), but this proved to be a gulp too far, causing him to quickly become an ex-pelican. At this point the pub landlord bellowed “Last orders at the bar, you drunken bastards!” and, so angered and griefstricken was I by the loss of Flappy Bob, combined with the closing of the bar, I became very insistent Bell-End Billy must be professionally killed without delay. To defuse the situation my dad gave my mum a tenner (family rates), and she shot the headless bastard through the knackers with the pearlhandled blunderbuss she habitually carried in the leg of her knickers. Even this tawdry episode, though, is not the reason I hate Christmas, but it was at this point things began to take a definite turn for the worse...

Without the companionship of Flappy Bob, I became lonely and sullen. In my despair, I decided to write a desperate plea to Santa Claus. In my letter I appealed for him to go forward in time to 2022, perhaps with the cooperation of his friend Dr Who, and bring back a brand-new Triumph Rocket 3 GT

Triple Black, and a case of Wood’s Old Navy Rum (bottled in the 1970s and aged for 40+ years) as my Christmas presents for 1978.

It would seem my letter eventually found its way to him, and he wrote back explaining that he was currently engaged in clubbing baby fur seals to death in Newfoundland to provide new trim for his Christmas outfit, with the excess 10,000 pelts being sold off to the Super Soft Merkin Company to fund his new Ride a Reindeer bestiality brothel in Cardiff. “However,” he continued, “your letter has touched my stony-cold heart so deeply that I’m sending you a brand-new 1977 HarleyDavidson Sportster motorcycle!”

Perhaps now you can understand my deep-seated and heartfelt disenchantment with the whole Magic of Christmas thing! Merry Xmas? My arse!