Golden Oldies
OH! CAROLS
My name is Rachel Johnson and I am a Christmasphobic. Let us count the ways. I don’t like presents as I have a – completely rational – horror of clutter, triggered by long co-habitation with a hoarder who drools over Uncle Monty’s rotting bothy in Withnail and I, while my dream home is a clean, white cube on a Greek island.
My main reason for not liking Christmas presents is because there’s nowhere to put anything in my two houses (even though the country one serves as a pricey storage unit, just as my Agas are basically very expensive radiators).
Next, I don’t like Christmas pop songs. I wouldn’t mind so much if the shops played the tinselly Christmas hits of yore on Christmas Eve, say, to encourage menfolk to splash out on headachy perfume and scratchy lingerie for the lady wife.
But jingle bells are compulsory in all shops even before Hallowe’en (John Lewis has been named and shamed for this) and the clocks have gone back, which makes me feel murderous.
As does the fact that Christmas commences around the time that royal yields to commercial – and Winter Wonderland takes over Hyde Park (this is a hideous, overpriced hybrid between a German Christmas market and a funfair); ie around the end of October.
I’m not saying that all Christmas pop songs are bad. Driving Home for Christmas by Chris Rea, 2000 Miles by the Pretenders, Mary’s Boy Child by Boney M... I can handle these once a year.
The number-one Christmas tune of all time, Fairytale of New York by the Pogues featuring Kirsty Maccoll, bears repeated listens. I can also manage Bing Crosby and Sinatra, but only in small doses – like a post-op morphine pump you can regulate yourself.
No, what makes me seethe with unseasonal rage is the enforced full immersion in cheesy choons that is Christmas shopping on our struggling high streets.
Given my aversion, I can’t understand why shops don’t lure us in by soft background Muzak of carol concerts from King’s College, Cambridge, or New College, Oxford, say – rather than forcing us out by playing loud Slade on a loop.
Carols are the original and best pop songs. They are Christian, yes, but surely at Christmas in England the uplifting sentiments and consoling melodies can’t be deemed offensive?
A boy pealing out the high, pure solo of Once in Royal David’s City in King’s College Chapel can send shivers of holy joy up and down my godless spine. I am prepared to make special pilgrimages in December to Southwark Cathedral and St Bride’s, Fleet Street, for this tingle time.
The switch to carols would not only enhance the shopping ‘experience’. It
would be good for footfall, too, if consumers could be confident that, when she – and it usually is a she – risks leaving the safety of online shopping for the perils of the high street, she will not be subjected to aural torture at every outlet.
I love carols so much that I regard them rather like turkey. They are too good for Yuletide.
I would never go so far as to say I Wish It Could be Christmas Every Day – but even I could manage turkey and carols more than but once a year.