THE ETERNAL CHRISTMAS

No kind of melancholia is more predictable and routine -- and none at all more heightened -- than that of a teeny-tiny little child as the clock strikes midnight, heralding that the 25th December has evaporated from the realm of present time to the distant, intangible wispy mists of memories past, and Christmas Day is done for another year. The fount of presents swelled beneath the tree has been depleted; thenceforth that Norway fern, now shorn of purpose, has nothing left to do but moult, and brown, and die its curious death as it crumbles in the corner of the living room. The fabulous spread on the dining room table -- that marvellous procession of parsnips and Yorkshires, pigs-in-blankets, bechamel-drowned cauliflower, caramelised carrots, crispy roast potatoes and bottles of sparkling wine popping off like fireworks or geysers, heralding the coronated King and Queen of the Christmas feast, the goose and the pudding burning blue -- has become a mess of crumbs and crumpled tablecloths, discarded paper hats and jokes and cracker toys, and pools of spilt gravy, wine and curdling double cream: a right, unholy mess for Mother and Father to strain themselves cleaning up come morning. The family had fled back to their own corners of the world, some perhaps not to be seen until Christmas Day rolled round again next year; and Father Christmas had, once more, completed his exhausting labour of love and goodwill, retiring back to Lapland for his well-earned rest. For a seven, eight or nine-year-old, the magic of Christmas is more real than any grown-up can possibly imagine. It’s something you wait all year for. It’s something you just can’t wait all year for. As it gets closer and closer, as the days tick down, as you end up devouring more and more of your Advent Calendar, and the shimmering, twinkling ruby red and silver, glittering gold and green decorations start flying up and covering every corner of the house and the whole wide world beyond, you find you just can’t sleep a wink no matter how hard you try; you’re tossing and turning, wide awake, wondering what’s going to be at the foot of your bed that glorious morning-to-end-all-mornings, wondering if you can catch the jolly old snow-white bearded marvel in the act, squeezing his way down your chimney, wondering if Granddad will overdo it on the sherry again and stagger straight into a door jamb like he did last year, the stupid old sod. It’s like you’re on a sugar rush all December long -- like someone pumped you full of a few hundred gallons of Coke and a metric ton of Woolworths’ Pick ‘n’ Mix on the 1st -- bouncing off the walls, fit to burst with excitement at any second because it’s Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!

My parents hated me on Christmas morning. All that pent-up anticipation had to get released somehow or another come the 25th, and for them, it always got released in the most annoying, relaxation-unconducive manner possible. Everyone remembers the old Slade song, don’t they? So here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone knows it. 1973. Classic Christmas Number One. Well, you know the bit at the very end, when they’re just cycling through the chorus over and over, and one of the band members just comes out of nowhere and screams.

IT’S CHRISTMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS!

Yeah, well, little piece of shit that I was as a child, I thought it would be hilarious to charge into my parents’ bedroom at six o’clock in the morning and scream that line at the top of my lungs, loud as the blast of an atomic bomb, making them both jump so much they would pitch themselves clean out of bed through pure, unadulterated shock and horror.

Like almost every single child living the length and breadth of this isle, I loved Christmas Day more than just about everything else in the world. But just like most of those children, I hated Christmas Day’s close. As a child, I used to break down in proper tears at the end of Christmas Day, when my parents took me up to bed. I was scarcely consolable -- that I had to wait a full twelve months -- 365 days -- 8,760 hours -- 31.5 million seconds -- to experience the incomparable joy that came with Christmas Day again. How on Earth could anyone expect a kid to wait that long for anything, let alone Christmas? How?

1973 saw the release of two of the most famous Christmas songs of all time -- the first, that Slade track that quickly became the bane of my parents’ lives; the second, by the otherwise forgotten Seventies rockers Roy Wood and Wizzard. If, as a tiny child, the beginning of Christmas morning had me anxious to emulate the first of those two hits, much to the chagrin of my snoozing, snoring, long-suffering mother and father, then the end of Christmas night had me obsessing over the message of the latter.

Well, I wish it could be Christmas every day,

So let the bells ring out for Christmas!

Et cetera, et cetera…

And tiny little seven, eight-year-old me did wish it could be Christmas every day. With every straining sinew and sorrowful heartstring, I wished, wished, wished I would wake up that very next morning and there would be presents from Father Christmas at the bottom of my bed again. That presents would flow forth again from the foot of the Christmas tree like water from a spring. That there would be another succulent goose on the dinner table come afternoon, with all the trimmings. That all the grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins who had left for the long drive home just hours earlier would be back at the door by mid-morning, with the same big smiles on their faces, arms out ready for tight, tight hugs. When I was seven, when I was eight, I wished as hard as I thought possible that it could be Christmas every day, to no avail; when I was nine, I decided I had to, with all my strength, try wishing harder and harder and harder than anyone had ever wished for anything before. 

That very year, as midnight struck on Christmas night, and the 25th was due to become the 26th, and my mother and father had retired to bed, I crept downstairs to a lounge bathed in darkness broken only by the silver veil of moonlight sailing in through the towering sash windows, and those twinkling faerie lights lacing their way around the tree, stood before them like a pensive Victorian widow. I took to my knees right at the foot of that gently glowing evergreen, craning for the ceiling, and gazed upwards to the highest height my eyes could reach, right up to the star balanced at our Christmas tree’s very pinnacle; and I wished, upon that magical, moonlight-bathed star, I wished, wished, wished it could be Christmas every day.

I felt certain, though, that even those best efforts to make my deepest, dearest wish come true would be in vain, in the end. Even then. Even as a small child -- a pint-sized human-shaped receptacle of endless hope and mindless optimism -- I felt I was just exhausting myself sitting there, begging, praying for Christmas Day to come again and again and again. I must have repeated my tearful desire some ten dozen times before I felt my weighty eyelids slowly, surely start to droop, sensed an almighty yawn swelling in my lungs, and fell asleep, right then and there at the foot of the tree, collapsed to the floor and curled right up in a teeny, tiny ball. 

Before I knew I’d been asleep, I woke with a start. It was morning.

My arm was draped across a box. Wrapped with wrapping paper.

There were dozens like it all around the tree.

Could it be?

As I sat myself upright, I saw my mother approach from the hall.

‘There you are, sweet-pea,’ she cooed. ‘We wondered where you’d got to -- and why you’d woken up and left all your presents from Father Christmas behind upstairs.’

It was!

It was Christmas Day all over again!

The family were over by eleven. Dinner was out by three -- and the spread looked even grander than it had last Christmas the previous day. Presents at six; playing with my cousins and all our brand new toys by half past the hour. It was all new stuff too. No repeat presents. Everything I’d been gifted from the day before was still here, upstairs, splayed across my room -- joined by a whole arsenal of amazing, stupendous brand new stuff!

Next day, I ran downstairs at a bolt to find even more presents under the tree.

And the next day.

And the next.

My wish had genuinely come true. From that day on, and every day thereafter, it really, really, really was Christmas every day!

A decent amount of time has passed since I made that wish upon that Godforsaken Christmas star. And, now, with every single millisecond of time that’s passed since that midnight hour of begging on my knees beneath the tree, it’s become exponentially more evident how much my innocent childhood naivete, to think it could ever possibly work to celebrate Christmas every single day of every single year, has utterly fucked us! Fucked the country! Fucked the entire fucking globe from corner to fucking corner!

I’ll tell you how it started. Think about it. No-one works on Christmas Day, do they. The whole country ends up looking like a scene straight out of 28 fucking Days Later. No cars on the road. No trains running. No buses. Every pavement just about as teeming with pedestrians as Boris Johnson’s bonce is teeming with brain cells. Nobody about to man anything, to keep the country running like it should, if everyone weren’t stuck at home because it’s Christmas shitting Day and it would have to be a freezing cold day in Hell before anyone can bully me into coming into work on Christmas, you tosspot slave driver. Recession doesn’t describe the half of what’s gone on. This confounding eternal cunting Christmas has made the Great Depression and the Credit Crunch look like child’s play. The stockmarket’s crashed through the floor. The FTSE would literally be in negative numbers if anyone were keeping track of it anymore. The banks have all gone bust because everyone’s used up all their savings, all their pensions, all the loans they can get their hands on buying more and more presents to hand out every single day like clockwork, because it’s Christmas fucking Day, and there’s always got to be presents on Christmas fucking Day, ain’t there, otherwise it wouldn’t feel like Christmas fucking Day anymore, would it? Everyone’s been tearing their hair out wondering how they’re ever going to be able to keep up with the need to bring in boxes and boxes of new stuff, new stuff, brand new bloody stuff every day, spending themselves completely out of house and home in the process, but of course, of course it hardly matters now because there’s sod all folk working the nation’s factories, working its ports, its airports, piloting its lorries up and down the country’s motorways; there’s no-one making the Christmas consumables every single one of us took for granted Christmas Day anymore, there’s no-one making bleeding anything anymore, because every morning, noon and night, every rising of the Sun, through the darkness and the light, it’s always, always, always Christmas Day and no-one does shit on Christmas Day except stuff themselves silly and get so pissed they can hardly stagger to the sofa for a lie down after lunch; so now not only isn’t anybody getting any presents for their Christmas every day, but everyone’s clothes are going threadbare, everyone’s shoes are falling apart at the seams, so we all look like we’ve woken up beneath some piss-soaked underpass; and the TV’s fucked and the dishwasher’s fucked and the freezer’s fucked and we’re pretty sure the plumbing to and from the toilet’s proper fucked but we can’t go out and get new ones or call for any repairs to be done because of course it’s Christmas and it’s never gonna not be Christmas now; so all we could do is sit about in the freezing cold lounge, pegs over our noses to keep the God-awful stench of weeks of accumultaed defecations piling up in the loo bowl, with nothing to do, with all our sources of entertainment having long since been worn out, and we’re all just sitting wondering what to do with ourselves, all in pitch-black darkness the whole time because there’s no-one running the country’s power stations. No-one out there running the National Grid. No-one maintaining the gas network, the water network. No-one working the farms, to supply us with our goose, our leeks, our parsnips, sprouts, roast potatoes, our fine Christmas spread, the one slap-up everyone looked forward to all year and now demands at three, on the dot, every single sodding afternoon without fail, so now we’re all surviving on whatever scraps and crumbs we can salvage from Christmas dinners past, like rats rootling through the bins -- like disgusting rodent vermin! We’re withering to skeletons. To zombies. We haven’t drunk a drop of water in forever. Between us, we’ve probably eaten the equivalent of a meagre mince pie in the last four days. 

Sure, for a while we were able to sustain our extravagant lifestyles through this horrific perma-Christmas, but that was only because all those people who don’t celebrate Christmas round here basically became our slaves. They didn’t even notice anything was awry at first. Christmas was just another working day form them. As much a working weekday as any other. It took many of them until gone New Year’s -- or what would have been New Year’s -- to notice something was amiss. To notice everyone was still missing after the holidays should have been fully done and dusted with for another year. Still at home celebrating, eating, drinking themselves stupid, making merry, while they did all the hard work. They snapped. Naturally. They grew infuriated at us. Volcanically infuriated. Went on strike, the lot of them. Fact, calling it a mere strike was desperately underselling it. They amalgamated into militias. Started bashing down front doors up and down the country. Dragging folk from their dinner tables by their ankles or their ears and chucking them into cars and vans to get them back to work, back to the office, the factory, the supermarket floor, the building site. But of course those grown-up Christmas revellers having their homes invaded, being snatched from their families, weren’t willing to go down without a fight. Weren’t willing to give up the most wonderful time of the year so bloody easily. Anything in a Christmas household that had potential to be used as a weapon, became a weapon. Carving knives became swords and daggers. Trees became battering rams. Hot gravy became boiling oil. Pouring alcohol for the pudding was thrown from windows out over the besieging rabble, followed by a match to burn the lot of them alive. It was Christmas, God damn it! Christmas! And you’ll take Christmas away from us when you pry it from our cold dead hands! Before long, half the country was on fire. There wasn’t a window that hadn’t been smashed in. No car that hadn’t been overturned. Across one half of the country, the Christmas celebrators had managed to overpower and enslave those who didn’t celebrate the holiday, taking turns being slave drivers, whipping their underlings with the cords of faerie lights until they worked themselves to death; and across the other half of the country, the people who didn’t celebrate had the numbers to overpower those who did, and made them their slaves in retaliation. See how you like it!

Most of the slaves have starved to death by now, though. Or fallen sick -- of course, we haven’t got the necessary doctors and nurses to run the country’s hospitals or provide us medication anymore, so even basic stuff like flu can kill a healthy person stone cold dead in days. Hence there’s not enough people to keep the country running. To keep the lights on. To keep food on the table. And those people we do have, we’ve exhausted to within an inch of their lives.

And they’re not even the worst victims. 

Think of Santa. Think of Father Christmas. He only usually has to work one night a year -- flying round the world, and delivering all the tiny little kids their Christmas toys. And the Elves in his workshops hardly have to rush themselves to finish everyone’s gifts because they’ve got all year to do it -- and there’s far more of them about than we think. But with it being Christmas every day, now, everything’s changed. The workshops have become sweatshops. Bang, done; bang, done; bang, done; no time to rest, not even a wink. They have to work through the day and through the night. No time to sleep. To eat. Even to piss; there’s not a set of long green stockings to be found anywhere around Lapland that haven’t been soaked through with elf urine. Things have got so bad, in terms of elves just dropping like flies at their stations, that Santa himself is having to muck in with the assembly work, as well as doing his rounds every single night, without fail. He’s an old man, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. A proper old fucker -- look at his beard, for God’s sake! He can’t keep up. He’s exhausted. He needs his rest.

So now, the world’s kids don’t even get Father Christmas’ presents these days, let alone anyone else’s.

And that’s the least of our Santa-related worries.

See, Father Christmas doesn’t just use his magic to deliver presents on Christmas morning. Throughout the rest of the year, during his down time -- when he doesn’t need to channel all of his power at once to make the sleigh fly and do deliveries to around about two billion households within all of eight hours, he uses it for other stuff, too. Just keeps it casually emitting so it can do whatever it needs to do to keep the world as safe and stable as can possibly be. Because humans have free will, and it’s therefore so much harder to control people and make them keep the peace with his magic, he doesn’t really tend to focus his powers so much on controlling human conflict, but if you’ve ever known a child to have made a miraculous recovery from a practically terminal illness, chances are he’s had something to do with it. Never demands credit, or worship, he just does good deeds with his magic because he can. There’s another thing his magic can control surprisingly effectively, too. The atmosphere, the environment, his magic has an enormous amount of sway over. Dear God, let me tell you, global warming would have been a hell of a lot worse without jolly old Saint Nick keeping everything in check for us. Leaving his magic to dissolve into the air and absorb all that carbon dioxide we belch into the sky, to cover up the hole in the ozone layer. Since it’s been Christmas every day, though, and the poor old sod’s had to focus every last ounce of his magic on trying to make his deliveries, burning himself out to within an inch of his life there’s been no-one around to keep the effect of our pollution in check. And what with all the smoke from all the fires that have swarmed the country and, indeed, the world ever since the Christmas riots started flaring up and consuming what little civil society we had left, the world’s climate must have warmed a full twenty-odd degrees since it started being Christmas every day. All the ice caps have gone. Half the world’s underwater. The Thames has started lapping at our front door -- and we live all the way up at the top of Highgate!

Eternal Christmas’ death toll must be in the tens of millions. Perhaps the hundreds of millions worldwide. I could see a ton of them from my bedroom window. Thousands upon thousands of dead bodies floating atop the water of the swollen Thames. Drowned bodies. Sickly, creamy white and green and grey. Veins all blue and bulging through decaying skin -- stepping-stone islands covering a sea that stretches from here to eternity in almost all directions, punctured only by the tips of ruins of the City’s tallest buildings. All this devastation. This destruction. And it was all the fault of my stupid, childish wish. Why the fuck did I have to wish for it to be Christmas every day?

Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to bear witness to my own personal Armageddon much longer. We were all going to die. I had unleashed the ultimate evil. Eternal Christmas had released it from its sixteen-year-old Swedish shell.

A portable radio was the only connection to the outside world I had left. We couldn’t escape the house. Floodwater three sides; a lawless hellscape to contend with on the fourth. An emergency news report came through. The sudden rise in global temperature caused by Father Christmas being out of action had had an unfortunate effect on one poor young climate activist who had been born with an unholy curse, whose truest horror would be triggered into manifesting itself if any human activity made the world too warm, too unstable, too unconfortably uninhabitable to sustain Life -- and had been forced, by her own conscience, her own terror, her own fear of what might be, to devote her life to making sure the beast that dwelt within her soul was never able to break free. To devote her life to warning us of the monstrous fate that would befall us all if the Earth’s thermostat got too hot, and she’d be forced into her maleficent metamorphosis through no fault of her own -- into the Destroyer of Worlds, the Punisher, the Reaper, the Raptor, she knew she would be doomed to become!

The last thing I ever saw, as I sat there in my bedroom, surrounded by ten dozen Christmases worth of toys, withering away to skin and bone for lack of food and water, nostrils throttled by the stink of shit rising from blocked drains that would never be fixed, scarcely bearing the energy to jam my eyes open, were a loathsome ogdoad of slimy black tentacles each a mile broad by ten miles tall, slamming themselves deep into the Earth’s core as they descended upon us, marching through what little was left of London, and a deep, dark mouth, encompassed by a hundred rows of teeth as sharp as sawblades, as big as Himalayan mountains, that looked for all the world like a living black hole -- ready and waiting to consume everything.

All I did -- let it be known, let the record show, all of you -- all I did was wish for it to be Christmas every day. And now I’m sitting here along with the rest of the world who survived the starvation, the riots, the disease pandemics, et cetera, et cetera, burning, dissolving in the acids of Greta Thunberg’s stomach after global warming transformed her into some giant, planet-eating Cthulhu creature sent to teach us a lesson for being such ignorant, impudent little shits always on the lookout for instant gratification no matter the cost, wondering how the bloody hell such a simple wish as that could have gone so wrong!