Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
"Jesus Fucking Christ" he said "What a tacky season".
Among the things I've grown to loathe more and more about this festering season, one thing looms larger every year - the sheer tackiness of it. Some of the decorations in city centres and the like aren't too bad - still naff as fock with their glittering stars, laurel-wreath look, and so on, but there's definitely far worse stuff than city centre stuff out there...
No, it's the decorations that people seem to feel some bizarre need to adorn their entire house with that really get to me and are just horrendously tacky. This year there appears to be some kind of "trend" for santas on parachutes - I have absolutely no idea why, but there we go. In some ways (at risk of being perceived as a snob, but fuck it, I really don't care) christmas decorations are very like 4½ carat gold necklaces - the very presence of ultra-naff exterior decorations seems to be like an attempt at a message of "we're well off really, we can afford all this shit" , even if they're going to be fed on Tesco Value Turkey, Veg and mince pies for the rest of the month.
As with so much of the festering season, it's all about status, about how other people see you, what you can get and what you've got rather than anything that's actually valuable or important. It's better to have eight acres of tat than five or six decent items. (OK, so I can't really imagine any decent exterior decorations, but that's just me - I'm sure there must be some, somewhere) I simply don't understand why there is a need to display how tacky and tasteless you really are - but it seems to be the trait of the season.
Even the great majority of the interior christmas decorations err on the side of tack over taste - for instance, what the hell is tinsel all about? Sheets of foil that have fallen into an office paper-shredder, followed by a brief stint with some superglue. Pox-ridden cheery santas (whether in Coca-Cola colours or not) waving out of windows, glowing bastard snowmen, and naff horrendous wreaths with "Merry Christmas" and "Santa I've been good, please stop here" scrawled all over them. Flashing sheets of lights in the window, plastic moulded reindeer with white fairy lights, it's all just tacksville. Maybe I'm more of a scrooge than I realised, but all of that paraphenalia means absolutely nothing to me, it doesn't represent the festering season for me at all.
Actually - that's not true. For sheer naffness and tackyness, they sum up the festering season just about perfectly.
No, it's the decorations that people seem to feel some bizarre need to adorn their entire house with that really get to me and are just horrendously tacky. This year there appears to be some kind of "trend" for santas on parachutes - I have absolutely no idea why, but there we go. In some ways (at risk of being perceived as a snob, but fuck it, I really don't care) christmas decorations are very like 4½ carat gold necklaces - the very presence of ultra-naff exterior decorations seems to be like an attempt at a message of "we're well off really, we can afford all this shit" , even if they're going to be fed on Tesco Value Turkey, Veg and mince pies for the rest of the month.
As with so much of the festering season, it's all about status, about how other people see you, what you can get and what you've got rather than anything that's actually valuable or important. It's better to have eight acres of tat than five or six decent items. (OK, so I can't really imagine any decent exterior decorations, but that's just me - I'm sure there must be some, somewhere) I simply don't understand why there is a need to display how tacky and tasteless you really are - but it seems to be the trait of the season.
Even the great majority of the interior christmas decorations err on the side of tack over taste - for instance, what the hell is tinsel all about? Sheets of foil that have fallen into an office paper-shredder, followed by a brief stint with some superglue. Pox-ridden cheery santas (whether in Coca-Cola colours or not) waving out of windows, glowing bastard snowmen, and naff horrendous wreaths with "Merry Christmas" and "Santa I've been good, please stop here" scrawled all over them. Flashing sheets of lights in the window, plastic moulded reindeer with white fairy lights, it's all just tacksville. Maybe I'm more of a scrooge than I realised, but all of that paraphenalia means absolutely nothing to me, it doesn't represent the festering season for me at all.
Actually - that's not true. For sheer naffness and tackyness, they sum up the festering season just about perfectly.
