Well, the Christmas decorations in Yate were put up earlier last week and the shops have been bursting with Christmas fare for over a fortnight.
Why do we have this obsession with a 6 week (often longer) preparation for Christmas? It wasn't like this when I was a kid - mind you, we didn't have quite as many supermarkets pushing us to buy, buy, buy.
I remember my mum buying the Christmas presents a couple of day before Christmas and my dad, if he was home on leave, buying the Christmas tree the weekend before Christmas, but not putting it up till the 23rd.
There again, in the 60's you couldn't buy frozen or shrink wrapped food that kept for ages; you went shopping two or three times a week and just bought enough to last you a couple of days at most. Most fridges had a tiny freezer section which was invariably filled with Ice and frost, rendering it entirely unsuitable for placing anything larger than a matchbox in it.
So, was the Christmas period shorter simply because we couldn't make it longer anyway?
As for the 12 days of Christmas. Decorations in the past rarely lasted beyond the 2nd of January and many were taken down the day after Boxing Day. The whole idea of 12 days of Christmas was a myth. In fact you'd be lucky if the Christmas tree made it as long as New Year's Day - the bloody things started to drop the minute you put them up and the non-drop Nordmann Fir was still a long way off. You'd still be finding pine needles in the vacuum cleaner detritus on Easter Sunday.
Bah, humbug!
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