Christmas Spirit

I am in the Christmas spirit. Appoximately a pint into the Christmas spirit. In my case, an earlier trip to the supermarket to lay in stocks for Christmas included a bottle of Southern Comfort, which I subsequently combined with a bottle of Crabbies, about half and half.

I’m not normally driven to hit the bottle, but it’s Christmas and, at times, Christmas is really quite depressing. Well, no, that’s not strictly true, it’s the build up to Christmas that’s depressing. The relentless “arthouse” adverts for perfume, the unremitting commercialism,  not to mention the certain knowledge that your Christmas grocery shop would feed a small village (and not even a starving African one) for a month and will probably take considerably longer to lose the weight you’ll gain from the over-indulgence.

On top of that, there is the <cough> annual tidy to restore the house to a semblance of a home and not my extended workshop and the children’s junk pile. This is NOT a quick process – a room a day, bag fulls of stuff purged, lots of dust distrurbed, a bad back and with any luck, a reasonably tidy house for all of, oh, a day or two before chaos is resumed.

In fact, I did most of my food shopping for Christmas last week and almost all of the presents are sorted, including my own – those I haven’t bought, I have asked for, so I don’t have many surprises to look forward to. Mind you, I do have a surprise pressie from my friend Viv (<whispers> which I have a sneaking suspicion may be yarn…or a very squishy free-form book.) Today’s shop was just for booze and bread (and one or two other bits and bobs, which actually cost more that the rest of the previous grocery shop). There was a deal on spirits, so I grabbed a bottle of Scum (that’s Southern Comfort to you) and DH grabbed a bottle of Cologne (that’s Gin to you, but I always think it smells as if you ought to dab it behind your ears rather than drink it), a dozen bottles of wine, a bottle of Absolut and a bottle of Baileys (plus some mince pies, mixers and soft drinks for the sprogs) to complete the set and it would have been rude not to tuck into some of it.

So here’s to comfortable numbness. Meeeerrry Chrishmash! 😀