Not again

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Well that's it done, four days at work over with and in actual fact I quite enjoyed it. As much as I love my 'middle of nowhere existence', the lack of human interaction can wear a little thin occasionally and the opportunity to be among others is a welcome change. That said the five play days ahead of me are no less welcome!

Work bought with it this week a stark reminder that yet again we are rushing headlong toward the festive season. As a child I adored Christmas time, it was my absolute favorite, everything about it enthralled me and filled me with an un- matchable feeling of excitement that nothing else could come close to. As an adult for years it was the same..........and then I hit the world of retail employment and it all changed.

Christmas begins for us next week! From today the hundreds of lines of festive merchandise are 'rolled out', we have in fact had a number already available for sale for the last two weeks though very low key. We all hate it, by the middle of October there isn't one of us who isn't fed up to the back teeth of tinsel, lights, artificial trees and the sound of those damn novelty scenes playing their horrendous faux Christmas carols! By the time Christmas arrives for real we have all been well and truly de-sensitized to any pleasure there may once was in the festivities.

The reasoning behind this unfortunate and much disliked situation is of course the mighty dollar. Ever mindful of profit margins and market share retailers, fearing for their corporate lives attempt to beat the competition year after year and consequently Christmas is heaped upon the unsuspecting customer earlier and earlier.

There are greater minds than mine I assume, that have foraged their intellectual, degree qualified way through unending market research and statistics to come to the decision that this is the way forward in a world where nothing matters beyond money. The confusing aspect to me is that almost without exception customers complain bitterly about it. Their complaints are the same as those of us who work in the environment.........that Christmas is ruined by such over commercialisation and very little is sold until much nearer the date.

It is perhaps indicative of the world as a whole, push push push, spend,spend,spend, advertising executives and manufacturers flooding children's TV schedules with bright advertisements for all things attractive to the under 16's (and over for that matter), surreptitiously heaping burden upon guilty burden on parents already struggling with the financial demands of life. The message, that if you truly love your child you will purchase for him or her, one expensive toy after another, because without doing so that child will suffer abject misery in one form or another, is very ill concealed. There are in the UK supposed to be controls on this type of advertising but they seem to be nowhere in evidence!

I am not a religious individual by any means, I would describe myself as agnostic in fact but without Christianity there would be no Christmas at all and yet it seems all but forgotten. The Christmas story, you remember, the one about a man and a woman, a donkey and three wise men seems to have been completely abandoned in favour of the 21st century version, the one about a man a woman, peer pressure and credit card debt. Do children even learn who Jesus and Mary were in these days of political correctness, where education seems to be so multi cultural that no culture learns anything? I can only assume that advertising executives and the chairmen of the worlds retailers sincerely hope not while they pile on the pressure and bombard us with all things Christmas for a whole quarter!

Bah humbug!