Jingle freakin' bells!

It's that time of year again!

With the sound of Jingle Bells barely seeming to have stopped ringing in my ears from last years manic festive 'push', suddenly Christmas seems to be looming somewhere too close up ahead again already.

Or at least that's what the retail marketing gurus would have us believe in their now annual routine of terrified scrambling for dominance in the market share stakes and desperation to pressure us all into a life of guilt and inadequacy if we don't fall victim to their clever blackmail psychology, and spend a kings ransom on crap our loved ones probably never wanted in the first place and will likely be on eBay by boxing day anyway!

Too many years living the 'joys' of Christmas in retail of course means that none of this palaver surprises me but it never ceases to annoy me and to some degree sadden me. An enforced trip to Tesco yesterday bought it all back, which was a bad idea on any level on a Saturday and saw reduced Halloween merchandise (why do they sell that stuff? Experience tells me most of it will be sold at a loss the day after Halloween, or not sold at all and loiter in the bowels of the nations retail stockrooms gathering dust until the next Halloween non event) fighting for supremacy in the aisles already with all those things we absolutely must have to put the jingle in our Christmas bells!

Too soon, too soon was the cry.

Guys, yes, it's you lot in marketing I'm talking too....do any of you remember when Christmas was Christmas? When it was actually about joy, love and peace, even for those without a religious bent, when children got a few well considered gifts and were happy with them, when families got together around a real tree adorned with baubles and trinkets saved sentimentally from one year to the next, when tinseled lights twinkled in gaudy colours that had been lovingly placed in the annual excited tree decorating ritual were the festive decorative norm instead of designer plastic monstrosities embedded with microchip multi-function fibre optics and when Christmas started in December, not in the middle of the bloody summer!

But perhaps you don't remember, perhaps when you took your oath of allegiance to the mighty marketing dollar you chose conveniently to forget....or maybe in your unending struggle to pull the wool over our eyes, that's us, the minions you want to reel in, you just simply began to fall for your own crap!

I promise you guys just one thing this Christmas, however hard you try, I will not be so much as looking at a Christmas card for a while yet!

Humbug!