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I don’t care too much for Christmas… well in the recent past that might have been the case - it seemed to come around too fast. What a young fool I was. Because now there’s some kids in the house it’s the best thing in the world. Not least because for the first time in seemingly ages, neither my wife or I were working and we got to just hang out with our children and play. All four of us together. We didn’t worry about the fact that neither of us have yet hit our deadlines. Thanks to Christmas we learned that family was more important than work and have decided to never work again. And then when the money runs out we will just play until we starve.
Of course there was much to do, preparing for tomorrow and for Christmas Eve with the in-laws, but we had time to enjoy having a child who is now old enough to understand what Christmas is, and be caught up in the magic, unless she ends up being rung up by the President of the United States with a few harsh truths.
My daughter was quite insistent that she wanted to leave a glass of milk out for Santa. I argued that he would prefer a nice glass of malt whisky to keep him warm, but Phoebe was sure he’d want milk. It took all day to persuade her that Santa could have both (and then just pour the milk down the drain - we gave him some that was past its best before date and a bowl for his reindeers. It would probably be OK, but if you didn’t get any presents or your house was full of old man and reindeer diarrhoea, then my bad). I think I managed to get there by suggesting that Santa might give fewer presents if he didn’t get whisky. In some ways I am worse than Donald Trump.
My main concern for Christmas Eve was the number of people tweeting to say that they were signing off for Christmas. Firstly, did they really think anyone would notice or care if they didn’t tweet for a day? Maybe they thought people might call the police fearing that something awful had happened to them. Though I can understand that they don’t want to be charged for a day of Twitter if they aren’t using it. Secondly though, surely Christmas Day is the main day (apart from International Women’s Day) that you NEED Twitter. How do you get through it otherwise? In the olden days Christmas Day meant being trapped in the house with your family, not being able to contact anyone outside in anyway, except for phone calls with distant relatives that you had to have awkward conversations with even though you weren’t really sure who they were. But now we have the internet and access to all our friends and favourite celebrities who we can surreptitiously keep in contact with for the whole day. It makes Christmas actually fun. So why would you sign off for the one day when social media is actually useful.
Were they really signing off? Would they not even check their Twitter feed tomorrow? The kind of person who thinks people care if they don’t tweet for a bit is surely too addicted to Twitter to leave it alone for 24 minutes, let alone 24 hours. I talk as someone who is very much addicted and not ashamed to admit it. It’s all the fun of having friends who are sort of texting you, without any actual responsibility to interact with them or care about them in the real world.
Anyway I pretended to sign off as midnight approached, only to immediately tweet about how boring my family was and how I wanted to be rescued. It was a fine satire and I hope I made the signing off idiots think twice about their behaviour. Of course if they had actually signed off then they wouldn’t have been around to see all the people making disparaging comments about how stupid they were for signing off (where do you sign off?) and will continue to sign off and be viewed as idiots by the people they assume are concerned about whether they are on Twitter or not.
Anyway, signing off the blog as usual for Christmas. See you on January 2nd.
