Oct 22 - Christmas Is Coming!
By As if I didn't already freak out about killing mosquitoes and having somebody’s blood all over my hand, one flew into my mouth first thing this morning and after running to the bathroom and spitting everywhere (and feeling a little something half way down my throat) I concluded I had indeed swallowed it; with somebody’s blood in it and all.
Yesterday afternoon, right after work, I spent a little while at the beach, to swim for a bit and to take photos for an on-going photo project. But the washed up sea monster, the seaweed getting tangled on my feet in the water and all the rubbish and pieces of wood strewn all over the sand could not distract me from the annoying flies having a bunch of fun flying all around my hair and back as I lay on my towel trying to keep up my tan.
What I’m trying to get at is that it’s still – a week away from November – very much summer around here, despite what everyone wants us to believe. We had one week of bad weather two weeks ago and everybody got a little too excited. It was barely cold enough for a cardigan (which I haven’t worn yet, I’ll have you know) but I still saw two or three women in town with leather jackets, thick jumpers and foulards. And I’m blocking out the couple of people I saw with proper wool scarves. A little temperature drop and we lost the plot. And I know people buy items of clothing in the UK and can’t wear them here because it’s not cold enough, but at least wait until December, or January, or February, or even March; coming out of the winter – at least for me – makes this behaviour a little more acceptable. I don’t blame them. But It’s still October. We might be a little over a week away from November, but it’s still October.
Shops in Gibraltar have four key events in a year to cater for: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween and Christmas. And every year we hear the same complaints about how we’re still weeks away and shops are already fully stocked; but this year in particular they’ve outdone themselves. Normally at this time of year stocks are running low on Halloween goodies, people are running around frantically from shop to shop to find some fake blood last minute and you can already hear people joking around saying things along the line of: “before you know it están todas las cosas de Christmas en Morrisons y BHS”. But shops must be playing with people because as soon as the temperature dropped below a hundred degrees two weeks ago Morrisons started rolling out the Christmas cards. And I don’t know much about psychology (‘much’ meaning I’m closer to being completely clueless than knowing at least something) but I can understand how feeling the temperatures lower a little and the already arctic temperature of our beloved Safeway can make anybody lose their mind. And it certainly doesn’t help that I have people like my cousin (yes, you) posting Christmas countdowns on Facebook. But the fact is, and I’ve just checked on a horrible Christmas Countdown website, we are still more than NINE weeks away from Christmas, which as far as I’m aware is over two months. TWO MONTHS. Do I need to repeat that again?
And I can already hear the complaints of: “this guy is the Grinch!”, like sleigh bells ringing in my head; but I’m not. I quite like Christmas, I have become a big fan of the winter in recent years and I don’t think there’s anything better than spending a handful of days full of food in good company of people in high spirits, high from spirits. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year but isn’t it ridiculously early to start getting hyped up for it? It can’t just be me. We’ve gone crazy. I constantly hear people, especially the older generations, go on about how fast time flies, how before you know it you’re old and frail but really we aren’t doing ourselves any favours, are we? We want to sprint before we can run, run before we can jog and jog before we can walk to BHS’s Christmas section. Even I have caught myself frantically sending out emails and doing online shopping this week, all because I know what people are like and soon we’ll hear that the post office is having to work on Sundays to meet everybody’s postal demands. But it’s still October and I still have to deal with Halloween next week. So just let me sort out my costume whilst I listen to Bob Dylan’s version of “Here Comes Santa Claus”.
