We need to formalise something. You, me, and the rest of the world.
Okay, so we’ve got Christmas. That’s all well and good – there’s the present-giving, and the Pagan roots, and let’s be generous and say that it runs from the 24th to the 26th, and let’s tie a little bow round that and put it to one side.
And then we’ve got New Year’s, and that runs from the 31st December to the 1st January, being, as it is, comprised of “New Year’s Eve” and “New Year’s Day”.
But for some reason, that’s not enough for us, and they are so close together that we have a tendency to adopt that mentality that one gets when one is ten minutes away from close of business, where you think “well, that’s not long enough to do anything worthwhile in. I’ll just kill time for a bit.”
Take, for example, my local gym and swimnasium. For some reason, they’ve plucked some random opening times out of their arses, printed them out on a piece of paper and slapped it up on the door, and considered that to be a suitable solution. At any other time of the year, it would not be tolerated if a business spent a week opening and closing at peculiar times.
So here’s what I propose. We need to close the gap to something a bit more workable.
Option 1
Scoop up all the National Holidays from the rest of the year and use them to fill in the space between the 26th and 31st December, like a kind of solar grout. Everywhere is closed, and if you didn’t stock up properly on lentils and other pulses, you’re fucked.
Option 2
Shunt Christmas a bit later, and New Years a bit earlier. I know it sounds madness to interfere with tradition, but why not? We all accept that we don’t know exactly when Jesus was crucified, other than “it was a Friday” so we move Easter around within a 4-week period. But for some reason, our knowledge that Jesus was probably born sometime in March means that we have to celebrate his birth on the 25th December?
In fact, I’m going to set the ball rolling on this one. I’m going to stop celebrating my birthday on the xth of August, and instead celebrate it sometime between the 1st and 5th of May. Let’s see if Jesus can follow suit.
Option 3
Change the calendar. If all 12 months had 27 days, then we could have Christmas on the 25th, Boxing Day on the 26th, New Year’s Eve on the 27th and then New Year’s Day on the 1st January. The only downside to this is that 12 months at 27 days each only gives us 324 days, so we’d need to add a new month, called Plongbrambler, with 41 days in it. February would then have 28 days in Leap Years.
Anyone with an existing birthday on the 28th to 31st of the Month would then get to choose a random day in Plongbrambler to celebrate their birthday on. Plongbrambler would be slotted in somewhere in summer, so that we can all go off on our summer holidays and not be forced to buy presents for those annoying gits with birthdays in Plongbrambler.
Option 4
Stop slacking. You’ve got two holidays on that side, and one holiday on the other. Who the hell do you think you are, you lazy sod, shirking your duties and expecting someone else to foot the bill (or, in my case, walk all the way round to the gym only to find it in darkness, and subsequently have to walk straight back again)?
Holidays are great. Holiday Seasons make me want to stub a cigarette out in a squirrel’s face.
In my complacency, I allowed my attention to wander to other tasks. This turned out to be my greatest of errors, for the Opal Fruit moved around in my mouth in a non-obvious fashion, exploiting my moment of least concentration to make a dive for the left cheek as the teeth came down.
