The Christmas Spirit

I used to love Christmas, honestly I did.  I would make the most of the whole month of December.  I would be invited to every party, every section lunch, every after work drinkie session, I was the archetypal “life and soul.”

Regrettably the month did have it’s down side and for all the merry making there were a few mornings when I wasn't really on full form and the rarer occasions when I didn't come in at all.  My colleagues were not always best pleased but they would put up with it because they knew at some point we would be crawling in hungover together.  For the rest of the year I was as reliable and hard working as the next man – or woman.

And so it was that I spent seven years in the office, being carried by my work-mates through the last month of the year before the status quo was restored in January and I pulled my weight for the next 11 months.  I loved Christmas, me…or at least until last year I did.

It was around mid autumn that Cassie came to work with us and I have to admit that we never really hit it off.  She made it abundantly clear that she thought me tedious and after initial stabs at friendliness I came to the conclusion that she was far too precious so I gave up and left her to it.  She was self-obsessed and miserable; I flatter myself perhaps but almost the complete opposite of my fun loving, up for a laugh self.  We acted with barely polite professionalism towards each other for a while and then came the Yuletide season.

I first realised that she was probably not the biggest fan of the festive period when I caught her tutting at my advent calendar.  I am a bit of a traditionalist in these matters, no chocolate filled “Pop Idol” advent for me. I had a countryside, snowbound scene replete with glitter and cute animals all celebrating Christmas in their own way (which seemed to involve little more than eating a lot and pushing gaily wrapped parcels around in little animal sized hand carts).  Cassie stomped in to the room, aggrieved at some form of merriment that she had not approved of.  Glaring at my calendar, she huffed “oh not you as well” and then barked some work based order at me before I could reply.  Considering her now obvious dislike of the season it was unfortunate that she received my Christmas card later the same day.  I was in the habit of sending one to everyone in the office and prior to that morning I had seen no reason not to include Cassie.  Indeed, as the Muslims and Sikhs in the office had received their cards with the sentiment of goodwill that was intended I did not foresee such umbrage being caused to her!  Umbrage was caused, and Cassie was not shy about demonstrating that fact to me.  This she did by returning the card to me, in pieces, in an envelope, which bore the legend “off, you” (missing out the swear words).

That would have been the end of the story, and thus not really a tale worth recounting, if I had not by chance wandered in to one of the more countrified hostelries on the edge of town some three weeks later.  I had been to dinner with one of the departments from work and had been liberally plied with Merlot by colleagues grateful to be in the presence of my wit and repartee.   After leaving the restaurant, a few of us went to the Lamb; I only lived a ten-minute walk away and the other two lads closer still.  We were already nursing pints when we noticed Cassie sitting in the corner, talking with a tall, dread-locked man in an earnest manner.  Neither of them, I noted, appeared to be enjoying themselves.  From the conversation of my two colleagues it was apparent that she had ingratiated herself in their affections no more than she had in mine:  “moody cow” and “miserable bitch” being two of the more mentionable epithets applied to her.

The two chaps left after a pint and as I was not quite satiated for the evening I remained, sipping at a double rum and coke.  The young man who was with Cassie left abruptly, exchanging pleasantries with her as he went (this is of course sardonicism, they were in fact saying some very rude words and seemed quite cross with each other).  Still I sat alone for a while before my blood-alcohol level reached such heights as common sense and me were abject strangers. At this point I decided it would be a good idea to talk to Cassie, who had spent the intervening period with an expression somewhere between angry defiance and pathetic grief plastered across her pale, drawn countenance.

“Cheer up, it may never happen!”

As an opening gambit this would have been very poor even had I been twice as drunk and been talking to somebody five times as good-humoured as Cassie.  She glared at me with the sort of contempt usually reserved for child murderers or tabloid journalists.  Clearly “it” had already happened and she hadn’t yet come to terms with “it”.  She was not forthcoming about the circumstances of her current misery but I would guess that a likely congruence of the respective private parts of Cassie and the earnest young man was now a less likely proposition than it had been relatively recently.  Realising that the gravity of the matter probably required a little more in the way of seriousness, I countered my opening statement with astounding depth.

“Are you ok?”

All right, not that deep at all but certainly an improvement.

“Yeah…” she returned, not completely convincing me with her tone, “He was a twat anyway.”

As this was the first time she had ever used that word without implying that I was one I felt we had reached a new level of understanding and offered her a drink.  She opted for a double rum and coke and for a brief moment we were as close as we were ever to be, drinking the same drink and neither of us abusing the other.  It wasn't to last, and it is all the fault of bloody Roy Wood and Wizard.

As I returned from the bar loaded with Woods’ (how ironic) and Coke and a packet of Salt and Vinegar Discos “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” started to blare from the juke-box and I, like an idiot overwhelmed with goodwill, decided to sing it to Cassie.  Not the best decision I've ever made in retrospect.

In the following tirade that spewed from her like toxic waste from a ruptured freighter I discovered many things, the details are now etched on my psyche in the same way that one would remember losing a limb.  The earnest young man was called Jake and he had been Cassie’s lover.  They had been followers of a pagan religion that seemed loosely based on the Wicca but with a darker, supernatural element thrown in for good measure.  Sadly – at least from her point of view – Jake had fallen in with a bad crowd, some Christians, and had renounced his former faith and had left her to devote his life to Jesus Christ.  Cassie was not really very pleased about his decision and had decided to take it out on me due to her being in love with Jake and regarding me as below pond life.

“You wish it could be Christmas every day do you, you (expletive deleted)? Well, I’ll (expletive deleted) fix it for you!” she snarled at me with a fury I had seldom seen in a human but occasionally in an angry Doberman.  At this point my bladder kindly advised me to go empty it before it emptied itself so I nonchalantly dismissed myself and swaggered to the men’s room – or possibly I jumped from my chair and sprinted there in terror – I forget which.  By the time I returned, timidly and not before some consideration, she had gone.  I poured the remains of her drink in to mine and downed it in one, it did taste a little odd but I assumed this was due to the involuntary evacuation of my digestive system that had occurred orally in the gents so I thought little of it.

The next day I was fine, not even a hangover, so I went to work.  I was a little nervous about running in to Cassie but it turned out that she had called in sick so it was fine.  She didn't return before Christmas and there was a really good atmosphere in the office for those last few days before we broke up on Christmas Eve.  Then I enjoyed Christmas like I never had before, it just felt so special, like the ones I remember from my school days.  It is just as well that I enjoyed it so much as to all intents and purposes it was my last.

It wasn't until about January 4^th that I realised something was wrong.  It had been a particularly mental New Years Eve so it didn't surprise me when it took a few days to get over that feeling of excitement.  Then the whole world started to feel decidedly odd.

At first it was just the atmosphere.  I don’t mean the oxygen/nitrogen balance in the air but the feeling one gets in one’s bones at special times.  I had a feeling in me and at first I couldn't quite put a finger on it but it soon came to me.  It was like the feeling I used to get at school when the headmaster did his reading of A Christmas Carol instead of doing prayers in assembly.  It was the feeling I get when the local council put the enormous tree up in the town square at the beginning of December or when old Auntie Rose visits with her brightly wrapped gifts of socks and handkerchiefs.  This was fantastic, I loved that feeling!

But how quickly things spoil when they are left out in the wrong weather.  By March the daffodils were peeking out and the sun had taken off his hat and the rebel songs in the pub on the 17^th just felt so, so wrong.  I started to feel how I imagined I would if I had spent Christmas day on Bondi Beach and it was around this time that I realised that Christmas every day was becoming a horribly real prospect.  I was being haunted by the spirit of Christmas.

It went on.  Every flesh I tasted was of Turkey, and that went beyond just eating.  Every drink was like punch or wine or those horrible liqueurs that only get drunk on Boxing Day but never the things I was actually drinking, which tended less and less to be alcoholic as I seemed to be hung over every morning without fail.  Television became a chore.  You know that feeling when you watch a Christmas special of some comedy show and it isn't based at Christmas time and it isn't very funny and the whole thing seems massively disappointing?  Well, imagine if every show you watched felt like the 2001 special of Only Fools and Horses.  Films are worse, even when I am at the Cinema I am convinced that I have seen the film before and I didn't like it and I am only watching it because somebody else wants to and there is something better on the other side.

And that’s not all of it by any means.  I wake up every morning hungover and drift every night in to a drunken sleep that never refreshes, whether I drink whisky or water, it matters not.  Every chocolate I taste is the coffee one from the Quality Street that nobody likes except Auntie Rose.  Auntie Rose seems to be around constantly, drunk on Bailey’s but not eating the coffee sweeties, just to annoy me.  The sofa seems constantly full of nutshells to stick in me when I sit down and the aroma of satsuma peel invades me with every breath I take.

It is now December again but I am at odds with the latest festive season, as for me the last one hasn't ended yet.  It is going on and on and on and it is constantly the end of Christmas, the bit where even my old self was starting to get a bit fed up with it.  If normal life being Christmas was hard, then Christmas being Christmas is set to be harder.

Cassie never did return to work.  I have been searching for her but she has moved on.  I don’t know what she did to me but I know it was her, I'm sure she wanted me to know.  At the last attempt I made to find her I discovered that Jake had “saved” her and they had gone to do missionary work in Africa together.  I can’t help feeling even if I found her she wouldn't be able to help me now, maybe her pagan powers were lost to Christianity.  I always said that it was the religious aspects of Christmas that ruined it.  Without Christianity and Paganism, Christmas would be fine.