The assumption was that players would be burnt out physically and drained mentally with a mid-season World Cup, but it was just a winter break for most.
Over the years, my partner and I, who have been together for the last 42 of them, have successfully managed to avoid Christmas and all its attendant routines, social obligations and traditions. It took some time to fully achieve the divorce because people think you’re weird if you don’t ‘do’ Christmas. You can see it in their eyes. They’re wondering what’s wrong with you. Are you some sort of Scrooge or misanthrope? Did some terrible thing happen in the festive season to turn you against it? How can you not like Christmas?
The truth is, we just don’t get it. We see it all with the dispassion of outsiders observing a tribal ritual but not getting the culture. I understand marking the birth of Jesus, of course, but don’t see how that relates to buying people an Xbox, hair straighteners or driving gloves (which can’t possibly still exist). You can thank the Lord for Jesus in a quiet moment, not by buying socks in Poundland in a retail park on the edge of Every Town or by drinking eight pints of snakebite in a Wetherspoons while wearing a Santa hat.
And I don’t understand who or what Santa Claus is or what this peculiar fiction is doing in our lives. If it evolved out of the Green Man Pagan celebrations, I can see how leaving a wee gift for Jack In The Green works. If that’s it, we should be celebrating the return of the light, post-Solstice, not getting a matching tie and handkerchief set or soap on a rope, supposedly from a fat fella in red. It seems cut from an entirely different and frankly weird mythic tradition. It makes no sense as myth; it makes no sense in reality.
Don’t get me started on the Coke truck.
One year, we put up a tree and gave each other presents, just to see what it felt like and it felt ridiculous. As ridiculous as those families that go for the ritual post-Xmas dinner walk, when they never normally walk anywhere, let alone all together, the tension so great it almost manifests itself as a living entity. Father with his hands behind his back, in the manner of all emotionally repressed men who are uncomfortable doing something. The reluctant teen for whom being seen in public with their relations is an embarrassment too far. There’s the relation everyone hates but who thinks everyone finds him amusing and his wife who is resented for eating all the best…
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