I was in a teleconference yesterday where the conversation turned to the frustrating phenomenon of Christmas inertia. You know the problem: Christmas actually lasts approximately two days, and most people have about a week away from work, yet it is completely impossible to achieve anything work-related for a whole month, between 5th December and 4th January. How does this happen?
Then, realisation struck. We noticed that two crucial things happen during that month of crippling inactitvity:
1) public sector bodies (usually, though not this year, thanks to George Osborne) put out a huge raft of competitive tender invitations and then go off on leave, thereby condemning every consultant in the land to burning the midnight oil over Christmas, forgetting to do any Christmas shopping, falling out with loved ones, not being able to contact the potential client to discuss the tender, and resigning themselves to probably not winning the tender in any case;
2) Father Christmas miraculously breaks into every household in the world within about 20 hours*, to deliver gifts and raid the booze cabinet.
(* This calculation is based on the fact that midnight varies around the world by 12 hours and there is an average 8 hours of darkness, so if Father Christmas sets out at sundown from the dateline and travels west he has about 20 hours until the sun comes up again. This does not allow for the fact that he has to start AND finish in the north, where the night is longer, whilst nipping down to Australasia, Southern Africa and South America during their much shorter, summer nighttime. Nor does it consider whether he discriminates against predominantly Muslim countries, where people are less likely to be interested in Father Christmas and booze cabinets will be few and far between. I am not a mathematician and will not be held responsible for inaccuracies in this calculation.)
These two observations provide incontrovertible, empirical evidence that Father Christmas and the Government are colluding in the annual implementation of a cruel and cunning manipulation of time-energy. This works by stopping everyone - except consultants and Father Christmas - in their tracks, using a bizarre formula combining gravity and cryogenics. People continue to eat, drink and shop, but are otherwise completely immobilised and are unaware that time has ceased to pass. The energy embodied in their eating, drinking and shopping is syphoned off to fuel Father Christmas's mammoth fleet of hovercraft, which set out across the globe on a month long endeavour to distribute gifts and gather up booze. When this work is done, time restarts, people find themselves swamped in wrapping paper and family discord, and civil servants return to work to find reams of verbose tender submissions stopping up draughts in their offices.
The question is, does the fact that we have stumbled across the solution to this eternal mystery mean we can, or should, prevent from happening again?
No-one visiting Sheffield over the past year or so will have failed to notice the giant Ferris/hamster wheel rotating slowly at the top of Fargate (just across from the Town Hall). Despite being a hilly enough city that the top of the wheel is several hundred feet lower than the view from my garden, Sheffield dared not be left off the list of British cities hosting a big wheel. I never went on it, because for me it wasn't worth several pounds to spend a couple of minutes up amongst the city centre rooftops accompanied by a running commentary....but I'm sure some people enjoyed it.
Last week I noticed that the wheel was being dismantled, presumably to be reassembled in some other lucky town, or possibly a victim of the public sector cuts. ("Wheel latest victim of cuts" would be an amusing local newspaper headline.) This did not stir much emotion either way for me, though on balance I decided it would be nice to have the big space at the top of Fargate back.
Today, however, an altogether more bizarre structure has appeared in its place, similarly fenced off from reality. It is a cone, about 30 feet across at the base and as tall as the surrounding buildings, covered in coniferous leaves, with a doorway at the bottom labelled "Santa's Grotto". I looks a little as if someone has indulged in a controversial, pacifist art project to temporarily camouflage a war memorial.
Santa Claus troubles me at the best of times. I vividly remember concluding at five years of age that Father Christmas didn't exist: I'm not questioning that St Niklas of wherever, on whom the Father Christmas legend is based, existed in the past, but I think I always knew the modern, red-coat Santa was a fairytale. My parents didn't try to persuade me otherwise, though for those first few years I did wake to find a sack of goodies had arrived unannounced on Christmas night. Not long after I remember my grandma taking me to a Santa's grotto in the local shopping mall. Firstly it struck me as odd that a stranger in disguise should ask me what I would like for Christmas. I probably requested lego. Even more odd was that he then proceeded to give me something totally different from my request, namely a very shoddy plastic rifle. Why ask me what I wanted if he had no intention of giving it to me? Why give me something I didn't like, and which didn't do anything (it wasn't anything fun, like a water pistol, just a bit of black plastic in the shape of a rifle)? As I look back at this now, I wonder if he was one of these depressed, estranged fathers or out-of-work actors, bitter about the hand life had dealt him, who gave all the kids toy rifles and found great entertainment in the image of dozens of small children running riot in the shopping centre with plastic artillery, like some junior battle re-enactment society. In any case, he wasn't Father Christmas, he was a very naughty boy.
I guess my suspicion of Father Christmas also stems from the fact that, to me, it makes much more sense that gifts would be exchanged between people who know and like each other, rather than being distributed by some abstract benefactor. At school, regular moral assertions from the teachers that it was "better to give than to receive" sat uncomfortably alongside the annual ritual of writing letters to Santa. The flipside to this is, of course, charitable giving, where the giving is done as an abstract concept and the giver's reward is to bask in the glow of their own benificence.
Now, of course, all these mysteries are solved in one fell swoop. All the letter-writing rituals and folklore are part of the conspiracy to keep ordinary people occupied while the incredible time-energy-warp is under way. And Sheffield's giant Grotto structure is, in fact, a gravitational refraction beacon that has been erected, and disguised as an entertaining quasi-natural feature, to facilitate the sucking of energy out of people and into Father Christmas. If we were to take direct action, dismantle the Grotto, poke Father Christmas with a stick through the ticket booth window, and cut down drastically on our eating, drinking and shopping, we just might be able to wrestle December out of his evil grasp.
On the other hand, we could work on tender submissions whilst nibbling mince pies and sipping sherry.
AW.
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